Noah Feldman writes: [T]he army represents the traditional power structure in Egypt, and the Brotherhood represents the will of the people as it would be defined in an ordinary democracy. Their clash is the real thing: a head-to-head confrontation between autocratic force and popular majoritarianism. Its resolution will determine, to a great extent, the future of democracy in the entire Arab world. It will determine once and for all whether the Arab Spring was real.

The struggle could be peacefully resolved in several ways — none very likely. The Brotherhood could fold, accepting the position of token power under the thumb of the military, as its Moroccan wing has done under King Muhammad VI. This would mean sacrificing credibility as well as ideology. If the Brotherhood were to accept such a wholly a subordinate position, it would squander its historic opportunity to marry religious legitimacy with constitutional democracy — its goal for the past two decades.

Alternatively, in a perfect Brotherhood world, the public would return to the streets in opposition to the army and the Supreme Council could back down, accepting the Brotherhood’s electoral victory in exchange for a promise to allow the military to keep its $1 billion-plus in annual US aid. The difficulty is that a substantial minority — 48 percent — of Egyptians voted for the military’s preferred presidential candidate, Ahmed Shafik.

Given the extent of its public support, there is little reason for the army to go gently. Nor will it be content to control a US-bankrolled military fiefdom — the generals know that over time, the Brotherhood will try to change the army by urging the promotion of younger, Islamist officers.

There is one model for compromise between the Brotherhood and the military, in which genuine power-sharing subsists over time: Turkey since the Justice and Development Party took power in 2002. The Turkish military has gradually lost its controlling place in government, a fact the Supreme Council will not ignore. But Turkey is comparatively rich, stable and happy — and that, too, is relevant.

Egyptians would also do well to recall the example of Algeria. After the first contemporary Arab democratic experiment took place there two decades ago, the military reacted to Islamist victory by reversing the electoral results and declaring martial law. The war that followed lasted for years. More than 100,000 people were killed in vicious guerilla fighting. Unless the Muslim Brotherhood and the military can find common ground soon, Egypt will be on a similar path.

The New York Times reports: The commission overseeing Egypt’s first competitive presidential election will declare an official winner on Sunday, the panel said Saturday, amid growing conviction that the announcement has become a bargaining chip in a negotiation for power between the ruling generals and the Muslim Brotherhood.

“As the beginning of a transition to democracy, it is a disaster,” said Omar Ashour, a political scientist at the University of Exeter and the Brookings Doha Center, who is here in Cairo. But, he added, the disaster began the day before the presidential runoff, when the military dissolved the Brotherhood-led Parliament and seized legislative power.

“The generals have their fingers on the reset button if they don’t like the outcome,” Mr. Ashour said. While the Brotherhood may have more legitimacy and the ability to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, “the generals have the guns and tanks and armored vehicles,” he said. “We are playing realpolitik at the moment.”

Television talk shows have obsessed over fragmentary reports of conversations between Brotherhood leaders and the ruling generals, mainly a face-to-face meeting last weekend between the Brotherhood’s parliamentary leader, Saad el-Katatni, and Gen. Sami Hafez Enan. But a Brotherhood spokesman, Jihad el-Haddad, said Saturday that there had been no direct meetings since then, when the Brotherhood made its demands for the reinstatement of Parliament and the empowerment of an elected president.

What is more, he said, the Brotherhood agreed Friday that from now on any talks with the generals would be conducted by a new “national front” it had formed with more secular or liberal advocates of democracy. In so doing, the Brotherhood is acceding to arguments for greater collaboration and openness that have been for years advanced by its more liberal leaders.

Mr. Haddad also insisted that the announcement of a president was merely a first step toward the resolution of the standoff, adding that thousands of Brotherhood members and their allies have once again occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo. “The governing will within the national front is that there will be no meeting with SCAF unless there is an elected president,” he said, referring to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

CNN: As Egypt waits for the delayed results of its presidential election, one of the revolutionary voices of the Arab Spring had a message for another president – Barack Obama.

“The U.S. administration should back off,” said Mahmoud Salem, aka “Sandmonkey,” the pseudonym under which he has authored a blog since the early days of the uprising.

