Around 300 people on Saturday turned out for a rally at Al-Azhar supporting President Hosni Mubarak's bid for a sixth term in office. Demonstrators chanted the slogan “The decision is yours…Because we love Egypt.” Heavy security was on hand.
Campaign organizers described Egypt's president as “a treasure.” No feasible political alternative exists to take over his position, they said.
The president's son, Gamal Mubarak, “doesn’t have enough experience and cannot be president amid the current international situations,” the organizers posited.
Meanwhile, the president's campaign spokesperson, Osama Taha, in a press conference announced the six objectives of the campaign: garnering complete support for President Mubarak, generating public awareness, gathering 20 million pro-Mubarak signatures, working through a popular perspective not a National Democratic Party one, in addition to engaging in dialogue with all political entities.
"There is no real alternative for president Mubarak in Egypt," campaign general coordinator, Mohamed Hashem, told Al-Masry Al-Youm. "If he didn’t become a candidate, we would ask him to recommend us someone whom he knows pretty well. Someone who can lead Egypt forward.”
“Our deep respect to Gamal Mubarak, but he is not highly experienced to take over the leadership of Egypt,” Hashem added. “We are not a field of experience for ElBaradei, Ayman Nour or others who recently appeared on the scene. It’s not reasonable to choose another candidate when we have a treasure like president Mubarak.”
But with the general Egyptian atmosphere of public discontent, not everyone voiced such endorsement.
“We, the youth, don’t have shelter,” one al-Darb al-Ahmar resident said, while adding that he wished to personally address the president. “So he would know there’s an Egyptian young man who can neither find shelter nor a job.”
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
