CAIRO: President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has ratified the amendments of the electoral constituencies law, necessary to hold Egypt’s long-awaited parliamentary elections, Youm7 reported Thursday.
According to the new amendments, Egypt will be divided into 205 electoral constituencies for individual candidates and four for the party lists.
The former parliamentary electoral laws were ruled unconstitutional in March by the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), on the grounds of disproportionate districting.
The draft election laws include legislation on electoral districts. The new law allocated 448 seats to individuals and 120 seats to lists. The previous law had allocated 420 seats to individuals and 120 through winner-takes-all lists with quotas for women, Christians and youth.
In April, the Cabinet announced that three new drafts were sent to the state council court to be approved.
On July 1, Egypt’s cabinet approved the anti-terrorism and parliament elections draft laws but Sisi ratified only the elections law since the anti-terrorism draft law faced a wave of criticism and journalists syndicate rejected it.
The parliament election is the final step in a political roadmap that the army had announced in July 2013.
Before the law was declared unconstitutional, the parliamentary elections were scheduled to take place over two phases, with the first taking place March 22-23 and the second phase running from April 26 –27.
Egypt has not had a parliament after its 2012 Muslim Brotherhood-dominated parliament was dissolved in 2013, months after the military-backed ouster of President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.