Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Tuesday said that he would not stand for re-election in September. Speaking on state TV, Mubarak promised constitutional reform, but said he wanted to stay until the end of his current presidential term.
Earlier it was reported that American president Obama urged his Egyptian counterpart that he should not run for another term in elections in the fall, according to American diplomats in Cairo and Washington. The message was conveyed to Mubarak by Frank G. Wisner, a former diplomat with deep ties to Egypt, these officials said, according to the NY Times.
Reinforcing the administration’s message to the Egyptian leader was an Op-ed article in The New York Times on Tuesday by Sen. John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he advised Mubarak to bow out gracefully “to make way for a new political structure.”
