Some seven months after taking power from ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military junta has announced a schedule for a series of staggered elections, starting in November and running through March, that would ideally end with a transfer of power.
The problem is, many of the demanded reforms aren’t in place yet, and the junta has vowed to keep Mubarak’s “emergency laws” in place through the entire process and into June of 2012, after the new parliament is supposed to be seated.
The move has sparked threats of boycotts from a number of factions, as well as promises of massive Friday protests in Cairo, while the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist faction which expects to do quite well in the votes, is loudly demanding changes to the election law, including banning those involved in abuse of power from running for election for the next ten years.
The delays have been at the very least somewhat helpful to the smaller reformist groups, which were given somewhat more time to organize. Still, if the election laws remain unchanged many fear that free elections will be impossible and the 2011 Egypt vote will just be another crooked transfer of power.
Millionaires and billionaires are the Egyptian generals, owners of multinational corporations with sweatshop labor being their biggest profit maker. So, remove them from power or kiss freedom goodbye.
@John Ellis, it is really interesting to find your posts on CNN and other media, including here. And always having something very canned to say. Of course, the "liberals" of Egypt are funded by various channels to disrupt the election, to demoralize population and ot discredit the military. Their sybol, the clenched fist, is a product of political engineering, used first in Serbia, and under the name Otpor. Feel free to look it up on internet. You are mightly confident that the billionaires are Egyptian generals, but they are not. Mubarak gutted the Army, and funded his own security services — those were the best equiped and had all the power. it is in the interest of our friendly small groups to schrech that the demands of the revolution have not been implmented, even though military from day one said that this is not their job, but the job of elected representatives.