CAIRO, 20 July 2005 — An Egyptian activist said he was confident Islamists would get a legal political voice in Egypt for the first time in decades after his long fight to found a moderate political party. A judicial advisory panel last week for the first time approved the Wasat (center) Party. Party founder Aboul Ala Madi said yesterday he was sure the court, which has the final say, will adopt the panel’s view and legalize the party in October.

“It’s a historic shift because for the first time in more than 50 years a party representing a moderate Islamist current will be allowed,” Madi said. “We are opening the door for the incorporation of Islamists in political life,” he told Reuters in an interview. A committee dominated by the ruling party has three times rejected applications for legal status by the Wasat. Two previous court appeals against the committee’s rulings have ended in disappointment for Madi and the party’s other founders, who include Christians.

The judicial panel’s nod in the third appeal is not binding on the court but makes approval likely, Madi says. Madi is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group widely seen as Egypt’s strongest opposition force but which has been officially banned since 1954. The Brotherhood also wants to form a party but the government dismisses that idea and launches occasional crackdowns on the group, arresting its members and accusing them of seeking to overturn the system of government.

Madi, who left the Brotherhood in 1996, says allowing a moderate Islamist party would curb the potential for militancy in Egypt, where militants seeking a strict Islamic order have in recent decades used violence against the government. “One of the main reasons of violence and extremism is the absence of freedoms and lack of representation of the Islamists in political life,” he said.

The Wasat has proposed what Madi calls a modern interpretation of Islamic Shariah law, which the constitution says is the primary source of law but Islamists say is not properly applied. “We choose the appropriate interpretations which help towards development and progress and not inertia,” he said. “We are for complete equality between Muslims and Christians in all rights, even the right to run for the post of president.” Egypt will have its first multi-candidate presidential election in September. President Hosni Mubarak is expected to seek an extension to his 24 years in power.

Madi said unusually strong domestic calls for more political freedoms and judicial independence could have emboldened the judicial panel to approve the Wasat. The party would aim to attract “the normal Egyptian public, the natural religiosity. We are not looking for the deeply religious,” he said.

Meanwhile, the largest leftist party decided yesterday to boycott presidential elections, saying the government remained despotic and had obstructed political reforms sought by the opposition. “We don’t want to be bit actors in a play the outcome of which is known in advance,” Rifaat El-Said, secretary-general of the Tagammu Party, told a news conference. “The general secretariat decided by a majority not to nominate anyone from the party leadership for the presidential elections and to boycott these elections,” a statement added.

“The government maintains despotic conditions, has stood against any constitutional or political reform and insists on no judicial supervision (of the elections),” it said.

The only prominent politician still likely to challenge Mubarak is Ayman Nour of the liberal Ghad (tomorrow) Party, who was detained earlier this year and is on trial on forgery charges which he and his party say are politically motivated.

Said said the Tagammu had given the authorities a chance to fulfill their promises of a level playing field for the presidential elections, but had now abandoned hope. The party had complained five times, for example, that local authorities had removed party banners while leaving in place those of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, he said.