Egypt to elect new president by November

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Egypt is to elect a new president by November to replace veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak who was ousted last month after 18 days of mass protests, the transitional military government said on Wednesday.

The polls will be organised 'within a month or two' of a parliamentary poll already timetabled for September, spokesman General Mamduh Shahin told reporters.

He made the announcement as he unveiled an amended constitution incorporating changes endorsed in a referendum earlier this month which marked the first popular vote since Mubarak's overthrow.

Shahin also confirmed that a ban on religious parties inherited from the Mubarak-era constitution would remain in force.

That clause has been the legal basis for the interdiction of the country's most influential political movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, for the past half-century.

The military council stepped in to fill the political vacuum in Egypt when Mubarak quit on February 11 after three decades of autocratic rule.

Shahin already announced that a state of emergency in force almost continuously for the past 50 years would be lifted before the September parliamentary election.

The emergency was imposed after the 1981 assassination of Mubarak's predecessor Anwar Sadat by Islamist gunmen at a military parade and was never lifted.

Human rights groups have consistently denounced the emergency which gives police wide powers of arrest, suspends constitutional rights and curbs non-governmental political activity.

"Parliamentary and presidential elections will not be held under the state of emergency," Shahin said on Monday.

More than 14 million Egyptians, or 77 percent of those who voted in the March 19 referendum, approved the military's plans for a swift return to civilian life, in the first test of democracy since the fall of Mubarak.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition movement in the country and officially banned in the Mubarak era, used its new found freedom, huge influence and organisational skills, to campaign for a "yes" vote.

But youth groups that spearheaded the protests which forced Mubarak to resign had called for a "no" vote, aruging that the timetable set by the military was too tight for them to organise at grass roots level, that the Muslim Brotherhood would benefit and that the changes to the Mubarak-era constitution were too limited.

The Brotherhood, and other more fundamentalist religious movements, presented the "yes" vote as a religious duty, although many at polling stations said they voted "yes" for the sake of "stability" rather than religious inclinations.

Egypt held its last parliamentary election in November-December, and this was to be followed by presidential polls in September.

Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party won 80 percent of seats in the last elections, which were criticised for widespread fraud and violence during the campaign and the vote itself.

That parliament was quickly dissolved after Mubarak's ouster.

The Brotherhood had said days before the referendum that it had reached an agreement in principle to run a joint list with other parties in the next parliamentary election.

The heads of the Islamist group and some smaller secular parties agreed to run a united list in the election, Khairat al-Shater, one of the Brotherhood's deputies, told AFP.

The changes approved in the March 19 referendum are by themselves uncontroversial, although critics argued they did not go far enough in overhauling the Mubarak-era charter.

The president will serve a maximum of two four-year terms and will no longer have the power to refer civilians to the military courts.

The state of emergency which has governed Egyptian life for decades will be able to be imposed for just six months without endorsement in a popular referendum.