A story by Jonathan Wright of Reuters…
Wedding of Mubarak’s son seen as part of succession
CAIRO, April 25 – Gamal Mubarak, the 43-year-old son of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, might as well have been on the campaign trail through the provinces this week. Only he isn’t a formal candidate for any elected office.
In the Nileside town of Minya, as a senior ruling party official, he took the chair at public meetings, chatted with senior citizens, kissed a donated Koran, accepted bouquets of flowers and inspected handicrafts at a girls’ school.
At the end of this week he takes another step which could help him qualify for the highest office in the land — the presidency his father has held for more than a quarter century.
In a family ceremony in Cairo on Saturday Mubarak will marry Khadiga el-Gammal, the blonde daughter of wealthy contractor Mahmoud el-Gammal and a woman more than 20 years his junior.
Analysts say Egyptians would find it hard to accept an unmarried head of state. They note that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a bachelor when he succeeded his father Hafez in 2000, found himself a bride less than six months after taking office.
“Things are moving perfectly towards their target,” said Gameela Ismail, wife of imprisoned opposition politician Ayman Nour, who challenged Hosni Mubarak for the presidency in 2005.
“The wedding is the final part before the curtain comes down and Gamal becomes the president,” she told Reuters.
Khadiga, who has mostly kept out of the public eye so far, fits the “first lady” profile set by her future mother-in-law Suzanne and by Suzanne’s predecessor, Jihan el-Sadat.
Suzanne Mubarak and Jihan, the widow of assassinated President Anwar Sadat, cultivated the image of modern cosmopolitan women. Unlike more than 80 percent of Egyptian women, they leave their hair uncovered in public.
Like Suzanne and Jihan, Khadiga speaks fluent English. She is a graduate of the American University in Cairo, where Gamal Mubarak also studied in the 1980s.
Her most extensive appearance in public was at a World Economic Forum event in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last year, when she sat between Gamal and Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif and mingled with international business people.
FAMILIAR FACE
President Mubarak and his son have denied they have any presidential plans for Gamal, a former investment banker who is assistant secretary-general and head of the policies committee in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).
But analysts and the opposition say there is no other plausible explanation for his political activities over the past five years and his gradual emergence on the public scene.
“The advantage Gamal has gained from the president is not only something past and present. He is also expecting a future benefit through being the next president,” the opposition newspaper al-Dostor said on Wednesday.
The state media once covered Gamal’s political activities only sporadically and discretely. They now show his photograph as often as they show those of many ministers, making him a familiar face to an increasing number of Egyptians.
The question now is not whether he is the chosen successor but how the Mubarak family and the ruling party will organize a smooth succession, the analysts say.
His only superior in the ruling party is aging apparatchik and secretary-general Safwat el-Sharif, who has been in government service without a break since the 1960s and is not considered a serious contender to succeed Mubarak.
Mubarak, who celebrates his 79th birthday on May 4, the same day as the public wedding party in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, won a fifth six-year term in presidential elections in September 2005 and has never appointed a vice president.
If he does not last till his current term expires in 2010, the prime minister would take over temporarily but the choice of a successor would fall to the ruling party, whose candidate would face a minimal challenge from the small opposition parties able to field presidential candidates.
Under constitutional amendments passed in 2005 and this year, the country’s largest opposition force, the Muslim Brotherhood, would not be able to compete because the government refuses to let it form a political party.