Interview| Ahmed Tantawy navigating the future amid years of political deprivation

Around 7 p.m. yesterday, opposition leader and former MP Ahmed Tantawy arrived at his family’s home in Qaleen, a town in Egypt’s Kafr El-Sheikh governorate, transported by a police convoy whose route had been cloaked in secrecy all day, beginning with his departure from the 10th of Ramadan Prison, where he had spent one year and one day.

That secrecy kept his wife, Rasha Qandeel, waiting outside a security facility in Cairo, and his brother searching for him between the 10th of Ramadan prison and the Matareya police station. Meanwhile, his legal team was trying to verify if his release certificate was issued by the Supreme State Security Prosecution.

When Al Manassa arrived at the family’s three-story house in Qaleen, it was almost midnight. Still, everyone was awake—Tantawy, surrounded by children of the family, his father, siblings, and fellow members of the Hope Current party. Yet his exhaustion, plainly visible, far exceeded what one might expect after a 143-kilometer journey from prison to home.

“The main goal behind hiding my whereabouts for about 10 hours prior to my release,” Tantawy said, “was to guarantee my supporters, relatives, or anyone else remain unaware where I was or what route I was taking—just to prevent any celebrations or gatherings. They succeeded.”

In this interview, Tantawy shares with Al Manassa his reflections on spending “a year and a day” behind bars—a sentence handed down after his presidential campaign in late 2023 sparked widespread attention, even though he was ultimately barred from running due to his campaign’s failure to gather the required public endorsements amid “security crackdowns” on citizens trying to support him.

Tantawy also weighs in on the government’s claims of prison reform and outlines his political future, now shaped by a criminal conviction that bars him from exercising his political rights.

Suffering, fracture, and a near-death episode

Tantawy served his entire sentence in the general population ward of the 10th of Ramadan Prison—a decision he described as “arbitrary,” noting that prison authorities repeatedly refused to transfer him to the political prisoners’ section, citing concerns for his safety. Still, he declined to elaborate on the impact this had on him. “I broke bread with fellow inmates,” he said, “so I won’t dwell on the toll this had on me.”

He revealed that he launched three short hunger and thirst strikes—each lasting for one day—to improve his prison conditions. These brief protests led to partial concessions through negotiation.

One strike was sparked by the prison’s refusal to allow him any access to outside news. Requests to receive newspapers or add news channels to the facility’s internal TV network—which showed only rudimentary movie channels—were denied. He wasn’t even allowed to buy a radio from the prison commissary, a right afforded to other inmates. Eventually, he managed to “wrestle” permission to bring in a radio.

Still, given the desert surrounding the prison and his cell being on the ground floor, reception was poor. “I only had access to official statements and broadcasts like Nile News,” he said, contrasting it with older prisons located in or near urban centers with stronger signal coverage.

Before that, he had staged a hunger strike in protest of extended intake procedures, the denial of home-cooked food deliveries, and the authorities’ refusal to notify his family of his prison location. Another protest followed, demanding access to group exercise sessions rather than solitary ones—a right he wasn’t granted until five and a half months later.

Raising his right hand, visibly swollen at the wrist, Tantawy recounted suffering a fracture during prison yard time that required surgery. “I fell while exercising. They performed surgery and inserted wires into my hand,” he said. “But they never followed up with adequate physical therapy, and now I can’t move my hand normally.”

He also recounted a life-threatening food poisoning incident during Eid al-Adha, just weeks after his arrest. “The prison basically shuts down during official holidays,” he said. “Emergencies are ignored. That one nearly killed me.”

“I wasn’t allowed to continue my doctoral thesis during my sentence,” he added. After months of pressure, he was finally allowed to receive books—but only those unrelated to law, politics, prison regulations, the constitution, or human rights. “Basically, none of the books they knew I’d actually study.”

As he described his experience, Tantawy repeatedly returned to the plight of fellow inmates, questioning whether the new “modern prisons” offer genuine rehabilitation. “They may have better ventilation and more comfortable beds, but compared to the older facilities, do they really help with reform and reintegration?”

Tantawy painted a bleak picture of the daily routine behind bars. "You’re in your cell almost the entire day," he said. "If you're lucky, you might get an hour outside. But even that is often skipped—especially on Fridays or public holidays like Eid."

He made it clear that the fault doesn't lie with the guards or the wardens. "The problem is systemic," he explained. "These new prisons may look modern on the outside, but inside, there's no rehabilitation—no evaluations, no personalized programs, no genuine effort to reintegrate prisoners back into society. You’re just left to endure time, not to emerge changed by it."

