The Muslim Brotherhood and the secular Wafd party withdrew from Egypt’s election on Wednesday after a crushing first-round defeat by the president’s ruling party marred by alleged fraud and violence.
The move left barely any opposition to contest the second round of the parliamentary poll next Sunday and dealt another blow to its credibility after Egypt came under heavy criticism from its US ally and human rights groups.
The Muslim Brotherhood won a fifth of the seats in the 2005 election, but failed to secure a single one in Sunday’s ballot.
“Sunday was marked by fraud, terrorism and violence carried out by police and thugs,” the Islamists said in a statement, adding that “the Brotherhood refuses to react to such violence.”
Despite the boycott, “we still plan to take all legal measures to invalidate this pseudo-parliament,” they said.
The liberal Wafd party, which won only two of 508 contested seats, said it was also pulling out of the election altogether, along with its two successful candidates.
“We will withdraw from all the election. The two who won seats in the first round will also withdraw,” said Munir Fakhir Abdel Nur, the secular party’s secretary-general.
One of Wafd’s two senators, Bahaa Abu Shaqa, also said he was resigning from the upper house.
The leftist Tagammu party, which won one seat, said it would keep its candidates in the run-off.
Official figures showed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) won 209 of 221 seats in the first round of the poll, seen as a forerunner to a crucial presidential election next year.
The NDP defended the election and said the Brotherhood lost its seats because it was unpopular.
“These elections will go down in history as free and clean,” NDP secretary-general Safwat al-Sharif told a press conference.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
RSS