Protests across Egypt continue despite President Morsi having withdrawn decrees giving him vast powers. The opposition continues to fight for a different constitution, having lost trust after Muslim Brotherhood violence.The majority of Egypt’s opposition is rejecting the Saturday referendum on the country’s new constitution. On the part of the larger opposition parties, it seems that only the party of moderately religious Abdel Moneim Abul Fotuh is in favor of participating in the referendum – yet even Fotuh rejects the constitution. Meanwhile, the fact that President Mohamed Morsi has annulled a decree which would have giving him huge powers was not enough to keep opposition activists off the streets.”We are afraid that the basic rights of people will be limited and will not be enshrined in our constitution,” said Abdul Bar Zahran, founding member and official for the Free Egyptians Party, one of the largest opposition groups in the country. He promoted continuation of the protest against the president and against the planned referendum: “We call for countrywide protests on all squares of Egypt for this Tuesday.”
For Zahran, the withdrawal of the president’s special rights is merely another political maneuver by the Muslim Brotherhood. From the very beginning, he believes, it was Morsi’s goal to push through with the constitution against the will of the opposition. Morsi had simply used the decree to stop the constitutional assembly from being dissolved. Now, the time left is too short to dissolve the assembly, so the draft constitution has been saved as long as it is accepted in the referendum.The opposition is angered not only by the draft constitution, but also by the way it had been drawn up, explained Elijah Zarwan, an expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations in Cairo. “Let’s assume that Morsi will pass five decrees that get the opposition all worked up. Then he withdraws one of them, and already he appears as someone willing to compromise, and then it’s the opposition that’ll look stubborn,” Zarwan said.
