Anti-Mubarak groups will rally against Shafiq in 2nd round: Analyst

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) candidate vowed to respect all political parties and religious sects if he wins the runoff vote scheduled for June.

Morsi promised to cancel the emergency law and hold accountable those involved in the crackdown of the country’s revolution.

An interview with Mustafa Reda, a member of the Executive Forum from Cairo, shares his thoughts regarding the issue.

What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

The Muslim Brotherhood did not garner the votes this time around because the Egyptians did not want them to have both power in parliament and the presidency. Do you agree?

Reda: Yes, I do agree to a great extent because actually there have been a lot of discrepancies and mistakes that occurred from the Muslim Brotherhood.

The first one and the most major one that they said in the beginning was that they will not be running for the presidency and then they changed their mind again.

And then their slogans and terms changed from day to day. So this made that a lot of Egyptian citizens lost confidence in the Muslim Brotherhood and that is why they lost a lot of the votes.

When you talk about losing confidence, do you think they have got a fair chance? Because they say since the parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood in some cases did not return to the towns in which they got their support from but then again they have only had that post in terms of a power in parliament for a number of months.

Reda: Probably I think in the future, probably within the next couple of days or couple of week, they will be getting a lot of support due to the fact that the competitor for the presidential elections which is Doctor Ahmed Shafiq is one of the ex-Mubarak regime and he is trying to defend himself by a lot of ways to show that he did not participate in active manner to the corruption and all the disturbance that occurred during the Mubarak era.

But the facts that are with us say the reverse. So probably the people which are going to vote for the Brotherhood are not in favor of them but they will be there in order that Shafiq would not gain all these votes.

Do you agree that Morsi is going to overwhelmingly get the votes?

Reda: Yes, I think I agree with what was just said now that probably Morsi is going to get a great deal of the votes because the credibility probably of Shafiq will be decreasing during the coming few days. This is due to two factors that probably the propaganda and advertisement that should be done by the Brotherhood, I think they are going to change the strategy now.

I hope they will be learning from the mistake and try to shape their strategy again in order to gain more seats. On the other hand, Shafiq will have quite a difficult time to prove that he is going to make a turnaround and not act in the similar way like he did during the Mubarak regime. So these are challenges for both candidates.

One has to make a great effort to change the strategy and change the methodology in order to attract more voters and Shafiq has, on the other side, to show a positive magnitude that is going to make something different that real change, that what was done and was there since 30years ago.

The Muslim Brotherhood has demanded the creation of this 10-member Presidential Council and then an eventual coalition government to be led by a non-Brotherhood politician. Who may they be talking about? Is it Fotouh?

Reda: I do not think this is a realistic solution to solve all the political issues because we have been in this process since a long time ago now and changing the due course will cause a lot of disturbances, I think, within the political arena.

So this is not a very professional avenue to go from.