Solidarity and human rights

Tantawy emphasized that his main motive for speaking with Al Manassa only hours after his release was “to push for change in these areas.” He is now drafting a proposal for a points-based system to assess prisoner behavior and incentivize conditional release after half or two-thirds of a sentence, saying, “I want to share my experience so that people inside might find something useful in it when dealing with prison administrations.”

He also spoke about the ongoing detention of Yehia Hussein Abdel Hadi, a founding member of the Civil Democratic Movement, who has suffered multiple heart attacks in detention. “His experience demolishes the narrative of prison reform and human rights progress,” Tantawy said. “This is a man in his seventies, constantly shuttling between prison and hospital, even though he’s just a pretrial detainee.”

Abdel Hadi was re-arrested in August 2024 and charged with the usual: joining a terrorist group, spreading false news, and inciting a terrorist act—two years after his release under a 2022 presidential pardon. That release had come during the launch of the national dialogue initiative.

Tantawy questions why the state continues to detain Abdel Hadi without trial. “You had no problem trying him in another case without detaining him for months, he showed up daily in court with his medication bag, fully prepared to receive a verdict,” he said, emphasizing that Abdel Hadi is not a flight risk. “What justifies jailing a man over 70 years old, with his stature and his place at the heart of the Civil Democratic Movement, in pretrial detention?”

Tantawy also expressed solidarity with Laila Soueif, who recently resumed a full hunger strike demanding the release of her son, Alaa Abdel Fattah. The activist and software developer remains imprisoned despite completing his sentence in September 2024.

While sitting with us for this interview, Tantawy saw recent photos of Soueif for the first time. Visibly shaken by her frail appearance, he said, “If we can’t feel compassion for a mother like her, making a simple demand after everything her son has endured—then where is our humanity? What do we make of the National Strategy for Human Rights?”

A political future without political rights

Legally, Tantawy’s conviction continues to bar him from exercising his political rights for five years, per Egypt’s political rights law. The court deemed his offense—printing and distributing election-related documents without authorization—as an electoral violation.

In addition to the prison sentence, Tantawy is banned from running in parliamentary elections for five years. He continues to reject the court’s characterization of his actions, insisting that the forms were simply part of the candidacy paperwork.

When asked whether he would run again, Tantawy said the decision lies with his political partners. “Political work is collective. Consultation comes first,” he stressed that members of the Hope Current “have paid a heavy price.”

Still, he added, “I’ve said before—I don’t want to be at the forefront. I wouldn’t have run in the next parliamentary elections anyways. My role now is to support others. I want to be the bridge they cross.”

He elaborated “If the Civil Democratic Movement decides to field candidates, I’ll be happy to devote myself entirely to supporting them—not just standing beside them, but behind them, in their campaigns, in their constituencies, rallying people to vote for them.”

For Tantawy, this is what political success looks like. “Instead of fighting over one seat,” he said, “let’s compete for dozens.”

The Civil Democratic Movement has yet to decide whether it will participate in the upcoming elections—scheduled for August for the Senate and November for the House of Reps—amid ongoing disputes. Pro-government MPs insist the elections be held under a system combining single-member districts with a winner-takes-all party list, while ignoring the movement’s calls for splitting list seats between proportional and absolute lists.

https://youtu.be/CxnwEJQO9Gc?si=uRCSFMp-XtWkw_tN

Presidential ambitions?

On the question of a future presidential bid, Tantawy said, “Let’s talk about the present. When the time comes in 2030, we’ll see what the political field looks like then.”

He reiterated that his project is not centered around one person. “Why don’t people believe me when I say, as I did at the start of my last campaign, that there will come a day when someone with more experience will take the lead—and that I’ll be the one supporting them?”

He expressed confidence that the legal and political circumstances preventing him from running could eventually change. “Couple of years back, any Egyptian who cared about public life knew we could have run a serious, honorable campaign,” he said. “That was the real victory—not because the candidate was Ahmed Tantawy. That wasn’t the important part.”

He repeated a sentiment from his 2023 campaign “I personally know dozens of Egyptians more qualified than me to take on this responsibility—just not the person who was running against me.”

It was close to 3 a.m. when Tantawy stood at the threshold of his family’s home, the cool night air heavy with the quiet hum of a long-awaited reunion. He shook our hands, eyes tired but steady, then turned to rejoin the loved ones who had waited a year and a day to have him back. All the while, his brother’s phone buzzed nonstop with messages and calls, each vibration a pulse of support from across the country.

Though stripped—for now—of his political rights, Tantawy remains, for many, a living emblem of hope and persistence in the face of repression.