Most surprising in the Egyptian political scene is the fact that political opposition forces always expect the impossible and wait for what will never come and for what cannot possibly happen to happen. The matter ends every time with opposition members as if in shock because what they had been waiting for did not come, although it had never moved to begin with and could therefore never reach them. Usually the next step on the part of the opposition would be to respond by moving forward on the path of the impossible, or “the wrong track” as Egyptians say. Then after a few steps, opposition members realize that they are fighting windmills and get depressed, without learning the lesson or changing anything about themselves. Thus they repeat the same mistake at the first political test, in which the opposing side would usually be the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), the government or the state, and there are no great differences there. Ever since the end of the People's Assembly elections, some members of the opposition have been promoting wishes, not information, that President Hosni Mubarak would take the initiative of dissolving the Assembly and holding the elections once again, after the violations and transgressions that took place when they were held. And even after Mubarak issued his decision to appoint the ten MPs the constitution allows him, some opposition members maintained the hope that Mubarak would surprise everyone, adopt the opposition's stance and announce, in the speech he gave yesterday before NDP MPs, the annulment of the elections! This is in spite of the fact that a simple analysis of events, and of the way the Egyptian President usually deals with matters such as these, provides no indication that he might take such a decision at all. Certainly those who believed such predictions have a problem understanding the nature of things on the Egyptian political scene. And if they were surprised when Mubarak did not take the decision they had been expecting, that is because they had expected the impossible. Indeed, the Egyptian President, who is Chairman of the ruling party, could have at any stage of the elections stopped them if he had wanted to. And because he did not do it then, he certainly was not going to do it later on. It is true that Mubarak denounced the violations, transgressions and acts of violence that accompanied the voting process in some districts. Yet he also considered that all of this did not mean that the elections as a whole had been rigged, or that their results emerged not expressive of the will of voters. And despite the fact that the features of the political scene in Egypt after the elections places members of the opposition in the position of “victims”, the opposition itself seems as if overtaken by its ills, which have made it fail to profit from being “the victim”, instead adopting the same behavior it has become accustomed to after each clash with the ruling party, which may lead it to being eaten away from within. And instead of resuming its battle against the NDP or the government, the opposition turned against itself and conflicts erupted within it, because of the participation of some of its parties in the elections, of the decision to withdraw after the first round, or of the wrong directions being taken – such as when a number of opposition members announced the formation of a parallel parliament, which everyone knows to be without influence and the result of an unpredicted reaction in a useless direction. Some of the opposition's major figures in fact seem as if their fundamental cause was to reach the Parliament, not to preserve the rights of citizens in terms of democracy and free elections. I have written here before the elections many times about the ills that plague the political party system in Egypt. And if the ruling party is taking advantage, in one way or another, of the implications of these ills, even by the standard of its desire to remain in power and to exclude the other forces present on the scene, it is strange that the other forces in the opposition keep making the same mistakes they make every time, without ever learning the lessons or seeking to resolve the causes of such ills. It is sufficient here to point to the fact that all of the opposition candidates who won or even were made to win in the second round of elections, after their political parties or movements had announced that they would boycott this round, had refused to comply with the decision to boycott and had begun to reiterate the same discourse known in advance, regarding the rights held by their voters over them to keep the Parliament seats they had obtained, thus doing away with the principle raised by the opposition regarding the soundness of the elections as a whole, not the soundness of the elections merely in the districts in which they had competed.
