Egypt’s House of Representatives held its opening session on Sunday morning, the first session since a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated chamber was dissolved in 2012, to select the speaker of parliament and two deputies
Bahaa Abu Shaqqa, a veteran lawyer and one of the 28 MPs appointed by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, chaired the session after taking the constitutional oath.
It is widely believed that Ali Abdelaal, a law professor at Ain Shams University elected through the For the Love of Egypt electoral alliance (FLE), has the best chances for the speaker’s post.
FLE recently formed Support Egypt, a controversial coalition of at least 400 partisan and independent MPs to maintain a parliament majority and back the Egyptian state as proclaimed by its founders. An internal vote by the coalition on Saturday won Abdelaal the nomination for the speaker’s chair. The other nominee, Osama al-Abd, a former president of al-Azhar University, bowed out.
Abdelaal was a former member of the assembly that laid down the final draft of Egypt’s current constitution in 2014.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
