Cairo: Braving the bad weather, which hit Cairo on Sunday, hundreds of Egyptian opposition activists denounced alleged fraud in recent parliamentary elections and called for the dissolution of the new “illegal”parliament.
“A revolution until victory”, and “The [People’s] Assembly should be dissolved” were some of the slogans chanted by the protesters who gathered outside Egypt’s Supreme Court as the anti-riot police looked on without intervention.
The protest was staged by activists from opposition parties and groups against the results of the latest legislative elections in which President Hosni Mubarak won 420 out of 518 seats up for grabs. Activists from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is Egypt’s largest-but-outlawed opposition force, joined the protest.
The Brotherhood, which won a fifth of the previous parliament, won no seat in the first round of the recent vote on November 28 and pulled out of the second held on December 5.
Former opposition MPs, who said they were deliberately eliminated from the new legislature, plans a protest on Monday in the Egyptian capital.
Sunday’s protest was held as Presidee4nt Hosni Mubarak told the board of the ruling party that the election complied with the law. “He, however, admitted “minor” irregularities” in the shape of vote buying and violence.
“With its negative and positive features, this election was a landmark,” added Mubarak, according to the official Middle East News Agency. He added that his party’s solid victory in the vote was due to “serious efforts”.
The latest election came less than one year before Egypt’s presidential elections. Mubarak, 82, has yet to say if he will seek a sixth term.
