On Tuesday the Egyptian parliament witnessed a rift between the parliamentary bloc of the Nation’s Future Party, which holds 316 seats out 596, and Mohamed Abdel-Alim Dawood, MP for al-Wafd Party. Ruction started during Dawood’s speech, in which he said, “It is impossible to speak about a national roundtable dialogue with those who entered the parliament with ‘boxes’,” referring to what is known about the Nation’s Future Party, that it presents boxes of supplies to voters on condition of voting for its candidates. “They have corrupted political life in Egypt,” Dawood added. Nation’s Future MPs interrupted Dawood’s speech, denouncing his statements and preventing him from going on, so he replied, “he that commits a fault thinks everyone speaks of it.”

Hanafy Gebaly, speaker of the parliament who was himself nominated by Nation’s Future, intervened in favour of the Nation’s Future parliamentary bloc and kicked Dawood off referring him to the secretary of the parliament to investigate his statements. It is well known that the Nation’s Future is the party established by direct orders of al-Sisi after the 3 July coup. It receives support from the security bodies, which played the main role in forging the parliament. This reality led a leader in the party to say in a public event before the parliamentary elections that the party is government-sponsored and is the ancestor of the Democratic National Party of Mubarak’s time.

Dawood’s statements came within his speech on the crisis of Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. He attacked the Egyptian media for its poor coverage of the negotiations between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia in Washington in early in 2020, saying that the Ethiopian media outperformed the Egyptian one. In addition, Dawood accused corruption in Mubarak’s regime of being the real generator of terrorism saying, “corruption is the origin of terrorism.”