Muslim Brotherhood supports ElBaradei

 When Mohamed ElBaradei, nobel laureate and former head of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, swept back to Egypt in February talking of democratic reform and possibly running for president, he reinvigorated a stagnant political opposition.

A loose coalition of opposition parties and reform movements sprang up with Mr. ElBaradei as the figurehead and began gathering signatures for a seven-point petition calling for democratic reform in Egypt.

But when the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition group, threw its weight behind that movement in early July, suddenly the numbers ballooned, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. The coalition now claims to have more than 300,000 petition signatures, with more than two thirds of them gathered by the Brotherhood.

It’s an indication of the powerful force for change in Egypt that could emerge if the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s notoriously fractious secular opposition groups were able to create a united front that demands an alternative to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled with an iron fist for 29 years.

Though they have widely varying views on what Egyptian government and society should look like, the groups agree that democratic reform is needed. The challenge is going beyond a signature-gathering campaign to more tangible action.

“If you have an opposition that comes together around a specific reform proposition or issue, and can communicate the message that things can be different, it would present a formidable challenge to the regime,” said Nathan Brown, a professor and Middle East expert at George Washington University.

While they have agreed on the reform petition, the problem is “cooperating on some kind of plan of action, communicating it, and finding some kind of galvanizing way to keep it in the public eye,” he said.

Mr. Brown, like other Mideast analysts, does not expect the Brotherhood and Mr. ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) to rise to the occasion and mount a movement capable of challenging the government.

The price for political activism is high in Egypt, where the government has ruled for nearly three decades under an emergency law that allows it to arrest and detain people indefinitely without charge. It is regularly used against political activists, and the Brotherhood typically pays a higher price for activism than other movements.

And Egypt’s opposition rarely agrees. Calls in the coalition for boycotting the upcoming parliamentary elections has revealed a lack of consensus, though Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a senior leader of the Brotherhood, said the group would participate in a boycott if all of the opposition committed to it.

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