Gamal Mubarak Opens Stealth Bid to Lead Egypt

CAIRO, Egypt (Aug. 29) -- In Egypt's sweltering slums, besieged this summer by heat waves and rolling blackouts, posters have cropped up in recent weeks showing a man in a dark suit and the slogan "Gamal Mubarak: the dream of the poor."

The posters are part of a larger campaign to promote Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's son Gamal as a candidate in Egypt's next presidential election, scheduled for September 2011.

Rumors have swirled for almost a decade that Gamal, a 47-year-old banker, was being groomed to replace his father, now 82 and ailing. But the current campaign, which includes Facebook sites and a petition drive, is the first indication that the younger Mubarak may the official contender from the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).

But the elder Mubarak has never ruled out a sixth term, and such an overt campaign marks something of a break from the pattern of official sycophancy toward the elder Mubarak -- even though the party has no other obvious successor.

"The whole thing is meant to look like a spontaneous grass-roots movement, but the NDP stamp is hard to miss," Salama Ahmed Salama, a political columnist for the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, wrote last week. "The presidential silence can only be interpreted as a sign of consent and support."

In 29 years at the country's helm, Mubarak has never appointed even a vice president, let alone a successor, and the regime has sought to keep its distance from the Gamal coalition. "This is a spontaneous reflection of the sentiment of some people, in as much as you have different other initiatives nominating other names," NDP spokesman Ali Eddin Helal told AOL News.

Helal said that Mubarak the elder is the undisputed party leader and that the NDP will unanimously support the president if he chooses to seek a sixth term.

But in an authoritarian country where little happens without the regime's tacit approval, analysts like Salama say the campaign could not have been carried out without some elite support. Otherwise, they say, the posters would not have stayed put. Oppositional propaganda is routinely removed from Egyptian streets.

"It's very unprecedented, so this comes with the approval of some of the higher-ups. It's a statement of purpose, that 'this is my seat,'" says Adel Iskandar, a media professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

Others see the new coalition as a message from prominent Gamal supporters to the president and the NDP's old guard that Mubarak's time at the helm is over.

"It could be encouraged by some businessmen," says Mustapha Kamel, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo. "They believe they are sending a message to the president that the time has come for him to step down and to leave his place for his son."

Analysts agree the attempt to make the campaign appear to be spontaneous may be meant to counter the common perception that Gamal is unpopular with Egyptians. Through the posters and the signature campaign, "they would like to give the impression that Gamal Mubarak is supported by ordinary people," says Kamel.

But even broaching the subject of succession is an unprecedented phenomenon in a country where the past two presidents died in office: Gamal Abdel Nasser from a heart attack in 1970, and Anwar Sadat by assassination in 1981.

Egypt's domestic opposition has coalesced around the return of Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize as chief of the U.N.'s nuclear agency, and his group, the National Association for Change. They have been working to collect signatures to amend the constitution to allow independent candidates like ElBaradei to run for president. The Gamal coalition's strategy appears to share surface similarities with the opposition movement.

The coordinator of the poster campaign, Magdi el-Kordi, explained his decision to local newspaper Al Masry Al Youm, saying, "I took this move in light of the serious national issues to have emerged recently, such as sectarian strife and the formation of Mohamed ElBaradei's National Association for Change."

"The same way that ElBaradei and the Coalition for Change is creating an infrastructure, the NDP is also creating a structure, but in this case it's dedicated to the endorsement of Gamal Mubarak, not his father," says Iskandar.

Hassan Nafaa, a professor of political science at Cairo University and the National Association for Change's spokesman, said of Gamal, "He doesn't need this campaign, so we think that the regime is trying to market him as a new president, but everybody knows that he will be imposed on the country. It is a way to create a false popularity."

Nafaa says the National Association for Change has collected approximately 800,000 signatures to date to change the constitution. Meanwhile, local media report that the Popular Coalition for Supporting Gamal Mubarak has collected more than 45,000 signatures supporting a Gamal Mubarak candidacy.

So much political activity more than a year before the election suggests how much uncertainty Mubarak's illness has created this summer. And it is unlikely to dissipate in the long political year ahead.