Egyptian media is reporting that despite its earlier promises, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood will compete for all of the parliamentary seats in the November elections. According to a report in Al-Masry Al-Youm:
The Muslim Brotherhood-led electoral alliance announced on Tuesday that it would compete for all parliamentary seats under the slogan “We bring good for Egypt.” The Democratic Alliance, which groups 11 parties, including the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, has fielded candidates in the 76 districts allocated by proportional representation via political party lists and in the 113 districts allocated to single winners, in both parliamentary chambers, according to an announcement made at a press conference today. This conference came on the heels of a meeting that lasted for nearly two hours between the various members of the coalition at the Freedom and Justice Party’s headquarters in Cairo. Speaking to reporters after the press conference, the party’s Secretary General Mohamed Saad al-Katatny said he has not yet received the exact number of seats that his party is running for but affirmed that it had to surpass the 50-percent ceiling set by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Shura Council earlier this year. By saying it would refrain from running for more than half of the parliamentary seats, the nation’s oldest Islamist organization was trying to reassure secularists that it had no intention of hijackng the state and thus Islamizing it. However, today, Freedom and Justice Party leaders said they had violated the Shura Council’s decision out of necessity. “The Shura Council set that [ceiling]when elections were still based on a single-winner system,” Katatny said. “When the system became list-based, we were obliged to fill the lists with names so that they get accepted. However, names that appear on the second half of any list have very little chance of making it into the parliament.”
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