“It was the message of Barack Obama’s administration to keep Mubarak,” he said Thursday on Amanpour. “Obama did not want this revolution and right now they (the American government) have made a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to have (Mohamed) Morsi as the president. They have been meeting them (the Muslim Brotherhood) for the past year. They need to stop pressuring us.”

Speaking from Cairo, Salem suggested multiple reasons why the American administration would favor a Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood victory: “To resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, to create some sort of some sort of Sunni alliance against Iran, or to create another Pakistan model.”

Whatever the reason, he said, “We don’t want any of those things. The Obama administration needs to back off.”

M.J. Rosenberg writes: I have a prediction about how the United States will respond if the Egyptian revolution is ultimately utterly crushed by the military, which certainly seems to be happening.

My prediction is that we say how terrible it is that the Egyptian people lost their struggle for democracy (at least, temporarily) but will take no actions that really punish the generals. Specifically, we will not halt $1.3 billion in United States military assistance – at least, not for longer than a symbolic suspension to indicate displeasure with the generals.

Of course, stopping the military aid is the best possible way to get the generals to go back to the barracks and let the revolution continue. After all, military aid does not benefit the Egyptian people in any way (in contrast to the humanitarian assistance we provide through USAID). Those tanks, fighter aircraft and the rest only benefit the army and the U.S. contractors who produce them, of course. They only add to the power the military can use against its prime enemy: the popular forces for democracy that launched the Egyptian revolution last year.

It seems counter-intuitive that we would support a military junta that crushed a revolution we supported. After all, the United States government is usually quick to stick it to Arabs who defy us in any way unless they happen to be floating on a sea of oil, which Saudi Arabia is and Egypt isn’t.

So why would we continue supplying the Egyptian military with aid, after they upturned the revolution, especially given the provisions of the law that require a cutoff of military aid if Egypt does not move toward democracy (the law contains a waiver which Secretary of State Clinton invoked as recently as March, a sign of more waivers to come).

The reason is simple. The Netanyahu government wants the aid to continue and, a point I need not belabor, it gets what it wants from both the president and Congress. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: Hosni Mubarak, the imprisoned former president of Egypt, was either near death or recovering well from minor injuries he suffered when he slipped in the bathroom, according to two of the many accounts of his health that swirled through Cairo Wednesday as the country’s election commission inched toward an official announcement of who would succeed him as president.

The commission warned that its official pronouncement of the results of last weekend’s voting might be delayed as it tries to sort through more than 400 appeals of irregularities filed by the two candidates, Muslim Brotherhood standard-bearer Mohammed Morsi and former Mubarak prime minister Ahmed Shafiq. But it was uncertain whether the results, due to be released Thursday, would be delayed only by hours or pushed back to Friday – a postponement that would be sure to raise suspicions about the validity of the result.

There was no easy explanation for the various versions of Mubarak’s health – and much speculation that the varying reports were simply intended to confuse a public already on edge about the military’s reassertion of authority after the Supreme Constitutional Court last week ordered the Islamist-dominated Parliament dissolved.

“Such rumors are nothing but a cheap attempt to destabilize the political scene and ruin the democratic transformation and the transfer of power to the elected president,” said Khairat el-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief strategist and financier who was the group’s first choice for president, but was declared ineligible to run because of Mubarak-era criminal convictions.

Reuters reports: A U.S. election monitoring group said on Tuesday it was unable to say if Egypt’s presidential election was free and fair as it had not been given sufficient access, accusing the military leadership of hampering a transition to democracy.

The Carter Center said it had been unable to monitor the vote properly and that a “return of elements of martial law” meant it was “now unclear whether a truly democratic transition remains under way in Egypt”.

Supporters of both presidential candidates – the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsy and former air force commander Ahmed Shafik – say their man won last weekend’s run-off. Official results are not expected until Thursday.

“We cannot provide a comprehensive assessment of the integrity of the elections due to the limited nature of the mission,” the Carter Center’s field office director, Sanne van den Bergh, told Reuters.

The group complained of late accreditation to monitor the vote, limits on the amount of time it was allowed to stay in polling stations and said it was denied access to the central count.

In a news analysis for JTA, Uriel Heilman writes: Egypt’s military coup is now nearly complete.

That may be distressing for Egyptian democracy, but it could help the Israel-Egypt relationship.

