CAIRO, Jan. 2 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's National Election Authority (NEA) will announce on Jan. 8 the timetable for the 2018 presidential elections, the authority said in a press conference on Tuesday.
"A panel was also formed to receive requests from local and international NGOs that are willing to oversee the electoral process," said NEA spokesman Mahmoud al-Sherif.
He said that the announcement will be made in a press conference in Cairo during which "all information pertaining to the process in terms of timing and procedures will be disclosed."
The NEA spokesman noted that the maximum electoral publicity for each candidate in the first electoral round is limited to 20 million Egyptian pounds (about 1.1 million U.S. dollars).
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi took office in mid-2014, a year after he led the ouster of his Islamist predecessor Mohammed Morsi in July 2013 in response to mass protests against Morsi's one-year rule and his now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.
Sisi said in November, 2017 that the 2018 presidential elections will be held in March or April as scheduled, stressing that he will not seek to change the constitutional limit of two four-year presidential terms, thus ruling out a third presidential term for himself after a possible second one.
Although he has yet to formally announce his candidacy for the 2018 election, Sisi is widely expected to do so and to earn a landslide victory due to the absence of competitive challengers in the presidential bid.
A pro-Sisi campaign said last December that it collected over 12 million signatures of Egyptians, more than 11 percent of the population, supporting Sisi to run for a second presidential term.
Egyptian rights and opposition lawyer Khaled Ali announced in November last year his intention to join the presidential race. However, there is a possibility for Ali's disqualification as he had received a suspended three-month jail term earlier in September over an obscene hand gesture he reportedly made after winning a court order challenging the government.
On the other hand, former air force commander and former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, who fled Egypt after narrowly losing to Morsi in the 2012 elections, announced from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) his intention to run for president.
However, Shafiq then came back from the UAE to Egypt in early December and said he will reconsider his bid for Egypt's presidency.
