Cairo: Fireworks erupt at his rallies, his face is plastered across the streets of his Cairo constituency and children wear T-shirts printed with his image.
Ahmad Mortada Mansour, the 34-year-old son of the head of Cairo’s Zamalek football club, has gone all out to win votes ahead of parliamentary elections that start in Egypt on Sunday.
Flush with money, Mansour and his pro-market, liberal Free Egyptians Party are mounting an ambitious bid to win support when the country votes for a new 596-member parliament, the first since the previous assembly was dissolved in June 2012.
The Free Egyptians Party, founded by telecoms tycoon Najeeb Sawiris — who has offered to buy an island off Greece or Italy to shelter people fleeing war-ravaged Syria — has 231 candidates across Egypt’s 27 provinces.
Many of the party’s candidates are former members of the National Democratic Party (NDP) of longtime ex-leader Hosni Mubarak, which was dissolved after the 2011 uprising that toppled him.
Following a ban on NDP members being lifted, many are returning to politics.
“We are a liberal party and we believe in the free market economy,” Mohammad Fareed, a youth leader of the Free Egyptians Party, told AFP at the party’s headquarters in Cairo’s upscale Zamalek neighbourhood.
“We believe that only a free market economy with a vibrant private sector that is backed by political support will eradicate poverty in Egypt.”
The party counts among its members leading businessmen like automobile manufacturer Raouf Ghabbour and Sawiris, who runs a multi-billion-dollar telecommunications empire across several Middle Eastern and African countries, plus Korea.
The Free Egyptians will push for liberal reforms in an economy that has a long history of heavy state involvement.
“The party has huge money, hundreds of millions of Egyptian pounds,” said Hazem Hosni, professor of political science at Cairo University.
“When it talks of being liberal ... it is liberal in business. They don’t want the state to intervene in anything.”
Fareed said his party wants to unshackle the economy, for example by scrapping subsidies that it says have slowed economic growth.
“By offering cheap energy, we have created high energy consuming industries that are not labour intensive,” limiting job growth, he said.
Egypt’s economic growth dropped to about two per cent in 2011-2012, amid the political turmoil that followed the ouster of Mubarak.
Growth is projected at around four per cent this year, but the recovery remains fragile, analysts say, given that inflation and unemployment remain high at 10 and 14 per cent respectively.
The International Monetary Fund earlier this month urged Egypt to “create the conditions for the private sector to increase its activity” in order to boost employment, especially among youth.
The government did cut some fuel subsidies in 2014 but came under fire from those benefitting from cheap energy.
Much of its economic efforts have focused on large-scale projects, like the ‘new Suez Canal’ unveiled by Al Sissi in August that will double the number of ships passing through the crucial waterway by 2023.
“Sawiris is not looking for such mega ‘president’s projects’ that are attractive for foreign investors ... but not necessarily right for Egypt,” said Hosni.
“It’s the small and medium projects” his group will look to support, he said.
But experts said it is unclear how much influence the party will be able to exert, regardless of the vast wealth behind it.
“Sawiris, the big boss, has his own calculations to keep his business running,” Hosny said. “He is not going to make the regime angry. He is liberal in an Egyptian context.”