Sunday’s decision by military rulers in Egypt to rewrite the country’s constitution – a move that strips much of the power of the Egyptian presidency — confirms what many skeptics had warned about since Hosni Mubarak was deposed in February 2011: This wasn’t so much a revolution as a military coup.



It was the Egyptian army that played the decisive role during the 2011 uprising, siding with the people against the regime and overthrowing Mubarak. It was the military’s leaders who then assumed control of the country. And it was the army that again intervened this week in the middle of a presidential election that would have delivered control of the country to the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi.



A few days before this weekend’s presidential vote, in which Morsi edged Ahmed Shafik, a former Mubarak-era prime minister and air force general, the military dissolved the country’s Islamic Brotherhood-dominated parliament. It did so by declaring that up to one-third of the legislators were elected illegally. The Brotherhood controlled 47 percent of seats in the body after Islamist parties captured more than 65 percent of the votes In Egypt’s first real democratic elections six months ago.



The moves against the parliament and the presidency make clear that Egypt’s military rulers are unwilling to cede power to a democratically elected government, especially if elections empower the Muslim Brotherhood.



“With this document, Egypt has completely left the realm of the Arab Spring and entered the realm of military dictatorship,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said in widely quoted comments. 



“It is a soft military coup that unfortunately many people will support out of fear of an Islamist takeover of the state,” Bahgat told The Associated Press.



That may be bad news for democracy and the Egyptian revolution, but it could be good for Israel.



Sara Khorshid writes: Preliminary election results show that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi is likely to become Egypt’s next president. But even if Mr. Morsi is declared the official winner later this week, Egypt’s first popular presidential election will not have been a democratic milestone.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling dissolving Parliament and the military’s declaration curtailing the presidency’s authority, Mr. Morsi will be a toothless figurehead under the thumb of an authoritarian military council that doesn’t seem likely to relinquish power anytime soon.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has tightened its grasp on power, giving itself control of legislation and the national budget, the right to appoint a panel to draft a new constitution, immunity from democratic oversight, and the power to veto a declaration of war. The new president is also expected to have no say in foreign policy and on relations with the United States, which gives Egypt $1.3 billion in annual military aid.

The military’s unwillingness to cede power and allow a genuinely democratic government has been clear for months. Yet the United States has continued to support the council — indeed, American-made tear gas canisters are still being used by the Egyptian authorities to suppress anti-military protesters.

When I voted “no” in the referendum on constitutional amendments last March, just weeks after the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak was ousted, it was a vote against the entire military-led transition process that set off the continuing legal mess that culminated in the recent dissolution of the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament and in the military’s seizure of sweeping legislative powers.

The amendments and the referendum marked the beginning of a process that led Egyptians and the world to falsely believe that Egypt was being democratized. On March 19, 2011, many Egyptians proudly showed off their inked fingers to symbolize participating in a referendum that they thought laid down a “road map of transition to civil, democratic rule,” as members of the council like to call it.

But that twisted road map was always intended to suppress the Egyptian people’s aspirations by delaying a democratic transition and dragging Egyptians along a path determined by the military. The referendum and the parliamentary and presidential elections have kept the people distracted by the trappings of democracy. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Faced with the popular election of the first Islamist head of state in the Arab world, Egypt’s ruling generals sought on Monday to soften the appearance of their supreme authority as they entered a period of negotiations with the prospective president over the balance of executive, legislative and military power.

In a two-hour news conference, members of the ruling military council made no reference to the election results, which by early morning showed that Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood had defeated Ahmed Shafik, a former Air Force general and Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, in the runoff to choose Egypt’s first democratically elected president. The ballots were counted in front of television cameras and party observers in polling places around the country to prevent fraud, and independent observers concluded that Mr. Morsi had won by a margin of about four percentage points, or about a million votes.

The election officials will not formally confirm the results until later in the week, however, and Ahmed Sarhan, a spokesman for Mr. Shafik, insisted on Monday that the general was the true winner and the Brotherhood had “terrorized” voters. He offered no evidence, and both the state-run and unofficial media reported that Mr. Morsi had a decisive lead in the vote count.

