Inheritance of Power
The grooming of Gamal Mubarak to be his father's successor as the next president of Egypt became increasingly evident at around 2000. With no vice-president, and with no heir-apparent in sight, Gamal started enjoying considerable attention in Egyptian state-run media. Bashar al-Asad's rise to power in Syria in June 2000 just hours after Hafez al-Asad's death, sparked a heated debate in the Egyptian press regarding the prospects for a similar scenario occurring in Cairo.
Mubarak founded, and became chairman of, the Future Generation Foundation (FGF), an NGO supporting job training but which also served as a vehicle for Mubarak's political career.
Both President Mubarak and his son denied the possibility of any inheritance of power in Egypt. More recently, this claim was made in early 2006, when Gamal Mubarak declared repeatedly that he had no aspiration to succeed his father, but that he would maintain his position in the then-ruling NDP as deputy secretary general, a post he held in addition to heading the party's policy committee, allegedly the most important organ of the NDP.
In September 2004 several political groups (most are unofficial), on both the left and the right, announced their sharp opposition to the inheritance of power. They demanded political change and a fair, multi-candidate election.
On 26 February 2005, Mubarak ordered the constitution changed to allow multi-candidate presidential elections before September 2005 by asking parliament to amend Article 76 of the Egyptian constitution. This change in the constitution was seen then by some analysts and senior judicial figures as a ploy to seamlessly allow Gamal Mubarak to inherit the top position in Egypt. According to this view, Gamal Mubarak would be one of the candidates in a presidential elections and would be supported by the ruling party and the government-controlled media. Since remaining serious candidates would be disqualified by the NDP-controlled People's Assembly leaving only the less popular candidates, the inheritance of power would be accomplished through a "democratic" process.
Read more about this topic: Gamal Mubarak
Famous quotes containing the words inheritance and/or power:
“Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 14:28,29.
“It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)