• MB News
  • October 16, 2009
  • 2 minutes read

Al-Adly: Overwhelming Brotherhood victory will not be repeated

Al-Adly: Overwhelming Brotherhood victory will not be repeated
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which unexpectedly won 88 seats of the 454-seat parliament in the 2005 Parliamentary elections, has been facing heavy security crackdowns in recent years, landing many of its top leaders in prison. This has led Egypt’s security chief to predict that they would not see gains in next year’s parliamentary elections since it is believed that the wide-ranging crackdown against the group’s leaders and financial backers has left it in disarray and unable to repeat its strong showing.
 
In subsequent elections for municipal councils and parliament’s upper house, Brotherhood candidates were disqualified from running by government election officials.  The group, which seeks to turn Egypt into an Islamic state through peaceful means, used its impressive grassroots organization to good effect during the 2005 elections. “They achieved some successes in previous elections, but the situation is now different,” Interior Minister Habib el-Adly asserted, and he continued that the group’s members continue to be rounded up for holding “illegal” secret organizational meetings, and asserted that people have lost faith in their “empty” slogans.
 
While too weak to pass any legislation of its own, the Brotherhood parliamentary bloc, has previously been able to embarrass the overwhelmingly dominating ruling party and use parliament as a platform to air their views. The most recent is the demand of investigations of the mysterious death of Abu Zuhri brother of Hamas leader who was alleged to have entered the country illegally in April, and was detained for unspecified “illegal” activities.