The ruling generals had stunned Egyptians on the eve of the vote by dissolving the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament and claiming all legislative power for themselves in an apparent attempt to foreclose the possibility that Islamists could control both the presidency and the legislature.

Though they acted under the veneer of a court ruling rushed out last week by a panel of Mubarak-appointed judges, the power grab erased their promise to turn over all power to elected civilians by the end of this month, and both liberals and Islamists denounced the move as a military coup. The court ruling dispirited Brotherhood supporters, energized Mr. Shafik’s backers, and led many Egyptians to expect that either the psychological effect of the takeover or more direct intervention would push Mr. Shafik to the presidency.

In the aftermath of Mr. Morsi’s victory — considered an upset by many, despite the Brotherhood’s proven popularity and political clout — the generals sought Monday to reassure the public that they had no intention of re-establishing a military-backed autocracy, although they did not back away from their effective seizure of legislative power.

“Trust the armed forces,” two representatives of the military council, Gen. Mandouh Shahin and Gen. Mohamed el Assar, repeated many times over the course of the news conference. “We don’t want power,” both also said repeatedly, citing the presidential election as proof of their good intentions.

Despite their seizure of Parliament, they promised a grand celebration at the end of the month to mark their formal handover to the new president.

Issandr El Amrani adds: As I warned on Twitter, there should be caution about rushing to think Mohammed Morsi is Egypt’s next president. From my understanding from this morning’s figures, the difference between he and Shafiq is about 900,000 votes with over 3,000,000 votes uncounted. The Presidential Election Commission says it will not give the final results until Wednesday or Thursday and there is likely to be some contestation by both sides, and perhaps even partial recounts. Ultimately what the PEC says will hold, since you cannot appeal their decision.

So one real possibility is that Shafiq will be declared president and the MB, having already announced its victory, will go ballistic. Or that Shafiq will lose and his supporters will go ballistic.

And then there’s the question of parliament. It’s still expected that tomorrow MPs (at least Islamist ones) will march to parliament to hold a session on which they will decide parliament’s response to the court verdict. Except that parliament is surrounded by army troops who have orders not to let anyone in.

Paul McGeough writes: The jig was up in Cairo when Barack Obama coughed up to the generals a cool $1.5 billion that he might have dangled before them to keep them on democracy’s straight and narrow.

Instead, he threw the money a couple of months back and they’ve been running amok ever since. The military cordon they placed around the Egyptian Parliament on Friday was the latest in a series of staggering events that can be spelt out in a four-letter word – coup.

With hardly a murmur of international criticism, the generals have amassed more power for themselves than the ousted dictatorship had, even to the point of reinstating the worst aspects of the hated emergency laws on Wednesday.
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The generals have been artful in convincing the world that they are well intentioned – since the January day last year, when they sacrificed the dictator Hosni Mubarak as the price for their own power and vested interests, right up to Thursday’s twin rulings by their crony mates on the Supreme Constitutional Court, which sacked the country’s new Parliament and gave a leg-up to another crony mate in the presidential race.

They have scuppered the Parliament and derailed the drafting of a new constitution, and if/when their preferred candidate wins the presidency, they’ll all kick back with a shisha pipe and lock in their vision for the new Egypt – which is very much like the old Egypt.

They are having an each-way bet. In the event their man goes down to the Islamist candidate running against him, the junta will have all the power it needs to nobble the new president through its clench on the new parliamentary elections and the drafting of the new constitution.

They have created, deliberately I suspect, an electoral mess that is unlikely to produce a legitimate, unifying president – and thereby, they create the justification for their argument that they must retain the power to watch over him. At the same time they have cleverly debased the judiciary, so if anyone has a complaint or grievance, where do they take it? [Continue reading…]

David Hearst writes: Millions of Egyptians went to bed last night thinking they had elected a president with full executive powers and woke up this morning in a military dictatorship. Just after the presidential polls closed, the generals granted themselves sweeping powers in a constitutional declaration that completes the coup started by dissolving parliament.

If the generals have their way, Egypt’s new president will not be able to legislate, control the budget, appoint members to a committee writing the new constitution, declare war or change the membership of the military council which assumes all these powers. The president will be able to appoint a cabinet and approve laws but whole swaths of policymaking – such as defence, national security or indeed the military’s vast commercial empire – will be a closed book to him.

