Court Dissolves Mubarak's Party

The Washington Post reports:

CAIRO — Former president Hosni Mubarak’s political party was ordered disbanded Saturday by an Egyptian court, the Associated Press reported, in a concession to protesters who have increasingly questioned whether the revolution that toppled Mubarak more than two months ago brought about major change.

The ruling was the capstone to an extraordinary week that also saw the detention and interrogation of Mubarak and his two sons, Gamal and Alaa, over their financial dealings and the killings of protesters in January and February. The trio’s detention had been another key demand of the tens of thousands of protesters who turned out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square earlier this month, outraged that the Mubarak family was apparently living under comfortable house arrest in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.

The National Democratic Party (NDP), which was founded in 1978 by Anwar Sadat, Mubarak’s predecessor, has dominated Egyptian political life for more than 30 years, and the burned-out shell of its headquarters still towers between the Nile and Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo.

Critics, including many of the protesters who led the movement to topple Mubarak, had said that the party has no place in a new Egypt.

Until the Supreme Administrative Court’s ruling on Saturday, the NDP and the Muslim Brotherhood had been the two most potent organized political forces in the country. The ruling also requires that the party’s assets should be liquidated and returned to the government, the Associated Press reported. It was unclear whether the organization’s intangible assets — its ability to get out the vote and to field candidates around the country — would survive under a new name.

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