Word: wafd
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Egypt's palace dictatorship died last fortnight with King Fuad I (TIME, May 11). Last week Egyptian politicians worked fast to take over the Government. As 16-year-old King Farouk I arrived from England to move into his new job, Egypt's overwhelmingly popular Wafd Party swept snap elections, as speechless as they were brief, for the Chamber of Deputies and Senate. Reason for haste was that King Farouk is two years short of his dynastic majority. The Constitution of 1923 provided that the envelope containing King Fuad's nominations for the Council of Regents...
...Wafd Parliament had the right to reject these names and it unanimously did so. It thereupon chose Prince Mohammed Ali for president of the Regency Council, as Fuad had planned, and two other men who would probably have been acceptable to the late King. They were his brother-in-law, Cherif Sabry Pasha, 41, athletic Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, and onetime Foreign Minister and Minister to Great Britain General Aziz Izzet Pasha. Not by accident was the Council loaded with foreign affairs experts, for Egypt's most important pending business is the negotiation of a new treaty with Britain...
Last week Egypt passed into the Wafd's power when Premier Aly Maher Pasha presented Prince Mohammed Ali with the resignations of his no-party Cabinet and the Premiership went to the Wafd leader, burly, big-voiced Mustafa El Nahas Pasha...
...Nahas Pasha is today the Wafd. He inherited it in 1927 from the late great Zaghlul Pasha who founded the party and picked El Nahas Pasha for his lieutenant. In Egypt, as elsewhere, lawyers supply most of the popular leaders and El Nahas Pasha is one of the ablest, most belligerent of Egypt's lawyers. A forceful speaker, he fired the fuse to last year's anti-British rioting, said: "We want to be Britain's ally, not her vassal...
Whether the Egyptian Parliament accepts or rejects the King's nomination depends largely on Wafd's interpretation of Prince Mohammed Ali's personality and prejudices. An impressive, beak-nosed, 61-year-old bachelor, Prince Mohammed Ali runs one of the world's biggest stud farms for Arabian horses, is the author of Breeding of Arabian Horses. A worldly, amiable and enigmatic man, he is sometimes tagged as pro-British. On the other hand, he has many friends among Wafd politicians...