To add insult to injury, the next president will have to swear his oath of allegiance before a constitutional court composed of Mubarak-era place men.

The most important power the military council retains is to prevent the president from changing its membership. Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak’s defence minister for 20 years, is, apparently, commander-in-chief for life. [Continue reading…]

At The Arabist, Steve Negus writes: Mohamed Morsi’s apparent win is the latest conventional-wisdom-defying turnabout in Egyptian post-uprising politics. Pronounced dead by some after the June 14 parliament-dissolving court verdict and the presumption that Shafiq would win the presidency, the transition has just got out of its sarcophagus for a few more lurches around the burial chamber.

In looking at what brought the victory and what it will produce, I going to assume that the most detailed figures I’ve seen — those released by the Morsi campaign — are substantially correct. That’s a big “if”, but there is some corroboration. Also, the numbers should soon be verifiable. Even if you don’t trust the elections commission, both international observers and candidates’ representatives were allowed much more access to the adding up of votes from different stations than in May, from what I understand.

First, the turnout. Morsi’s numbers say that a supposedly dispirited electorate actually went to the polls in numbers about 20 percent higher than in the first round. Maybe it’s because the choices are now clear, and fear is a more potent motivator than hope. But if you look where the turnout is highest, this suggests rural machine politics on both sides. Upper Egyptian governorates (aka Morsiut) seem to have produced vote counts 150 percent of what they were in May. The Delta (aka Shafiqiya) was also up 20–50 percent. Cairo in contrast dropped a bit, as did Alexandria. Giza was up about 15 percent.

I have heard that both sides were busing in supporters to stations — presumably old NDP party organizers and Coptic groups for Shafiq, Islamists for Morsi. This probably involves improper influence on polling day and is technically an infraction but it’s understandable. A lot of voters live outside areas where they are registered and don’t have the resources to travel to vote on their own, so it’s a question of partisan busing or de facto disenfranchisement.

Morsi’s apparent win means more short-term uncertainty. I don’t think he’s capable of ushering in the Caliphate any more than Shafiq is capable of bringing back the Mubarak era (more on that below). The Islamist’s narrow victory, following the five-way split of the first round, means that his only popular mandate will be that he’s not Shafiq. He’ll be a president with only limited, temporary constitutional powers, facing off against a military who’s quite capable of vetoing whatever he does by means administrative, judicial, and now legislative. He will have very little of either moral or institutional power to shape the drafting of the constitution, and he will live under the Sword of Damocles of another court ruling.

I suspect that the Brothers will acquiesce to the creation of a constitution — any constitution — to give the electoral battles that they are capable of winning, but not using, some permanence. SCAF now essentially controls the drafting process, with the Brothers at best given a spoiling role, so it’s quite possible now that we settle into a Turkey-ten-years-ago or Pakistan-now style of uneasy military-civil government coexistence. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian summarizes today’s events in Egypt so far:

• Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been celebrating in Tahrir Square after the group claimed victory for its candidate in the presidential election. By the Brotherhood’s count, Mohammed Morsi took 13.2 million votes, or 51.8% with more than 99% of the more than 13,000 poll centres counted. It gave Morsi’s opponent – Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister Ahmed Shafiq – 48.1% out of 25.5 million votes. Shafiq’s campaign challenged the result.

• But a statement from Ahmed Shafiq’s campaign claimed he was ahead “beyond all doubt“. Shafiq’s media spokesman Ahmed Sarhan accused the Brotherhood of trying to create a “fait accompli” and of risking confrontation on the streets “when official results declare Shafiq to be the winner”. But at a s press conference Sarhan appeared confused suggesting Morsi had 52% of votes so far and Shafiq 51.5%.

‘• The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) has denied that it is engaging in a power grab after it issued a new constitutional declaration tying the hands of the country’s incoming president and cementing military authority over the post-Mubarak era. At a press conference it accused people of “blowing this out of proportion” and urged people to “stop all the criticisms that we are a state within a state”. Despite awarding itself a range of powers including legislative responsibilities and full control of the armed forces, Scaf insisted that it was subservient to parliament. The military rulers also claimed they were unhappy that the supreme court dissolved parliament – “our biggest achievement” – and said they had no control over the armed forces.

