Islamist Leader Pursues Egypt’s Presidency

A popular reformist leader in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said he will run for president, in a move that raises the possibility that Islamist politicians could dominate the country’s presidency and its parliament.

The announcement by Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the 59-year-old head of the Arab Doctors’ Union and a member of the Brotherhood’s legislative Shura Council, marks a break with the group’s leadership.

The organization months earlier promised not to field a candidate in the presidential election, in order to quell concerns that Islamists sought to take power in the wake of the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February.

On Thursday, the Brotherhood distanced itself from Dr. Aboul Fotouh, suggesting he could be suspended from the organization because of his candidacy if he doesn’t resign first. He has said he will run as an independent.

The Muslim Brotherhood, though outlawed under the Mubarak regime, is the country’s most powerful political organization, having built support throughout the country as a health and education charity.

Though it disavaowed violence in the 1970s and preaches a relatively moderate form of political Islam, some Western governments worry that an Egypt under Brotherhood control could reshape regional politics, particularly if it were to cancel a peace treaty with Israel. The Brotherhood has said it stands by the treaty.

Concerns that the group’s political aspirations are growing were stoked late last month when its new political party, Freedom and Justice, announced it would vie for as many as half of parliamentary seats.

The organization had assured the Egyptian public that it wouldn’t nominate candidates for more than one-third of the seats in September elections. Brotherhood leaders denied a policy change, saying they increased the number of nominees to make sure they would win one-third of the seats.

Dr. Aboul Fotouh is widely considered the leader of a more moderate group within the Brotherhood’s leadership. He has advocated a positive relationship with the West, more rights for women and religious minorities, and democratic reform within the party’s top-down leadership structure.

At the forefront of his reformist stance are his calls for a commitment to separating the Brotherhood’s work as a religious organization from its political activities. Some members, particularly youthful activists, have said Freedom and Justice isn’t adequately independent from the Brotherhood.

Dr. Aboul Fotouh’s decision to run for president worried moderate Egyptian Muslims and the country’s Christian minority, who have anxiously watched the recent political rise of Islamists and have been shaken by months of violent sectarian clashes. Sectarian riots on Saturday killed 15 people and wounded several hundred in an impoverished Cairo suburb.

“Christians wouldn’t welcome anybody of an Islamist background” as president, said Youssuf Sidhoum, the editor-in-chief of a local Coptic newspaper called Al Watani. Christians make up about 10% of Egypt’s population.

While Dr. Aboul Fotouh hasn’t officially left the group, members said they expect his candidacy for president will be seen as tantamount to his resignation. Dr. Aboul Fotouh was traveling on Thursday and couldn’t be reached to comment.

Saad Al Katatni, the newly appointed secretary-general of the Freedom and Justice Party, said that if Dr. Aboul Fotouh doesn’t resign, the group will investigate him to decide on his punishment. His membership in the group may be suspended, said Mr. Al Katatni, and the Brotherhood wouldn’t consider supporting his candidacy.

“It’s an unsettling message for public opinion” for a Brotherhood member to seek Egypt’s top office, said Mohammed Habib, who was a member of the group’s Shura Council before he resigned two months ago because he disagreed with the Brotherhood’s top-down management style.

An expert on the Egyptian army said the ruling military council is committed to a democratic transition, and will back whoever the people elect.

“I think the military council and the military people in general are thinking the same way I am: that if we put conditions on anybody, this is not democracy,” said Mohammed Kadry Said, a retired army major general who is an analyst at the government-funded Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Dr. Aboul Fotouh’s break with the Brotherhood leadership is a dramatic turn for an organization that, for most of its 83-year history, operated under autocratic regimes that treated most Islamists as public enemies.

For Brotherhood youth who supported the protests against the Mubarak regime, Dr. Aboul Fotouh, who began his career with the Brotherhood as a student activist, is a hero: a moderate, well-respected Islamist with a firm commitment to democratic reforms and irreproachable revolutionary chops.

During the 1970s, Dr. Aboul Fotouh made a name for himself as a student activist at Cairo University. Throughout the 1980s, he helped guide the Brotherhood beyond its roots as a charitable group and into parliamentary politics.

“He is one of the great people that the Brotherhood youth look up to and consider as a role model,” said Mohammed Qassas, a youth leader in the organization. “He’s a distinguished person, he represents moderate Islamism and he’s got a good chance to compete.”

He was instrumental in getting Brotherhood members into the leadership of Egypt’s professional syndicates, which operate much like trade unions.Yet many secular-minded pro-democracy activists who helped lead the revolution that ousted Mr. Mubarak consider Dr. Aboul Fotouh as an Islamist who should be opposed.

“He has somehow broken with them, but his background is Muslim Brothers,” said Mamdouh Hamza, a prominent pro-democracy activist who is organizing a secular political bloc to confront Islamism. “Do you think Egypt should have a Muslim Brother as a president? I don’t.”

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