Anti-Morsi coalition at odds

CAIRO - Divisions opened Saturday in the mixed coalition of Egyptian activists and politicians who banded together against their country's Islamist government last week, with a dispute over who would become the interim prime minister showing sharp disagreements about the proper scope of religion in the country's politics.

Egyptian state media reported - and later rolled back the announcement - that Mohamed ElBaradei, a former chief of the U.N. nuclear agency, had been appointed interim prime minister. The reversal came after Islamists who joined in the coalition against ousted president Mohammed Morsi threatened to withdraw their support if ElBaradei were installed.

"Indications are directed at a certain name, but talks are still ongoing," said Ahmed el-Moslemany, a spokesman for the interim president, Adly Mansour, speaking late Saturday at a news conference that had been billed as an announcement of a new prime minister.

The unusual back-and-forth suggested that ElBaradei, a divisive figure in Egypt who is seen as a staunch secularist by groups who want a greater role for religion in politics, may have proved too controversial a choice. A top aide to ElBaradei had also portrayed the appointment as a done deal on Saturday.

But as reports of ElBaradei's selection filtered out, leaders of the ultraconservative Salafist Nour party threatened to withdraw from the broad coalition of groups backing a path toward elections.

"The nomination of ElBaradei violates the road map that the political and national powers had agreed on with General Abdel Fatah al-Sissi," Ahmed Khalil, the Nour party's deputy leader, told the state-run al-Ahram newspaper.

Many Islamists view ElBaradei as a leader who is uninterested in giving them a say in Egypt's affairs. He "in a way is kind of the ultimate liberal," said Shadi Hamid, an Egypt expert at the Brookings Doha Center. "He has a very antagonistic relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is why it doesn't bode well for Brotherhood reintegration" if he were to come to power.

Just as the democratically elected Morsi experienced a remarkable fall from grace last week, ElBaradei's unelected rise to the position of prime minister would have marked a remarkable turnaround for a politician who has struggled to find popular support outside Egypt's urban, educated classes, in a country where roughly half the population lives on less than $2 a day.

Before the announcement of ElBaradei was reversed, state television broadcast images of him meeting with Mansour at the presidential palace. It was the first time Mansour had worked from the palace since he took office Thursday, hours after Wednesday's coup. Mansour also met with representatives from the Nour party and from the Tamarod group that organized the protests last weekend that brought millions of people into the streets against Morsi's rule.

Even before Egypt's 2011 revolution, ElBaradei - a Nobel Peace Prize laureate - had been a harsh critic of former president Hosni Mubarak, who had led the country for three decades.