CAIRO, 3 June 2005 — A group of Egyptian artists, public figures and activists issued a joint statement yesterday in which they vowed to seek all possible efforts to keep President Hosni Mubarak in office for a fifth term next September.
The 76-year-old president and leader of the National Democratic Party (NDP) has been running Egypt since the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat in 1981. Mubarak’s fourth six-year term ends in September.
The newly formed “Continuity for Prosperity” group began gathering signatures on a petition to convince people to re-elect Mubarak.
Some 500 actors, lawyers, doctors, activists, students, and intellectuals have signed the petition. Among the signatories were 20 members of Parliament and 15 football players, civil society groups and some politicians, including Muhammad Abdel Aal, chairman of the Social Justice Party.
The group’s president, veteran actor Hussein Fahmi, said he had not expected that a wide spectrum of opposition groups to oppose Mubarak since he has offered a lot for the country.
“I’m calling on all the members of the Egyptian society, the NDP and the opposition groups to support the president who has spent all his life serving the country,” Fahmi said. “We have to become a one force and work for the country’s prosperity and to expose those who work for outside forces and aim at destroying the country’s safety and security,” he added. The group, which critics say is the first real pro-Mubarak group in the country, said they support Egypt’s first multicandidate elections, but said that at the moment Mubarak seems to be the only one fit for the job.
“We are not against Mubarak but a republic means a president should be chosen in multicandidate elections and should rule for one or two terms, not forever,” said Kamel Zouhairi, former head of the Press Syndicate.
In another development, hundreds of people demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Habib Al-Adly, holding him responsible for the fact that police stood by last week while supporters of the ruling NDP assaulted women demonstrators, sexually harassed them and stripped them naked in the street.
