”The dialogue was positive, but what the government offered falls short of our demands,” Hamzeh Mansour, secretary-general of the group’s political arm, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), told Arab News.

”We still stick to our demand that the elections be conducted in accordance with a new election law that enjoys national consensus, otherwise we cannot take part in the polling process,” slated for Nov. 9, he said.

Mansour on Saturday led a Brotherhood delegation to a four-hour meeting with Prime Minister Samir Rifai and other Cabinet ministers, who assured Islamists that the polls would be held in ”maximum fairness and neutrality.”

Rifai also pledged to send a new election law to the next Parliament if Islamists opted to take part in the coming elections.

The executive bureaus of the Brotherhood and the IAF held urgent meetings later Saturday to appraise the outcome of the meeting with Rifai, but both panels turned down the government’s offer as insufficient as far as fairness of the polling process is concerned, sources said.

However, Mansour said that the IAF was ready to continue the dialogue with the government with a view to arriving at a new election law ”acceptable to all political parties in the country”.

Mansour and other Brotherhood leaders said that they wanted to ensure non-repetition of the ”rigging” that marred the 2007 polls.

The state-funded National Center for Human Rights (NCHR) conceded that the last elections witnessed certain ”irregularities.”

King Abdallah dissolved the lower house of Parliament in November amid reports that the chamber had failed to carry out its legislative and supervisory jobs.

He directed Rifai’s Cabinet to arrange for ”fair and transparent” elections in accordance with a modern election law.

The government later endorsed a temporary election law, which was rejected by opposition parties for its failure to provide for a system of proportional representation.