Hamdeen Sabahi

His father had benefited from the land ownership reforms brought about after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952.

Sabahi spent his childhood being around farmers and fishermen and became a fisherman during adolescence.

Hamdeen Sabahi (حمدين صباحي, ; born 5 July 1954) is an Egyptian politician and journalist.

He is currently the leader of the Egyptian Popular Current and a co-leader of the National Salvation Front.

An opposition activist during the Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak eras, Sabahi was jailed 17 times during their presidencies for political dissidence.

Sabahi was born in a small Nile Delta town in Kafr el-Sheikh Governorate called Baltim in 1954 to a father who was a fellah ("peasant").

Of his eleven siblings, Sabahi was the youngest.

He had been consistently supportive of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israel since the 1970s.

In the same year, Sabahi survived an assassination attempt and was later detained for speaking against Arabs' inaction to the sanctions imposed on Iraq.

In 1975 Sabahi became a student in Cairo University where he studied mass communication and served as editor-in-chief of the university's magazine The Students.

Together with a group of his friends, Sabahi founded the Nasserist Thought Club, which he also presided over.

The club soon after opened branches in other Egyptian universities.

Sabahi and his colleagues established the club in response to what they saw as Sadat's policy of undoing late President Gamal Abdel Nasser's legacy.

That year, Sabahi was also elected as president of Cairo University's student council until 1976 and as the president of the General Union of Egyptian Students until 1977.

In 1977, after the mass anti-government protests, then-President Anwar Sadat met with Student Union representatives from around Egypt for a televised debate and it was there that Sabahi became well known among Egyptians.

He openly expressed his disapproval of Sadat's economic policies and the alleged corruption of his government.

He criticized Sadat's Infitah or "Open-Door" policy, which he said only favored the capitalists and those who were already well-off.

He also criticized Sadat's plans to make peace with Israel, while Palestinians remained without a home and devoid of representation.

"If the terms we have to accept in order for this land to be returned include recognizing the Zionist entity," Sabahi argued, "this would be a mistake."

Because of this confrontation, Sabahi was banned from working as a journalist in the state-controlled media.

Sabahi was arrested again, this time during the presidency of Hosni Mubarak in the late 1980s, for allegedly being a member of the "Egypt Revolution" group, which was accused of killing Israelis inside Egypt.

The group, led by Mahmoud Nour Eddin, included Khalid Abdel Nasser, the son of late President Nasser.

In September 1981, as a result of his vociferous criticism of the peace treaty, Sabahi became the youngest member of the Nationalist Opposition movement to be detained.

He was among some 1,500 other political activists jailed by Sadat's government in nationwide crackdown.

In 1985 he obtained his master's in journalism.

Shortly thereafter, Sabahi and some colleagues founded Saʿid (The Rising), "a center for Arabic journalism", where many young, Arab journalists were trained in the field.

He was arrested again in 1991 after a speech to students in Cairo University where he condemned airstrikes by the United States against Iraq, following the Iraqi military's withdrawal from Kuwait.

Sabahi helped establish the Arab Democratic Nasserist Party (legalized in 1992), headed by Diaa al-Din Dawoud.

In 1993 he was among the members of the Egyptian nationalist movement to visit Palestinian resistance leaders in Lebanon.

A well-known opposition figure, Sabahi ascribes to Nasserism and in 1996 he founded the Nasserist Karama (Dignity) Party.

Sabahi ran as an independent and not as the Dignity Party's candidate.

One of the few secular figures without any ties to the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Sabahi has attracted the support of several leading Nasserists.

Sabahi is running under the slogan "one of us" which highlights his strong ties with the working class and advocates his socialist aspirations.

Sabahi also gained the support of prominent Egyptian figures including writer and political activist Alaa Al Aswany and director and film-writer Khaled Youssef.

He was an immediate supporter and participant of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Sabahi entered the 2012 Egyptian presidential race in which he finished third place with 21.5% of the vote trailing the second place candidate Ahmed Shafiq by a margin of 700,000 votes.

In the 2014 presidential election he was one of just two candidates.

He ran second with less than 4% of the vote.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was declared the winner after attracting 22 million of the nearly 23 million votes cast.

Sisi was sworn into office as President of Egypt on 8 June 2014.