by The State Department announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton phoned the Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Amr on Saturday to discuss several issues of importance to both countries.
Many of the same subjects were discussed during Clinton’s Saturday call as were discussed in a similar call by President Obama to Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi which was made on Friday.
While Friday’s call by Obama stressed the issue of Egypt’s transition to democracy and its importance, Clinton’s call stuck to the specific issues of economic and political concerns in addition to current events now taking place in Syria.
Clinton’s call to Foreign Minister Amr was a response to Egypt’s election results. Egyptian Islamists, a political group led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a banned group during the days of Hosni Mubarak, took an overwhelming majority of the seats in parliament. Muslim Brotherhood itself won 47% of the seats, while an alliance of ultra-conservative Islamists won the next largest percentage of seats, 25%. Together the two Islamic parties make up almost three-quarters of the parliament.
“They also compared notes on Syria in advance of the Arab League meetings this weekend,” the State Department said in a brief statement.
