(Reuters) - Egyptian police battled thousands of protesters outside President
Mohamed Mursi's palace in Cairo on Tuesday, prompting the Islamist leader to
leave the building, two presidential sources said.
Police fired teargas at demonstrators angered by Mursi's drive to hold a
referendum on a new constitution on December 15. Some broke through police lines
around his palace and protested next to the perimeter wall.
Several thousand people had gathered nearby in what they dubbed "last
warning" protests against Mursi, who infuriated opponents with a November 22
decree that expanded his powers. "The people want the downfall of the regime,"
the crowd chanted.
"The president left the palace," a presidential source, who declined to be
named, told Reuters. A security source at the presidency also said the president
had left the building.
Mursi ignited a storm of unrest in his bid to prevent a judiciary still
packed with appointees of ousted predecessor Hosni Mubarak from derailing a
troubled political transition.
Riot police at the palace faced off against activists chanting "leave, leave"
and holding Egyptian flags with "no to the constitution" written on them.
Protesters had assembled near mosques in northern Cairo before marching towards
the palace.
"Our marches are against tyranny and the void constitutional decree and we
won't retract our position until our demands are met," said Hussein Abdel Ghany,
a spokesman for an opposition coalition of liberal, leftist and other disparate
factions.
Despite the latest protests, there has been only a limited response to
opposition calls for a mass campaign of civil disobedience in the Arab world's
most populous country and cultural hub, where many people yearn for a return to
stability.
A few hundred protesters gathered earlier near Mursi's house in a suburb east
of Cairo, chanting slogans against his decree and against the Muslim
Brotherhood, from which the president emerged to win a free election in June.
Police closed the road to stop them from coming any closer, a security official
said.
Opposition groups have accused Mursi of making a dictatorial power grab to
push through a constitution drafted by an assembly dominated by Islamists, with
a referendum planned for December 15.
Egypt's most widely read independent newspapers did not publish on Tuesday in
protest at Mursi's "dictatorship". Banks closed early to let staff go home
safely in case of trouble.
Abdelrahman Mansour in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the cradle of the anti-Mubarak
revolt, said: "The presidency believes the opposition is too weak and toothless.
Today is the day we show them the opposition is a force to be reckoned
with."
After winning post-Mubarak elections and pushing the Egyptian military out of
the political driving seat it held for decades, the Islamists sense their moment
has come to shape the future of Egypt, a longtime U.S. ally whose 1979 peace
treaty with Israel is a cornerstone of Washington's Middle East policy.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, who staged a huge pro-Mursi
demonstration on Saturday, are confident that enough members of the judiciary
will be available to oversee the mid-December referendum, despite calls by some
judges for a boycott.
Cairo stocks closed up 3.5 percent on Tuesday as investors took heart at what
they saw as prospects for a return to stability in a country whose divisions
have only widened since a mass uprising toppled Mubarak on February 11,
2011.
Mohamed Radwan, at Pharos Securities brokerage, said the Supreme Judicial
Council's agreement to supervise the referendum had generated confidence that
the vote would happen "despite all the noise and demonstrations that might take
place until then".
"NO WAY PERFECT"
Prime Minister Hisham Kandil, a technocrat with Islamist sympathies, said in
an interview with CNN: "We certainly hope that things will quiet down after the
referendum is completed."
He said the constitution was "in no way a perfect text" that everyone had
agreed to, but that a "majority consensus" favored moving forward with the
referendum in 11 days' time.
The Muslim Brotherhood, now tasting power via the ballot box for the first
time in eight decades of struggle, wants to safeguard its gains and appears
ready to override street protests by what it regards as an unrepresentative
minority.
It is also determined to stop the courts, which have already dissolved the
Islamist-led elected lower house of parliament, from further obstructing their
blueprint for change.
Mohamed ElBaradei, coordinator of an opposition National Salvation Front, has
said Mursi must rescind his decree, drop plans for the referendum and agree on a
new, more representative constituent assembly to draft a democratic
constitution.
In an opinion piece published in the Financial Times, he accused Mursi and
the Brotherhood of believing that "with a few strokes of a pen, they can slide
(Egypt) back into a coma".
ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who once headed the U.N. nuclear
watchdog, wrote: "If they continue to try, they risk an eruption into violence
and chaos that will destroy the fabric of Egyptian society."
Despite charges that they are anti-Islamist and politically motivated, judges
say they are following legal codes in their rulings. Experts say some political
changes rushed through in the past two years have been on shaky legal
ground.
A Western diplomat said the Islamists were counting on a popular desire for
restored normality and economic stability.
"All the messages from the Muslim Brotherhood are that a vote for the
constitution is one for stability and a vote against is one for uncertainty," he
said, adding that the cost of the strategy was a "breakdown in consensus
politics".
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