Signs Increasingly Point to Gamal Mubarak as Egypt’s Next President

By Andrew Hammond

A favorite parlor game among Egypt’s educated classes in recent years has been guessing who the next president might be. The current president, Hosni Mubarak, has never appointed a deputy—a policy, analysts say, designed to maintain his grip on power. Mubarak himself was a relatively unknown deputy president when he took the reins following the 1981 assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. At the age of 74, however, and with numerous assassination attempts behind him, the issue of Mubarak’s successor is becoming more and more pressing.

Speculation has centered on two people: intelligence service chief Omar Suleiman, and Mubarak’s dashing 39-year-old banker son, Gamal. Since Israeli-Palestinian peace talks ran aground with the eruption in September 2000 of the Palestinian intifada, Suleiman has become increasingly visible in public as Mubarak’s occasional envoy to Israel, the Palestinians and the U.S. administration in Washington. Suleiman’s face also began appearing in Egyptian state-owned newspapers.

Egyptians are now concluding, however, that Gamal is the heir apparent, after the gains he made in September, when Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) held its first general congress in 10 years. The gathering was carefully engineered to give the party a new “reformist” leadership under the younger Mubarak, now in charge of the party’s policymaking body, and Information Minister Safwat Sherif, appointed new NDP secretary-general. “The old guard will remain, but in parallel with a new group led by Gamal Mubarak,” said political analyst and former member of parliament Mona Makram-Ebeid. “He will have great leverage to make change, which he didn’t have up to now.

“Gamal is acceptable (within party ranks),” she explained. “There isn’t much resistance because of his age and his background, which is Egyptian but exposed to American and British culture.”

Gamal speaks fluent English, worked with an investment bank in London and regularly appears on CNN with Binyamin Netanyahu-style polished soundbites. Sherif, on the other hand, is a Mubarak loyalist whose career began in the intelligence services of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s. After a 1995 attempt on President Mubarak’s life in Addis Ababa, the massive state information network over which Sherif presides made a concerted effort to deify him as the nation’s father/savior—at the same time as the tide had turned in the state’s favor in its war with Islamic groups staging an insurrection.

There is little chance that the younger Mubarak is promoting Sherif in his own right. Sensing an ulterior motive, analysts reckon Sherif has been charged with further “polishing” Gamal’s public image in the next stage of the careful process of making Gamal acceptable to a nation of 70 million people which prides itself on its pioneering role in bringing Western democracy to the Middle East, even if things went awry after the 1952 military coup.

Observers first began tracking Gamal’s career when he returned to the country to take a position on the Egyptian-American Presidents Council of businessmen set up by Mubarak and then-U.S. Vice President Al Gore in 1995. At that time, Mubarak’s older son, Alaa, was embroiled in accusations of corruption and influence-peddling by foreign, Arab and Egyptian opposition papers.

As happened in Syria, the president’s choice of successor moved from one son to another (in Syria because of the untimely death of Basil Al-Assad). In 1999, with business community backing, Gamal established his Future Generation Foundation, an NGO which promotes young people in business and public life. Associates involved in the project say Gamal and his father had considered turning the group into a political party to rival the ossified NDP. Opposition from the NDP’s old guard, however, persuaded Mubarak it was a bad idea. Then, in 2000, Mubarak appointed his son to the NDP’s general secretariat. Gamal began to appear regularly on television and among government ministers at major events of state, and the state media started lavishing praise on him as the voice of Egyptian youth and the hope of the future.

Putting aside the issue of who his father is, many ordinary Egyptians welcome Gamal’s meteoric rise in Egypt’s elderly-minded political establishment, and would even welcome his presidency. When asked if they think Gamal is being groomed as their next president, many Egyptians will answer, “I hope so”—so sick are they of the same faces ruling the country for the last two decades. Mubarak’s rare cabinet reshuffles have failed to invigorate popular faith in government, and his decision in 1999 to move Atef Obeid from the position of minister of public enterprises to that of prime minister met with particular disappointment around the country. Calls for Obeid’s removal have been frequent, although his defenders in the state-owned press have said he inherited an unfortunate legacy of economic problems that can’t be blamed on him. Still, his image singularly fails to inspire Egyptians with hope for the future.

