Wafd Party under new leadership as state-aligned Abu Shaqa loses elections

Bahaa Eddin Abu Shaqa, a close ally of the state who headed the liberal Wafd Party, lost the party’s leadership elections on Friday by a small margin to international law professor Abdel Sanad Yamama.

After a career that began in the judiciary, Abu Shaqa was elected to head the Wafd Party in 2018.

He sowed division in the party ranks through his handling of the 2020 parliamentary elections, which saw him appoint members of his own family to key positions as he cooperated closely with the state-allied Nation’s Future Party against the will of many of his fellow party members.

Leading party members told Mada Masr that Abu Shaqa’s four-year leadership saw the Wafd turn into a one-man party, with the former party leader using his links to the regime to silence critics and oust opponents. Abu Shaqa’s exit, the party members noted, could open the door for the return of former members.

Out of the 3,293 members who cast their votes in Friday's election, 1,668 voted for Yamama against 1,548 in favor of Abu Shaqa, with 77 casting spoiled ballots.

Three candidates were initially in the running for the position, with Yasser Qora hoisting a challenge to Abu Shaqa as well as Yamama. Qora ultimately withdrew his bid for the leadership to strengthen the front against Abu Shaqa, said Mohamed Gad, a senior Wafd Party figure who initially campaigned for Qora.

The final vote was impartial, according to the Wafd secretary general Fouad Badawy, who was also a member of the party committee supervising the election. Badawy told Mada Masr that the vote was overseen by Administrative Prosecution Authority officials.

The party could now pursue reconciliation with former members, said Gad, and will then choose a new supreme committee to bring back those exiled from the party and name a new leader for the party’s parliamentary blocs in the House and Senate.

Abu Shaqa, who Gad said posited himself as “the undefeatable man of the state,” was a prominent regime-affiliated legal practitioner. He chaired the 2015-2020 House Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee, and in 2020, Sisi appointed him to the newly-formed Senate where he was elected deputy speaker. 

His son, Mohamed Abu Shaqa, acted as legal advisor to both of Sisi’s presidential election campaigns since 2014, and was appointed by the president as a member of the Justice Ministry’s legislative reform committee.

Abu Shaqa also chose his daughter, Amira, for one of the House seats allocated to the Wafd Party on the joint national list for the 2020 election — led by now-majority holders in both parliamentary houses, the Nation’s Future Party.

A number of senior party figures resigned in protest against the handling of the elections. In response, Abu Shaqa announced in September 2020 that he would be stepping down from the party leadership, only to retract the decision days later.

Abu Shaqa continued instead to target critics of his leadership, opting in February 2021 to choose party member Suleiman Wahdan as head of the party’s 25-member bloc in the House and endorsing the dismissal of MP Mohamed Abdel Alim Dawoud as bloc leader after Dawoud accused the Nation’s Future Party of exchanging bribes for votes.

Abu Shaqa later dismissed Dawoud and eight other senior members of the party, accusing them of participating in a “conspiracy against the party.” Abu Shaqa also dismissed party member Mohamed Magdy Farahat and submitted a complaint to the Public Prosecution accusing Farahat of “espionage with foreign channels.”

Dawoud now plans to ignore Abu Shaqa’s decision to dismiss him, he told Mada Masr, and to return to the party without a formal request. He stressed that Abu Shaqa’s loss in the party election was “a natural result of his breach of his obligations toward the party and its members.” Dawoud praised Yamama, a professor of international law at Monufiya University, calling him a serious and well-known legal figure.

Regarding the possibility of returning to lead the party’s parliamentary bloc, Dawoud said the new party chair will have to consult the party’s supreme committee before correcting what he described as “the invalid decisions” of recent years. 

According to the House bylaws, the head of any party must address the House speaker in writing regarding any change in the leadership of the party’s parliamentary bloc within a week of a decision being made.

Mada Masr tried to obtain a comment from Wahdan, the current head of the party's parliamentary bloc, but did not receive a response as of the time of publication.