Egyptian activists Hamdi Habib and Mohammad Imam started in April 2014 a campaign they named “You’re the President,” calling on Ahmed Shafiq, the former minister of civil aviation and the last prime minister under President Hosni Mubarak, to run in the 2014 presidential election. But when former Minister of Defense Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced his candidacy, Shafiq refused to run and the movement ended. Now, posters are again filling the streets, calling on Shafiq to run in the parliamentary elections set for this year.

Shafiq ran in the 2012 presidential elections against Mohammed Morsi. When the race ended in the latter’s victory, Shafiq submitted a statement to the state prosecutors questioning the fairness of the elections and the possibility that the results were subject to fraud. Shafiq left Egypt for the United Arab Emirates on July 29, 2012, after Morsi’s victory and following accusations by a number of Muslim Brotherhood figures of squandering public money. To this day, he has yet to return to the country. 

On Oct. 11, 2012, Morsi dismissed Attorney General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud (who had served in this position since the Mubarak era, before the January 2011 revolution) and appointed Talaat Abdullah in his place. Abdullah belongs to the “Judges for Egypt” movement, which is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Following his appointment, Abdullah opened investigations into the accusations that Shafiq wasted public money as minister of civil aviation in the Mubarak era, a case known in the media as the “Land of the Two Pilots.”

Despite the Egyptian judiciary acquitting Shafiq on Dec. 19, 2013, of all charges, his name has not been removed from the list of those monitored on arrival to Egypt and banned from traveling out of the country once there.