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The National Democratic Party (Arabic: الحزب الوطني الديمقراطى, often simply الحزب الوطني--the "National Party" or "Nationalist Party"--in conversation) was established by the late President Anwar El Sadat in 1978. It was announced on July 9, 1978 and formally approved on October 2, 1978. Since Sadat's assassination on October 6, 1981, the party has been chaired by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The NDP is the current ruling party of Egypt and has enjoyed uncontested power in state politics since its creation.

Electoral System in Egypt
The electoral system in Egypt where the National Democratic Party operates is not a free nor a fair system. . It is a democracy in name only. More generally, it is observed that there is no such thing as democracy or democratization in the Arab World today. And in the case of Egypt, although President Hosni Mubarak himself recently boasted that Egypt enjoys "all kinds of democracy," substantive democracy and civil liberties within the country remain elusive. "The truth of the matter is that participation and pluralism are now at lower levels than at any time since Mubarak assumed the presidency in the wake of Anwar Sadat's assassination 21 years ago."

Freedom House ranks Egypt's Political Rights Score 6 and Civil Liberties Score 5, with 1 being the most free and 7 being the least free.

Egypt has operated under a "state of emergency" for all but five months since 1967, allowing the president to outlaw demonstrations, hold detainees indefinitely without trial, and issue law by decree. The trend began when President Gamel Abdel Nasser succeeded in establishing a state of emergency between 1956 and 1963 on the pretext of the threat of an offensive against Egypt. Nasser declared another state of emergency in June of 1967 because of the Egyptian-Israeli war, and even though the war was over in a matter of days, the state of emergency lasted a total of 13 years. After Sadat's assassination in October of 1981, his vice-president and successor Hosni Mubarak declared another state of emergency which has been in effect since.

It is worth stressing that the People's Assembly of Egypt, which is lower house of Egypt's bicameral legislature, is constitutionally empowered to question and even challenge presidential authority. That it chooses to not do so cannot be attributed to unanimous approval of presidential policies. This is a result of the People's Assembly being restricted to the role of rubber-stamping presidential authority because it is confined by presidential powers beyond its control. Under Article 152 of the Constitution, the president is able to have his proposals bypass the People's Assembly and endorsed through referendum. Consequently, it is impossible for the Assembly to consider or reject the policy.

The President of Egypt, though, rarely needs to rely on resorting to referenda, except in circumstances where it is a formal requirement, such as initiating constitutional changes. Presidents of Egypt need not use use Article 152 because there is no reason to do so. The majority of legislation passed through the People's Assembly is initiated by the President. Additionally, almost all proposals by the President are by the mandated two-thirds' majority with little to no deliberation at all.

So why then is there talk of democracy by Egypt's leaders and parliamentary elections? Liberal reforms undertaken in the authoritarian states of the Arab World are spurred by a desire from the countries' leaders to garner internal and external legitimacy; however, these reformes lack the substance needed to open the way for meaningful democratic change. Dr. Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University wrote in 2005 that:

"Certainly, the discovery of a democratic vocabulary does not stem from idealistic conversion, but from pragmatic conclusions about the need to relieve pressure and vent political steam, as well as the shrew recognition that democratization wins favor... The new language of politics in the Middle East talks about participation, cultural authenticity, freedom and even democracy. No doubt, the defining flavor of the 1990s is participation."

Elections and apparent multi-party political systems offer authoritarian governments this opportunity for "democracy by decree." However, regimes that adopt these (electoral) systems "tend to impose a number of constraining conditions in order to ensure that the arena of political contest remains under their stringent control. The laws regulating the licensing of opposition parties, for example, always demand a public commitment to the existing political order and the substantive acts of the regime." These were the conditions under which the National Democratic Party in Egypt were formed in 1978 and continue to present day.

See also Politics of Egypt

History of the National Democratic Party
Prior to the current multi-party political system in Egypt, there was single-party rule. Gamel Abdel Nasser rejected the idea of establishing alternative political parties at the inception of the Arab Republic of Egypt in 1953, instead opting to establish a single-party system in which interest groups were organized along functional lines and co-opted within the framework of an official representative body. This body was known as the Liberation Rally (LR) from 1953 – 1958, the National Union (NU) from 1958 to 1961, and the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) from 1961-1976.

