CAIRO, 21 February 2005 — Egypt’s Parliament has received an official request from a prominent businessman and former parliamentarian to run for the next presidential elections.
The 65-year-old Muhammad Farid Hassanein is making headlines again by being the first public figure in Egyptian history to submit an election program to Parliament.
He is one of the five activists who announced last month their plans to run for presidency and have been already working on collecting one million signatures on a petition calling on Parliament to amend the constitution to have multiparty presidential elections.
According to the Egyptian Constitution, a candidate for presidency has to twin two-thirds of the vote in the Parliament, dominated by the National Democratic Party headed by President Muhammad Hosni Mubarak, before putting his/her name to a popular vote in the September referendum.
“I was not planning to submit my papers to Parliament because I knew they would not accept it,” said Hassanein. “But people advised me to take the right legal procedures by sending my manifesto to the People’s Assembly,” he told Arab News.
