Eight months have passed since the 2006 parliamentary elections in which independent candidates backed by the banned-but-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood captured 88 of the 454 seats in the People’s Assembly, making it the largest opposition bloc in the house.

But while the election results might have crowned Al-Ikhwan as the most influential group in the PA after the governing National Democratic Party (NDP), they still lack the numbers to pass or repeal laws. The Brotherhood’s role in the legislative process remains limited in the face of the NDP’s absolute majority.

Instead of judging the bloc on legislative victories, analysts say it’s more important to ask whether the Brotherhood, long accused of being a one-trick party whose solution to every policy debate was simply to bellow “Islam is the solution,” now understands that it will need more than party discipline to become a real alternative to the NDP or the secular opposition.

“We know that the 88 [seats] won’t change the course of the Parliament, but it might influence the decisions taken in it,” counters Mohamed Habib, deputy supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, who reluctantly admits that “the NDP has an inconvenient majority, therefore any decision issued [by the government] will be approved.”

On the first count — discipline — the group has proven itself formidable: Although Ikhwanites hold just under 20 percent of all seats in the house, during the past legislative session they occasionally made up the majority of those present in the house.

“Because the [NDP members] are regularly absent, the Muslim Brotherhood are the majority in many sessions,” says Habib, who claimed that PA Speaker Fathi Sorour once delayed a vote on a crucial bill because Brotherhood-backed independents outnumbered their NDP colleagues.

While that’s not likely — a session with that makeup would lack quorum for a meeting — Diaa Rashwan, director of comparative politics at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and an internationally recognized expert on Islamist movements, says it did happen at the committee level. Rashwan says the Industry and Energy Committee once voted against a government proposal, forcing the Parliament to set aside the vote ahead of a second committee meeting the next day — a vote at which the NDP made certain all of its members were present.

“The Brothers deliberately attend all the parliamentary sessions because they know that most of the NDP members are not going to [be there],” says Rashwan.

“What we suffer from, along with the Egyptian citizens, is the fact that you have the NDP bloc that the government keeps on moving to vote to their liking,” says Husain M. Ebrahim, deputy chairman of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary caucus. “The government [pushes] the NDP members to vote in favor of a law, regardless to whether or not the NDP members understand this law.”

Critics counter that while it might not be the ideal way to run a democracy, it’s little different from the way things commonly work in Western democracies — and the Brothers themselves take a similar approach to enforcing party discipline.

Over the course of the 2005-06 legislative season, the Brotherhood presented its own vision of constitutional amendments to the Parliament, but was unable to get a bill on the agenda for a vote. “We suffer from imbalance between the executive authorities and the other two — legislative and judiciary,” claims Ebrahim.

Brotherhood-backed MPs were hoping to introduce a draft law that would give the judiciary more authority and independence, but were cut off at the pass when the NDP majority and non-Ikhwan independents passed the government’s Judicial Reform Act on June 26, 2006.

Down but certainly not out, the Brotherhood next focused on Penal Code reform. “There are many articles in the Penal Code that we want to amend because we think that the priority now should be for civil freedom,” says Ebrahim.

On July 10, 2006, the PA amended articles in the Penal Code that relate to libel and other “publishing offenses.” Although the amendments eliminated jail sentences for many offenses related to libel, they upped the fines judges can impose and created the new offense of “publishing false information about the finances of public officials.” In some cases, the amendments still allow the presiding judge to sentence the offending journalist to jail if he sees fit.

Ebrahim claims Al-Ikhwan deserves credit for the amendments: “The Muslim Brotherhood and the rest of the opposition in Parliament are one of the main reasons for abolishing the decrees calling for journalists’ arrest,” he says. “It’s true that the journalists and their syndicate played a very big role, but we adopted their demands. This wasn’t only the journalists’ demand but it was also the public’s demand because the press matters to [everyone].”

Habib says the Brothers’ support for the Penal Code amendments are part of its bid to promote reform “in all areas, including Egyptian citizen’s problems with unemployment, housing, transportation and inflation.”

Nevertheless, Habib, like most senior Brotherhood officials, stops short of outlining a comprehensive legislative program that might remedy those ailments.

It’s not just legislation the Brothers are unhappy with, but also the pattern of conduct within the Assembly itself.

“For example, we succeeded in amending an article that gives limited privileges to [foreign] drivers, but we prevented Israeli drivers from benefiting from it. And the Parliament approved,” says Ebrahim. The PA duly held a second vote to give Israeli drivers the same privileges, he complains. The vote took place just two days after a session devoted entirely to discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It’s parliamentary schizophrenia,” rails the caucus deputy chairman. “One day they are cursing Israel, and the next they are giving it privileges!”

Still, Ebrahim says the Brothers have taken strong steps in the right direction.

“I can’t claim we have accomplished all our aims in Parliament, but this is just the beginning,” he notes. “The laws [that the government proposes now] are passed with great debate; before they were effortlessly passed. Take the Emergency Law: True, the government passed the Emergency Law, but it [only] got pushed through with a great debate.”

During the vote to renew the Emergency Law, the opposition bloc, including the Brotherhood, turned up at the session wearing black armbands declaring “No to the Emergency Law.” Almost 120 MPs, including all 88 Ikhwanites, voted against renewing the laws, which critics say curb civil liberties and cede too much power to the executive branch of government.

In the previous parliaments, almost 95 percent of deputies voted for the Emergency Law. President Hosni Mubarak made the replacement of the Emergency Laws with a permanent anti-terror act one of the cornerstones of his 2005 re-election campaign.

“This parliament is the best [by all standards, given] its heated discussions and its ability to regain a part of the people’s trust,” Habib asserts. “It is possibly the best parliament in recent decades.”

Although Rashwan says this Parliament doesn’t differ much from the 1987 parliament, which included 110 members from the opposition, he admits the Brotherhood’s performance has had a positive impact on the Assembly.

“Unlike what people thought, the Muslim Brotherhood [was concerned] about all sorts of issues facing Egypt, including amending the Penal Code and monitoring the privatization process,” says Rashwan.

Rashwan says the Brotherhood will only be able to start amending laws once they win at least a third of all seats in Parliament. Advancing a parliamentary platform attractive to both the secular opposition and conservative NDP deputies would help, too.

“We had hoped that the [secular] opposition would gain more seats [in the last parliamentary elections],” says Habib. His colleague Ebrahim adds that the Brotherhood has already “cooperated on many domestic issues” with the handful of deputies from other opposition parties in the PA.

Despite the difficulties, Al-Ikhwan is determined to put the wheels of change in motion when the People’s Assembly reconvenes in November.

“We have two aims: One is to fight corruption, and that is facilitated by the oversight tools we have as parliamentarians,” says Ebrahim, falling back on one of the group’s two favorite subjects. The other, of course, is human rights: “We have adopted a national project to protect civilians from appearing in military courts by amending many human rights articles,” Ebrahim notes. “This is at the top of our agenda for the next session.”

With the NDP slated to advance a series of Mubarak’s promised constitutional amendments in the next session, expect more fireworks come November. et