Q
What will your top three priorities be if you are elected president?
A
The first priority is to establish a state of law, so equality and justice above everything. The second is developing the educational system, followed by economic reforms and then revisiting our foreign relations with Arab, Muslim and African countries. But this doesn’t mean that we should work on one of those fronts and when we’re done move on to the next; these should all happen in parallel.
Q
So which countries do you think we should strengthen our relations with?
A
We should strengthen our relations with countries all over the world. We are an ancient country that had relationships with the whole world, but our foreign relations were flawed in the past years as a result of Hosni Mubarak’s mishandling. So we will work on restructuring our foreign relations with the Islamic world, Arabs, Africans and [the] international [community].
Q
And our relations with Iran? Do you think we should re-establish diplomatic ties?
A
We are 30 years behind on reestablishing Islamic ties with Iran: We should have never severed our ties with them to begin with. We should reestablish our ties with Iran and our economic relations with them as well. We also need to expand our economic relations with Turkey because this is very important and part of a bigger vision for Cairo to become a trade and economic hub.
Q
Are there aspects of our relations with the United States or Israel that you would like to see changed if you become president?
A
Current relations are based on achieving Israel’s and the US’ interests, not Egypt’s. Our relations should be based on mutual benefit for each country to achieve its interests.
Q
So will you be maintaining our relations with the US and Israel?
A
I am not for it. I am just speaking of existing relationships with those countries. But these ties shouldn’t be severed anyway, though we should work on getting back the rights violated as a result of those relations, like the natural gas deal. So the relations should be based on us achieving what is in our interests, just as much as the US and Israel do.
Associated Press
Q
What is your plan to tackle the issue of slums and building violations?
A
You either eliminate the slum area altogether and relocate people, or transform the slum area that has no services or organization into an organized environment. This latter method has been used in several countries, including Brazil and South Africa, so we should study both methods and work with both. Some slum areas will have to be completely removed, while others would undergo a thorough planning and organizing.
Q
But so far, our low-income housing projects haven’t been very successful . . .
A
The money was stolen, simply. There was a lot of corruption in the previous regime and this is one of our priorities: to eliminate corruption and oppression so that the money dedicated to those projects would actually go toward the development and not be stolen.
