Socialist Popular Alliance’s Haitham al-Hariry becomes latest candidate disqualified from 2025 House election

Opposition politician Haitham al-Hariry, former member of Parliament from Alexandria, has been excluded from running in this year’s House of Representatives election.

Hariry, currently a member of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, is one of at least six politicians who have previously held seats in Parliament to be disqualified from the 2025 parliamentary race on the grounds of their military service status — a matter that did not prevent their nomination and success in previous elections.

Speaking to Mada Masr, Hariry, who was elected to the House in 2015 but lost his bid for reelection in 2020, said the ruling stripped him of his “constitutional right to run in any future elections without any reason or justification.”

He added that his exclusion, upheld Thursday by the Supreme Administrative Court, sets a legal precedent that could disqualify thousands of Egyptians.

Thursday’s court decision also excluded Mohamed Abdel Halim, another SPAP candidate.

A decision by the National Elections Authority earlier this year also cut short the electoral ambitions of several candidates from the Salafi Nour Party who had applied to run in the Senate election.

Mohamed Shokry was barred in Cairo, Saber Refad in Marsa Matrouh, Al-Sayed Khalifa in Kafr al-Sheikh, and Ahmed Yehia in Beni Suef.

Why is the judiciary disqualifying parliamentary candidates?  

The NEA, a judicial body, rejected the candidates' nominations on the basis that they were “excluded” from performing military service by Defense Ministry decrees.

Conscription into the Egyptian Armed Forces is required by every man in the country over the age of 18 for a period of one-three years, except in certain extenuating circumstances when an exemption can be granted.

Proof of service or exemption from service is required by anyone wishing to run for election. 

This year, however, the NEA has begun to disqualify candidates on the grounds that a ministerial exclusion does not constitute an exemption. On appeal, its decisions were upheld on Thursday by the Supreme Administrative Council.

The decision could bar thousands from political participation — including many who were excluded from military service on the basis of their families’ political affiliations or public activism during the government of ousted former President Hosni Mubarak, Hariry’s defense team noted in a memorandum to the court.

Hariry was excluded from military service by the defense minister on national security grounds since his father was a prominent opposition leader.

A new interpretation

Judicial sources who spoke to Mada Masr said that the expanded disqualifications in this year’s election is rooted in a new interpretation of the military service law that collapses the legal distinction between those excluded from service by a ministerial decree and draft evaders — the latter category is barred from running for office.

The laws governing military service and political participation have both previously allowed candidates of the same categories to run in past elections.

Nour Party deputy head Al-Sayed Khalifa, for example, participated in the 2012, 2015 and 2020 parliamentary elections despite being excluded from military service in 1982 by a ministerial decision.

But he was unable to run for the Senate this year, after a Kafr al-Sheikh administrative court upheld the NEA’s decision to exclude him from running in the Senate election in July, arguing that the ministerial decision did not constitute a formal exemption under the military service law, which requires either completion of service or a full legal exemption.

The NEA first made public this new direction on July 11, when it released the preliminary list of accepted candidates for the 2025 Senate election.

The interpretation had been floated in internal NEA discussions during the 2017-2020 tenure of Judge Ahmed Abboud, according to a former High Elections Commission member who spoke to Mada Masr. The elections authority did not support it at the time. 

Even now, some administrative courts of first instance have accepted candidate’s appeals, reversing their disqualification on the grounds of ministerial exclusion from military service. 

This was the case for Ahmed Yehia, another Nour Party candidate disqualified by the NEA in July.

Yehia won his lawsuit before an administrative court in Beni Suef on July 14, after he argued that he had appeared before the conscription office to report for military service, but was exempted due to a 2011 Defense Ministry directive, in accordance with Article 6 of Law 127/1980, which regulates military and national service.

But the NEA appealed the decision before the Supreme Administrative Court, which ultimately overturned the judgment from the lower Beni Suef court.

The court stated that the defense minister’s exclusion constitutes neither an exemption, nor performance of service, explicitly or implicitly, and concluded that Yehia had therefore failed to meet the mandatory requirement for electoral candidacy.

The ruling now stands as a binding judicial principle for other State Council courts, unless the Unification of Principles Circuit issues a contradictory judgement. As such, it carries significant weight in shaping legal precedents governing eligibility to run in parliamentary elections, according to a former deputy president of the State Council who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity.

A dangerous direction 

Defense lawyer Khaled Ali, who represented Hariry in his appeal, told Mada Masr that the interpretation sets a dangerous precedent.

It expands the interpretation of legal provisions governing military service in a manner that violates the principle of equality and undermines the constitutional right to political participation, Ali continued.

He concluded that the interpretation opens the door to the punishment of political opponents and to stripping them of their political rights. 

Hariry’s defense team argued that the NEA’s decision to disqualify him amounts to political discrimination.

They also argued that Hariry had submitted a certificate excluding him from military service — an official document issued by the Defense Ministry and accepted in previous election rounds — and described its current rejection as a “mistaken interpretation of an unequivocal legal text.”