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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Wishing on a wafd

"The pasha is dead ... the Wafd lives," proclaimed the headline IN THE OFFICIAL ORGAN OF EGYPT’S OLDEST POLITICAL PARTY ON August 14. The pasha, Wafd party leader Fouad Serageddin, had passed away three days before and been mourned by thousands in a rowdy street gathering at the Omar Makram mosque.

There was a time when the Wafd, for a few short months, looked set to establish itself as the party of business and the free market. After political parties were relegalized in 1977, the New Wafd Party emerged as a right-of-center bloc within the new system of controlled pluralism.

Some commentators expressed the hope that the party would represent the emerging business class. With the Infitah (Open Door) policy in full swing, and Egypt meant to develop a vital market economy, it only made sense that local investors and capitalists should have a voice in the country's partially opened parliament.

Somehow that didn't materialize – at least not with the Wafd as the party of business. The party dissolved itself after just a few months, then reemerged (again) in time for the 1984 elections. But by that point, many businessmen had found their niche in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). The People's Assembly elections of 1990 and 1995 made it absolutely clear that real political leverage was best obtained through affiliations with the NDP.

By the mid-1990s, however, economic reforms and structural adjustment had created a more diverse spectrum of business interests, and for many members of the burgeoning business community, the pork-barrel approach of the NDP seemed antiquated and stifling.

So why not have two ruling parties – or at least two parties within reach of actual power? One would be the NDP, but stripped of its free-market oriented segment, and the other – envisioned as the Mustaqbal (Future) Party – could be the party of business, privatization and openness that had been missing from the scene for so long.

Why not? Well, according to close observers of parliamentary goings-on, the core of the old NDP said absolutely no way. Key members of the would-be business party eventually made their accommodations with the old guard and bailed from the non-starting project.

So where does that leave Egypt's business community in the second half of 2000, with a new round of parliamentary elections looming before the end of the year?

One parliamentary commentator suggests that the inner circles of the NDP are now working on a real pro-business agenda to present as the party goes into the elections. But that prospect may be as fragile as the plans for the Future Party were. The NDP, whoever may gather around it, remains essentially the party representing the interests of the public sector bureaucracy.

The Wafd, meanwhile, is still sorting out the succession to its leadership, but the pashas will eventually, one way or another, have to make way for a new generation.

The young Wafdists lack the automatic credibility that follows in certain circles from having an undiluted Ottoman lineage and a pre-revolutionary nationalist background. But without those substitutes for ideologies and policies, might the new Wafdists start taking the parts of their party's platform that talk about economic liberty really seriously?

If the system would permit, and if the Wafd had the ability, perhaps we would see the emergence of a real, mass-based, right-of-center opposition party.

NEIL MacDONALD

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