New faces dominate Nation’s Future-controlled House leadership positions

After crudely ensuring it would be the major power broker in the 2020 Parliament, the state loyalist Nation’s Future Party further cemented its makeover of the legislature this week as the House of Representatives elected members to leadership positions.

The House held its initial sessions at the start of the week, with the first order of business being to elect a speaker. Despite some indications that the incumbent, MP Ali Abdel Aal, would retain his position, Hanafy Gebaly, a former Supreme Constitutional Court chief justice, was elected on Tuesday from a race of four that did not even include the former speaker. 

Abdel Aal’s departure from the scene — he left the chamber shortly after taking his oath of office — was the first of a week of changes for the legislature, in which the head of nearly every parliamentary committee changed. 

One thing was clear, however: this would be the Nation’s Future’s legislature, as the ascendant party controls nearly every leadership position in the House, pushing out figures who had run afoul of the new leadership.

This leadership now includes deputy speakers businessman Mohamed Aboul Enein and Counselor Ahmed Saad Eddin. After friction within the Nation’s Future over campaign donations, Aboul Enein ran as an independent, even though he is a senior party member. Saad Eddin previously served as the parliament’s secretary-general from January 2016 to September 2019 when he submitted his resignation to Abdel Aal and was replaced by Fawzy.

Abdel Aal’s fate was seal before the House even convened, as a parliamentary source told Mada Masr that the Nation’s Future sent a text message to all its MPs on Monday, a day before the first parliamentary session was to be held, urging them to elect Gebaly, Saad Eddin and Aboul Enein to leading House positions. Tipped off to his ouster, Abdel Aal arrived to the House chamber on Tuesday in evident displeasure, sitting alone in a room from which he emerged to attend the general session when his name was called out in order to swear his oath of office. Shortly afterward, he exited the main hall and left the Parliament building before bureau elections were held. MPs Moustafa Bakry and Ayman Abou al-Ela accompanied him until he left through the main gate.

In a quick session, the House of Representatives convened on Wednesday to announce the final composition of its 25 sub-committees, a prelude to Thursday’s election of committee heads and deputies. 

For his part, MP Ahmed al-Sharqawy told Mada Masr that he expects the former speaker to keep to himself in the coming period and to be absent from most parliamentary sessions.

Before leaving Tuesday’s session, Sharqawy — who joined the Legislative Committee on Wednesday — denied reports that Abdel Aal would resign from the House after losing the leadership content. He noted that his resignation now would give the wrong impression to those who chose to include him on the Nation’s Future-led National List.

Abdel Aal’s time at the head of the legislature has not always been smooth. In early 2019, Abdel Aal faced opposition to his behavior during debate of a housing law.  Moreover, there was a marked antagonism between Abdel Aal and leaders of the Nation’s Future Party, who have close ties with sovereign entities, and which held a parliamentary majority in the former Parliament. 

Following Abdel Aal’s departure, his most trusted colleagues were also sent packing, with Gebaly accepting the resignations of House Secretary-General Mahmoud Fawzy and Abdel Aal’s former deputy Ahmed al-Mahdy. 

On Thursday, Gebaly replaced Fawzy with Ahmed Manaea, a State Council deputy chair, after securing approval from the administrative court’s special committee. 

A source in the House’s General Secretariat who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity said that Fawzy was forced to resign due to his relationship with new deputy Ahmed Saad Eddin, which the source described as “hostile.” According to the source, when Fawzy was Abdel Aal’s legal counsel, he pushed the former speaker to force Saad Eddin to resign as secretary-general in September 2019 so that Fawzy could replace him.

According to the House of Representatives internal bylaws, the speaker may nominate a secretary-general. The secretary-general is, then, appointed following the approval of both deputies. He attends parliamentary sessions and bears the responsibility of smoothly running the various departments of the Parliament’s General Secretariat, which is dedicated to aiding the House of Representatives and its parliamentary bodies in carrying out their functions.

According to a source affiliated with the House’s General Secretariat, who spoke to Mada Masr on condition on anonymity, despite often speaking of his closeness to security agencies, Fawzy was surprised that the Nation’s Future Party abandoned Abdel Aal for the sake of Gebaly at the 11th hour. Meanwhile, the source found that pushing away Fawzy, Mahdy and Abdel Aal fixes the image of the Parliament, which has been criticized for the past five years.

The source explained that the last decision taken by the now-resigned secretary-general was to exclude a large number of journalists from covering Parliament, petitioning the National Press Authority to have state-run outlets to send a single representative from and the Supreme Council for Media Regulation to have private and partisan outlets to send two reporters to cover parliamentary news.

Gebaly’s ascension to the head of the House comes a few months after his predecessor at the court, Judge Abdel Wahab Abdel Razaq, was chosen to head the Senate. It also comes three days before the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Administrative Court’s January 2016 decision confirming Egypt’s sovereignty over the islands of Tiran and Sanafir. The court ruled that the maritime delineation agreement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which included transferring the sovereignty over the two islands to Saudi Arabia, was invalid. When they worked at the court in 2018, Gebaly and Abdel Razeq halted the execution of the State Council’s ruling. They argued that entering into such an agreement is within the unique purview of the executive authority and the legislature, and it is not an administrative matter subject to the State Council’s oversight.