The first political party of Egypt, the Liberation Rally, was dissolved after Syria and Egypt joined to become the United Arab Republic in 1958 and reincarnated as the National Union party. Between 1949 and 1955, Syria had witnessed five changes of leadership, and by the late summer of 1957, the country was on the verge of complete collapse. The most influential actors in Syria in the late 1950s were the Communists, the Arab Renaissance Party (Ba'ath Party), and the state army. In a series of moves meant to outdo one another and led by a misguided belief that each would benefit from joining Egypt more than the other, Syria agreed on February 1, 1958 to Nasser's complete terms for a full union with Egypt ruled from Cairo by the same institutions that governed Egypt. The National Union party was created by Nasser to include and co-opt Syrian political actors into the Egyptian state apparatus.

The Egyptian union with Syria unraveled in 1961. The Syrian army organized a coup to server ties with Egypt and did so on the morning of September 28, 1961. The interim government also expelled all Egyptians from the country. Nasser believed that the UAR failed because the degree of social reform necessary for such an ambitious project had not matriculated, and began to lead his own country down the road of Arab socialism. In 1961, Nasser disbanded the National Union party and created the Arab Socialist Union party to reflect this change in direction.

Gamel Nasser died while holding office in 1970, and his vice-president and successor, President Anwar El Sadat, began a four-phased approach to introducing a multi-party system in Egypt: he issued the 1974 October Paper; he established manaber (platforms); he formed the Misr Party (ASPE); and finally in 1978 he formed the National Democratic Party. In the October Paper Sadat reaffirmed his commitment to establishing a constitutional democratic government, preserving Egypt socialist legacy, and rejecting the "theory of the single party" and acknowledged calls for a multi-party system. The October Paper also announced Egypt's new economic policy as combining Arab capital, western technology, and the state's abundant resources in an effort transform the Egyptian economy. The new economic policy became known as al-infitah al-iqtisadi (the economic opening).

President Sadat's October Paper and political reform were motivated by self-preservation, not democratic idealism. Perceiving the Arab Socialist Union as a potential threat to his Presidency, Sadat divided the ASU into three ideological platforms. He then disbanded the ASU entirely in 1977 and endowed these bodies the official status of political parties in preparation for upcoming parliamentary elections. On July 9, 1978, Sadat announced the formation of his own political party, the National Democratic Party. It was formally approved on October 2, 1978. Soon thereafter, some 250 MPs of the People's Assembly hurried to join the President's new party. Dr. Maye Kassem of the American University in Cairo summarizes the transition from the ASU to the NDP best:

"This move was undoubtedly related to the fact that the President's party would ensure for its members direct access to state resources. The main point, however, is that since most of the NDP's members were originally members of the disbanded ASU, its creation was more the result of presidential instigation than of pressures from an organised constituency. Put differently, the mass conversion from 'socialist' to 'democratic' ideology implied not only the desire to remain under direct presidential patronage, but also that the emergence of the ruling NDP was no more reflective of constituency interests than the ASU was under Nasser's party system."

Since its creation in 1978, the NDP has held no less than three-quarters of the seats in the People's Assembly. The ideology of the party remains purposefully vague and open to interpretation. As a result, the President and his government can pass any legislation without appearing to compromise the Party's "official" standing.

Opposition to Sadat increased from 1977 onward in the wake of his economic reforms and peace initiative with Israel. Sadat reacted with repression. In 1980 he declared Law 95, known as the Law of Shame, which criminalized many forms of expression. In September 1981 he arrested more than 1,000 of his critics from across the political spectrum. This crackdown is often cited in conjunction with Egypt's peace with Israel as a step leading to his assassination by Islamists in October of 1981.

NDP under Hosni Mubarak
Since President Sadat's assassination in 1981, President Hosni Mubarak has continued to request and obtain the People Assembly's approval to maintain emergency law under the premise of threats of terrorism and violence. Despite the emergency law, political party life during the 1980s was relatively active, with the re-emergency of the Wafd Party and the participation the Muslim Brotherhood via alliances and Muslim Brotherhood candidates running as independents. Elections in 1984 and 1987 produced parliaments with opposition representation of about 20 percent. The combination of increasing Islamist opposition groups and violence by extremist organizations during the 1990s spurred legislation that hurt all Egyptians ability to express themselves politically via formal institutions or more informal means. The 1993 Syndicates Law, 1995 Press Law, and 1999 Nongovernmental Associations Law hampered freedoms of association and expression by imposing new regulations and draconian penalties on violations. As a result, by the late 1990s parliamentary politics had become virtually irrelevant and alternative avenues for political expression were curtailed as well.

