Coded messages

In the next few days President Hosni Mubarak is scheduled to meet with the Council of Governors. He will then embark on a sequence of ministerial meetings that might include one with the full cabinet immediately following the holidays that start in Egypt on 10 September.

The objective, according to official statements, is to follow up on the meeting between the president and the cabinet held earlier this week during which Mubarak took ministers to task for a decline in public services and urged them to up their game ahead of legislative elections.

"The president called on the government to act promptly to resolve problems and to attend to the concerns of citizens," said Presidential Spokesman Suleiman Awad following Saturday's meeting. "Clear and specific directives," he added, had been issued by the president to improve the quality of public services and upgrade development "with an eye on the requirements of social justice".

Awad also said infrastructure improvements had been a key issue on the meeting's agenda with an extra LE58 billion allocated "over the next three years" to upgrade existing projects.

Overall, Awad stressed, the meeting addressed "the nation's present and future priorities... [including] the need for the government to prepare for honest and transparent legislative elections and to fully implement the [political and development commitments] Mubarak undertook while running for the presidential elections [in 2005]" ahead of next year's presidential elections.

The political signals emanating from the meeting and subsequent statements, as well as from the announcement of future follow-up executive meetings, is that Mubarak is not in favour of an immediate cabinet reshuffle and is planning to stand in next year's presidential elections, says Hassan Abu Taleb, a senior political analyst and commentator at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

"It is clear that Mubarak is giving his cabinet a final warning in the face of widespread public dismay over its performance, especially when it comes to public services," argues Abu Taleb. "These might be Mubarak's last directives to the cabinet which could be reshuffled in the wake of the legislative elections should it fail to meet the expectations of the president and of public opinion in the coming weeks."

Abu Taleb's assessment is shared by presidential and cabinet sources who suggest that Saturday's meeting ended with a tacit understanding that the government will remain at least until parliamentary elections.

Within the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) -- or at least those quarters calling for a cabinet reshuffle ahead of People's Assembly elections in order to spare NDP candidates the scorn of a pubic infuriated by the poor performance of the government -- disappointment has been expressed over the political signals sent out by the meeting.

"While nobody can predict what the president will do up to the eve of the legislative elections it now seems that a reshuffle is unlikely," said one NDP source who asked for his name to be withheld. "This government has failed to express the political vision of the party and we thought that our candidates would have had a better chance if a reshuffle had come before the elections though this clearly was not the wish of the president."

What Mubarak wants, says Abu Taleb, is to give his ministers "the chance to implement some mega projects that they have started" rather than sack because of public anger over "a drop in performance".

The chances are, argues Abu Taleb, that Mubarak will have to reshuffle the government after the elections. "There will be a new parliament, a new composition to the opposition, and it will be of interest to the regime to introduce a new government," he says.

How extensive that reshuffle will be is a matter of debate. While some speak confidently of a new prime minister and some, if not all, of the key ministers who report directly to the president, others suggest that any change will be limited and that the prime minister and economic portfolio ministers will keep their posts while ministers responsible for public services are replaced.

"This cabinet was entrusted by the president to meet the commitments he made upon taking a new term of office in 2005 and despite public dissatisfaction over services the president himself is satisfied with its overall economic performance and trusts the neutrality and wisdom of his prime minister," said one official source on condition of anonymity.

Yet it is an open secret that many in the NDP's top echelons -- especially those close to Mubarak's influential son Gamal, the party's assistant secretary-general and head of its Policies Committee, are lobbying for Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif to be replaced by either Trade and Industry Minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid or Housing and Infrastructure Minister Ahmed El-Maghrabi.

For Abu Taleb it is too early to speculate. If the government improves its overall performance, he says, then it would not be untypical of the president to keep any major reshuffle until after the presidential elections that "he seems set to contest on behalf of the NDP".

"It really makes no difference if this government stays on or if a new government comes in. The NDP's policies are tailored to serve the interests of the rich and this government, or a replacement, will continue to implement them," says Ali, a Cairo taxi driver.

According to Ali, the president "needs to control the influence of businessmen over the government and to make sure that the needs of the poor are really attended to".

While there is no real debate over the direction of economic policy within either the NDP or the government -- commitment to further liberalisation has been repeatedly renewed by state officials, including the president himself -- there are differences over the pace of liberalisation, most notably between the NDP's old guard and the group of businessmen who would prefer Gamal and not Hosni Mubarak to be the party's candidate in the next presidential elections.

According to leading opposition figure and political science professor Hassan Nafaa, a cabinet reshuffle would only be significant if Mubarak decided to replace "technocrats that basically implement [Policies Committee] directives with political figures capable of altering the direction in which the country is heading".

"Short of this it will be difficult to resell the NDP's policies to the public even if they are repackaged by a new set of technocrats."

"So far," says Nafaa, "there are no indications that Mubarak is planning to make such a change".

The issue is not really about who the next prime minister will be but about the next president, says Abu Taleb. "And I think that the next president will be Hosni Mubarak, who is obviously sensitive to mainstream citizens and to the delicate equilibrium of Egyptian society."