• The Muslim Brotherhood labelled the military declaration “null and void“. Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei described it as a “grave setback for democracy“. Human rights activist Hossam Bahgat, said: “Egypt has completely left the realm of the Arab Spring and entered the realm of military dictatorship.”

The New York Times reports: The Muslim Brotherhood on Monday projected its candidate as the winner of Egypt’s first competitive presidential election, hours after the ruling military council issued an interim constitution granting itself broad power over the future government, all but eliminating the president’s authority in an apparent effort to guard against a victory by the Islamist candidate.

The military’s new charter is the latest in a series of swift steps that the generals have taken to tighten their grasp on power just at the moment when they had promised to hand over to elected civilians the authority that they assumed on the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year. Their charter gives them control of all laws and the national budget, immunity from any oversight, and the power to veto a declaration of war.

After dissolving the Brotherhood-led Parliament elected four months ago, and locking out its lawmakers, the generals on Sunday night also seized control of the process of writing a permanent constitution. State news media reported that the generals had picked a 100-member panel to draft it.

“The new constitutional declaration completed Egypt’s official transformation into a military dictatorship,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, wrote in an online commentary. Under the military’s charter, the president appeared to be reduced to a powerless figurehead.

Though final results are not available yet, by early Monday morning the Brotherhood was projecting its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, the winner, and its leaders escalated their defiance. After meeting with Gen. Sami Hafez Enan of the military council, the Brotherhood-affiliated speaker of Parliament, Saad el-Katatni, declared that the military had no authority to dissolve the Parliament or write a constitution. He said that a separate 100-member panel picked by the Parliament would begin meeting within hours to write up its own constitution — raising the prospect of competing assemblies. And Saad El Hussainy, leader of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc, said that the group’s lawmakers would show up at Parliament as scheduled on Tuesday morning. The generals having stationed military and riot police to keep the lawmakers out, potentially setting the stage for new clashes in the streets.

The military’s moves were “a new episode of a complete military coup against the revolution and the popular will,” said Mohamed El Beltagy, a leading Brotherhood lawmaker, said in a statement online. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera‘s Sherine Tadros writes: As I was crashing to make the deadline for my elections piece on the first day of voting, I trawled through the raw pictures the cameraman had collected from various polling stations looking for that classic woman-holding-up-purple-finger-and-smiling shot.

I didn’t find it. There were lots of purple fingers (the ink stain you get showing you’ve voted) but nobody held theirs up to the cameraman with pride, the hallmark shot of previous election days.

There is a distinct lack of energy or enthusiasm surrounding this vote. It’s safe to predict that most of those eligible to vote will not cast their ballots this time around – a mixture of apathy, confusion and active boycott.

There are of course those who tell me they are voting Mohamed Morsi or Ahmed Shafik out of conviction but ask a few more questions and you’ll find the conviction is more about the other not winning than belief in the candidate they are voting for.

For many others, the deep seated depression surrounding the vote comes from the realization that whoever wins, it’s the military rulers or SCAF that will end up running the country.

February 12th was not the start of a transition to democracy, it was a military takeover.

Al Ahram reports: A new constitutional annex defining the powers of Egypt’s incoming president will be in place within the next 48 hours and before presidential election runoff results are officially announced Thursday, an official source close to the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) told Ahram Online.

According to the source, the annex will give the new president the power to appoint the prime minister, ministers and their deputies, state representatives at home and abroad, civil servants, military attaches and diplomats.

The new president will also have the authority to call parliamentary elections and joint sessions of the People’s Assembly and Shura Council.

The High Constitutional Court on Thursday declared the parliamentary elections law, under which the first parliament was elected, unconstitutional. The ruling resulted in the immediate dissolution of the Islamist-dominated People’s Assembly. Fresh elections should take place within 60 days.

The new annex is expected to amend article 30 of the constitutional declaration, issued by the SCAF in March 2011, which would allow the coming president to take the presidential oath of office before the High Constitutional Court instead of parliament.

The president will also be able to grant pardons.

According to the source, the SCAF will not be handing over all its powers to the elected president and will retain the legislative role until a new parliament is elected. It will also preserve the right to approve the general budget.