The National Democratic Party and parliamentary politics rebounded in significance in 2000 as a result of speculation among Egyptians about presidential succession. Mubarak was then 71 years old and had just begun his fourth six-year term in 1999. It appeared to many that Gamal Mubarak, President Hosni Mubarak's younger son, a banker by profession, was being groomed for the presidency. He began taking an increasingly active role in politics, first as a spokesman for business interests and youth as a nonpartisan activist and then later in the NDP.

President Mubarak announced parliamentary elections for 2000, and he pledged to uphold a Supreme Constitutional Court ruling calling for judicial supervision of elections. Although the 2000 elections were the first to be supervised by judges, and by most accounts somewhat cleaner and more credible than the 1990 and 1995 elections, there were still widespread arrests of Muslim Brotherhood candidates and campaign workers, as well as intimidation of voters outside polling stations. Surprisingly, the NDP suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of independent candidates, who secured more than half of the 444 seats up for election versus the NDP's 39 percent. However, 181 of the independents were "NDP independents" - members who had run in the elections despite not having received the party's nomination. These 181 independents and an additional 35 actual independents joined the NDP after winning, giving the party a combined 88 percent parliamentary majority.

The poor performance of the NDP in the 2000 parliamentary elections afforded Gamal Mubarak an opportunity to assert himself in party politics. He proposed an overhauling the NDP in an effort to make it look and function more like a modern political party rather than a tool for recruiting support for the regime in exchange for government patronage. Michele Dunne, editor of the Carnegie Endowment's Arab Reform Bulletin, wrote in 2006 that

"Drawing on largely the model of the British Labor Party, Gamal Mubarak designed and led a new Policy Secretariat that began to produce policy papers on a wide range of economic, political, and foreign affairs topics. He recruited a circle of young, reform-minded businesspeople and technocrats, some of whom were later placed in cabinet or party leadership positions. By 2004, Gamal Mubarak's imprint on the NDP was apparent, with the appointment of a cabinet full of his proteges (among them Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif) in July and the holding of a slickly package, media-friendly party conference in September showcasing the NDP's new image. Hosni Mubarak's presidential campaign in summer 2005 - which featured Western-style stumping, clear promises for policy changes, and an attempt to show that the party was not using government resources int eh campaign - showed the touch of Gamal and his circle."

Gamal also uses NDP annual conferences as an opportunity to woo established political elites of Egypt. One analyst wrote that the real story of the September 19-21 NDP conference of 2006 was not the carefully packaged briefings offered by party members, but "Gamal Mubarak's increasing political weight and seemingly unstoppable ascent towards the presidency."

Despite the shakeup of the NDP, Parliamentary elections of 2005 produced similarly disappointing results for the regime. NDP candidates won only 34 percent of the vote and, again, it was only after co-opting "NDP Independents" and actual independents that the party was able to secure it two-thirds majority. Although opposition candidates only secured 28 percent of People's Assembly, 2005 was a watershed moment for Egyptian politics, as oppositions candidates were overwhelmingly elected from the Muslim Brotherhood rather than secular parties. The Muslim Brotherhood affiliated candidates won a historic 88 seats in the legislature.

The Muslim Brotherhood is officially banned in Egypt, but has continued to run brotherhood-affiliated candidates as independents in local and parliamentary elections since 1984. Since their victory in 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood bloc has used the People's Assembly in Egypt as a soap box for criticizing the regime and as an engine for promoting their ideas. They have also taken their positions as MPs seriously, and through this effort they have generated more legitimacy for the People's Assembly as an institution, as opposed to the 1990s when legislative politics were shallow and stagnant.

Despite speculation on Gamal Mubarak succeeding his father as president, Ali Eldin Hilal, the head of media for the NDP, said in an interview with the American Arab channel al-Hurra, "The candidate [in 2011] of the National Democratic Party will be President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak... This is the will of the leadership of the party." Hilal stated that the announcement will only be officially made a month or two before the elections in the autumn of 2011. President Mubarak will be 83 at the time of the election and 89 at the end of another six-year term.