Egypt’s election commission ejects front-runners from presidential race

By Leila Fadel, Tuesday, April 17, 3:01 PM

CAIRO — Egypt’s presidential electoral commission permanently disqualified 10 presidential hopefuls, including three front-runners, on Tuesday, upending the election just weeks before next month’s vote.
The commission announced Saturday that it had disqualified the candidates from the election, the first since the ouster last year of President Hosni Mubarak. With its Tuesday decision, the commission rejected appeals filed by ultraconservative preacher Hazem Abu Ismail, who is popular among followers of a puritanical form of Islam known as Salafism, as well as appeals from the Muslim Brotherhood’s top strategist, multimillionaire Khairat el-Shater; Hosni Mubarak’s controversial former spy chief and vice president Omar Suleiman; and seven other candidates, according to state television.
The move by the commission of Mubarak-era judges could draw destabilizing protests, especially from ultraconservative voters who feel the law was manipulated to disqualify their preferred candidate. Outside the commission on Tuesday, rowdy supporters of Abu Ismail staged a sit-in in protest and chanted “God is great.”
“The committee started rigging the elections today,” Abdel Moneim Abdel Maksoud, a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood, told al-Jazeera after the announcement.
Shater was disqualified because he had been a political prisoner during Mubarak’s rule. But the lawyer said the country’s military rulers pardoned Shater after his release from prison last year and there was no reason to remove him from the race. “The committee is choosing what serves its interests, and this is an apparent and daring forgery of the coming election before it even starts.”
With several top contenders out of the race, the front-runners for the vote are Amr Moussa, the former Arab League chief who has consistently polled on top; Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a progressive Islamist; and the Brotherhood’s backup candidate, Mohammed Mursi.
The commission said Abu Ismail was disqualified because his late mother held dual Egyptian and American citizenship, a violation of Egyptian law. Abu Ismail has denied that his mother was a U.S. citizen and has cast the disqualification as a conspiracy against him.
Suleiman was disqualified because of troubles with the signatures he collected to support his nomination, the commission said.