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Egypt's a failed state: ElBaradei

Arab World Materials 29 December 2010 11:19 (UTC +04:00)

Major Egyptian opposition leader and former UN nuclear regulatory chief Mohamed ElBaradei had undermined the country's ruling system as a 'failed state.'

"You need to get outside the system and understand that this is not a political system," UPI quoted ElBaradei as saying on Tuesday, Press TV reported.

"This is a system that has failed. Egypt has become one of the 60 failed states," he went on to say.

Earlier this month, the results of Egypt's second round of general elections gave a predictably huge win for the ruling party amid widespread reports of voter intimidation and fraud.

Led by Egyptian President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, the National Democratic Party swept nearly 80 percent of the 508 seats.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest opposition group, which won one-fifth of the parliamentary seats in the 2005 elections, though, did not manage to get any of its 130 candidates into the parliament.

Human rights groups have condemned the Egyptian government for cracking down on opposition candidates and their supporters.

In late October, ElBaradei said Cairo would not be able to retain its increasingly "authoritarian" rule.

"The more unpopular this regime becomes, the more it realizes how much it is hated, the most authoritarian it becomes," he was quoted as saying in an October 30 interview with Austrian daily Kurier.

"That's untenable in the long term, change will come," he concluded.

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