Socialist Popular Alliance Party endorses Sabbahi for president

The Socialist Popular Alliance Party announced their endorsement of presidential hopeful Hamdeen Sabbahi in the upcoming elections in a press conference held at the party’s headquarters on Saturday.

The party had held a meeting earlier where the majority voted for endorsing Sabbahi, who said that the decision was not a surprise, “since it falls in line with the Popular Alliance’s vision and history of struggle.”

The Popular Alliance is the second to declare its support for Sabbahi in his quest for presidency after the Dostour Party, which was founded in 2011 by iconic figure Mohamed ElBaradei.

During his speech, Sabbahi stated that “If we don’t gain power using the revolution, after overthrowing two heads of the state, we won’t be able to gain power using ballot boxes.”

In his opinion, a revolution that can’t gain power is an incompetent one. “The Popular Alliance Party was a participant in the revolution in the squares, and now it has decided to participate in taking the revolution to the ballot boxes,” he added.

“I will not allow the targeting of any peaceful citizen regardless of his affiliations. Whoever carries weapons in the face of Egyptian people will be punished according to the law. I will not discriminate between citizens in this country based on their opinions as long as they’re peaceful. Those who commit crimes will be punished, but there will be no collective punishment either,” he affirmed.  

Sabbahi also addressed the recent media controversy surrounding alleged statements he made regarding the prosecution of presidential candidate and former Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. 

“We support transitional justice that’s not vindictive nor selective, against those whose hands are drenched in blood or political corruption. Transitional justice is based on tolerance, justice and reparation, and the constitution stipulates that a law for transitional justice has to be drafted,” he said. 

Sabbahi asserted that his “main concern is not targeting specific names, as I said in front of everyone,” clarifying that he "doesn’t deal with Sisi as a criminal that I'm targeting for prosecution.” 

Further igniting the media war, he stated that one newspaper had misquoted him, while another had attributed false statements to him.

Privately owned Youm7 daily had alleged that, in a meeting with a number of his campaign’s youth on Thursday, Sabbahi had stated that “Transitional justice will rule over the crimes of murder, squandering public property, and political corruption. I will not differentiate between those who made the 2010 elections a massacre for democracy, and those responsible for the bloodshed since January 25, 2011 till now, and I will not deny the bloodshed of peaceful Muslim Brotherhood protesters who died without being involved in terrorism,” the Turkish Anadol news service reported.

According to Anadol, Youm7 quoted Sabbahi as saying “I don’t deal with Sisi as a criminal, but I’m targeting him for prosecution within a specific frame, which I’ll implement through serious social consensus, aiming at healing wounds and not stirring new fights.”             

Sabbahi’s campaign denied the allegations, claiming that the statements Youm7 published “contain a lot of contradictions, proving that they were completely fabricated.”

Youm7 responded with a minute and a half recording where Sabbahi responded to a question by one of the youth, who asked “how transitional justice that doesn’t involve the prosecution of Tantawi and Sisi is incomplete.” However, the recording ends before any statements regarding the prosecution of Sisi are made by Sabbahi. 

However, the newspaper said they had a 60-minute long recording that they were planning to release if Sabbahi’s campaign continued to deny the accusations, Anadol claimed. 

Meanwhile, a Google search of the keywords “Sabbahi” and “Youm7” resulted in a number of links to headlines on Youm7's website, including “A surprise: Sabbahi promised the youth in his campaign to prosecute the Field Marshal”, “Political anger at Sabbahi after Youm7 published his statement” and “Youm7 replies to Sabbahi’s campaign with an audio recording of his meeting.” However, all of the aforementioned stories redirected to one statement released by the paper’s editorial board. 

“After publishing the recordings proving our professional credibility, we decided to take down the Sabbahi recording about transitional justice and stop the feud with his campaign to preserve the stability of the electoral process,” it said.

The statement claimed that Youm7 tried to avoid confrontation with Sabbahi’s campaign and warned them not to deny the news, but stated that “the campaign's insistence on denying the recording forced us to publish recordings we did not want to publish.” 

The news outlet added that “Since our readers, who are our main concern and whom we vow to keep informed with the truth, are now acquainted with the credibility of the recording we published without mistakes or exaggeration, we decided to stop the argument around this case out of concern for the electoral process. We don’t need to divert media or political attention to other battles.”