CAIRO - Despite howls of disappointment from the opposition, an amendment allowing for Egypt's first competitive presidential polls may have opened the door for much-delayed democratic reforms, analysts said Wednesday.
"The opposition wants to get real competition between the parties' candidates and independents and the amendment hardly allows for that," said political commentator Imad Gad.
"But reforms will be gradual and the amendment is a small step towards achieving democracy in Egypt," he added.
The revision of Article 76 was endorsed Tuesday by an overwhelming majority of the 454-seat lower house dominated by President Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).
The amendment is to be put to a popular referendum later this month.
Under the proposed changes, political parties can field candidates only five years after coming into existence and they should have a minimum of five percent of seats in both houses of parliament.
Egypt's secular and Islamist opposition elements complain that conditions for registration are so tight that only the ruling party will be able to field a candidate, undermining the whole point of the reform.
But Gad insisted that Mubarak, who proposed the amendment last February after coming under heightened domestic and international pressure for reforms, would not be able to backtrack.
"The NDP's monolithic rule is over. Reforming is no longer an issue though the speed of reforms is," he said.
"The sustained combination of local and American pressures may help the reform process and guarantee that we don't stop at cosmetic changes."
Washington hailed the election reform Tuesday although it refrained from commenting on complaints aired by the opposition.
"In principle it is a step towards democratization, but the devil is in the details," said another political analyst.
"Constitutional changes are extremely difficult to achieve and yesterday's amendment de facto bars independents from fielding a candidate," Dia Rashwan said.
"The machine has moved an inch but it surely needs to be pushed again and I'm not sure that protests will be enough" he added.
Analyst Walid Kazziha aired greater pessimism saying that pro-reform elements "have no constituency behind them."
"Democracy is not about legal changes, it's a process. The problem is that society as a whole is not set on a course of politicization," he said.
"Yesterday's amendment didn't change the crux of the matter which is how to have a democracy without democrats."
Opposition groups, occasionally joined by students, university teachers and judges, have launched a string a demonstrations in recent months asking for the 77-year-old Mubarak to engage in reforms and even to step down.
They also demand the lifting of emergency laws put in place after the assassination of Mubarak's predecessor, Anwar al-Sadat, 24 years ago.
Kefaya (Enough), a coalition group of Marxists, Nasserites, liberals and Islamic dissidents from the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been leading recent protests announced a campaign of civil disobedience in the wake of Tuesday's vote.
It also called for a boycott of this month's referendum and September's presidential election, charging that the reform was a "sham".
"The constitutional change did not open the door to reforms, it closed it," charged the group's leader.
"Free and fair elections cannot happen and our political future looks bleak," George Isaac told AFP.
Egypt's strongest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said it would urge it followers to vote against the amendment.
But the Islamist group's second-in-command Mohammed Habid underscored that "in our view, there was no amendment."
"This process has returned the country to square one. It will lead to more despair as people will lose all hope in political reform," he also told AFP.

05/11/2005 14:06 GMT