When voters went to the polls more than a year ago to vote for Egypt's upper house of parliament, most presumed the legislature would be the powerless talk shop that it had always been for 30 years. Few candidates were known outside their families, parties or neighborhoods. Only seven percent of the electorate bothered to cast a ballot.
Thanks to the twists and turns of the rocky transition that followed Egypt's 2011 uprising, the Shura Council is now the sole law-making body in the land. The legislature found itself in this unexpected position after a court dissolved the lower house of parliament, prompting an Islamist-led panel that drafted the new constitution to include a clause handing the council legislative powers until a new parliament is elected.
Like the lower house before it, the Shura Council now finds its fate in the hands of the courts. On Sunday, Egypt's constitutional court is expected to rule on the legality of the legislature's election, which was conducted under the same law as the lower house that was disbanded on an electoral technicality.
It's well within the realm of possibility that the court could order the Shura Council to dissolve — and may even render its works invalid, including the country's Islamist-backed constitution, bringing Egypt's political process back to square one. Such a move, while far from certain, would push Egypt into legal limbo and could trigger a new political crisis.
Much of the criticism of the council stems from its shaky popular foundations.
Of the legislature's 270 members, 180 are elected with the other 90 being appointed by the president — a throwback to its days under Hosni Mubarak, the authoritarian leader ousted in 2011, when the legislature's seats were often sinecures for loyalists or favored members of the opposition. Today, five percent of its members are Christians — about half the proportion of the population — and four percent are women.
When elections were held in early 2012, not only did many voters stay away but so did many political parties — especially several of the newborn liberal groups with smaller budgets. Over 70 percent of the seats were taken by Islamists.
The Freedom and Justice party, the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood's political wing, holds 42 percent of the council's seats. Together with allies like the Wasat party and the ultraconservative Construction and Development party — the political arm of the former militant Gamaa Islamiya group — the Brotherhood can easily muster nearly 60 percent of the votes to pass favorable bills.
Liberals and critics say that Islamists have been using their majority to ram through their agenda — a departure from pledges to postpone such issues until a new lower house of parliament, known as the People's Assembly, is elected.
They also allege the Islamists have used the council as a powerful tool to shake-up institutions perceived as bastions of Mubarak loyalists, to make cuts in the state budget that target — among other things — the arts and women's programs deemed by Islamists as unnecessary or immoral, and rush through laws rife with loopholes.
"The Shura Council, in its current form, has turned into a speedy machine to pass faulty laws that provoke argument and divisions rather than ... solve a problem," wrote political scientist Hassan Nafaa in a Saturday column in the Al-Masry Al-Youm daily.
02 Jun, 2013
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Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEKen23Dnp1wHDnIUMfg59qvl-XEA&url=http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/egypts-long-scorned-legislature-deepens-rift-19305185
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