Status Quo Shake-Up

In the context of Egypt’s tortoise-paced domestic politics, then, the NDP conference was an earthquake. Slick television ads and posters around the country now claim the party is all about “new thinking,” the NDP’s new slogan. For most of its 24 years in existence, the party has been run by Agriculture Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Yousef Wali and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Al Shazly, who remained deputy secretary-general. At the September congress Shazly’s powers were cut back and Wali was “pushed upstairs” to a newly-created post of deputy president for internal affairs, with Sherif assuming his former position.

“The repercussions of Gamal Mubarak’s coup in the NDP appears the day after the conference, when Sherif took up his new post by moving to Wali’s office and moving out his stuff,” the opposition al-Arabi newspaper said. “Kamal Al Shazly’s authorities were cut back and his wide empire was trimmed down via creating a load of mini-secretariats within the party’s general secretariat, with responsibilities previously in Shazly’s hands parceled out to others, such as Zakariya Azmi, a big Gamal fan, who is now in charge of party finances.” Azmi, head of the presidential office, or diwan, is part of the tight ruling clique around Mubarak.

The state press is telling Egyptians that this mix of chucking out the old and ringing in the new is a stroke of genius. “These are the elements of solving the difficult equation, and nothing more than this could have happened at this stage—calm change whose undisputed hero is Gamal Mubarak,” wrote Mohamed Abdel-Moneim, editor of the state-owned weekly magazine Rose al-Yousef and a former Mubarak press spokesman. “Perhaps the first of his achievements was giving the big party the kiss of life. What a great beginning.”

For years Egyptians have viewed the NDP as corrupt and aloof. In the 2000 parliamentary elections it won its lowest number of seats since it was created by President Sadat in 1978 to promote his peace with Israel and pro-West policies. The party actually won less than 50 percent of the vote, but maintained its grip on parliament when independents joined with it en masse at parliament’s subsequent opening session. Opposition groups say the NDP rigs elections with police help to ensure huge majorities in parliament, then rubberstamps government policy.

Now, the general feeling in Egypt is that the writing is on the wall: Gamal is being molded as leader and sold to an initially doubting nation as the best man for the job. Since his NDP victory, Gamal has even appeared at a meeting of Arab ambassadors with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the sidelines of the Labor Party conference in Blackpool. Gamal is known to the U.S. as well as the British leadership, and that’s an important assurance of continuity Mubarak would want to convey to his Western allies.

Nevertheless, selling Gamal will remain a tricky question of political maneuvering. Egypt’s intelligentsia balk at the idea of becoming another “hereditary republic” like Syria, and open criticism of the possibility is seen by some as one of the reasons Egypt tried and jailed civil rights academic Saadeddin Ibrahim. “What I’ve heard is that it’s the people around Mubarak who have been pushing for him to have Gamal as his successor. He didn’t want to at first,” said one prominent political writer who is appalled at the idea of power passing from father to son.

Pressed by Western media on the issue, Mubarak has dismissed the suggestion that Gamal will be Egypt’s next president. Political watchers have heard it all before, however: many who now dislike him intensely remember Mubarak’s promise in the 1980s not to stand for more than two terms. He’s now on his fourth.

The question is, what will Mubarak’s next move be? According to one Western diplomat, Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, has been pushing for him to step down soon. Some bet on Sherif being made prime minister, which would back the idea that Gamal, his partner in running the NDP, is the stalking horse for the presidency. Mubarak could even bring Gamal into the cabinet—although that risks setting him up for the inevitable unpopularity that comes with ministerial posts and dirtying the halo the state media has carefully constructed around his head. While plans could go awry and it might not happen at all, barring a major PR blunder on Gamal’s part, or in the unlikely event that the intellectual community lobbies against a monarchical succession, it’s a fair bet that Gamal Mubarak will succeed his father as president of Egypt.

Andrew Hammond is a free-lance writer based in Cairo.