son, a banker by profession, was being groomed for the presidency. He began taking an increasingly active role in politics, first as a spokesman for business interests and youth as a nonpartisan activist and then later in the NDP. President Mubarak announced parliamentary elections in 2000 and pledged to uphold a Supreme Constitutional Court ruling calling for judicial supervision of elections. Although the 2000 elections were the first to be supervised by judges, and by most accounts somewhat cleaner and more credible than the 1990 and 1995 elections, there were still widespread arrests of Muslim Brotherhood candidates and campaign workers, as well as intimidation of voters outside polling stations. Surprisingly, the NDP suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of independent candidates, who secured more than half of the 444 seats up for election versus the NDP's 39 percent. However, 181 of the independents were "NDP independents" – members who had run in the elections despite not having received the party's nomination. These 181 independents and an additional 35 actual independents joined the NDP after winning, giving the party a combined 88 percent parliamentary majority. The poor performance of the NDP in the 2000 parliamentary elections afforded Gamal Mubarak an opportunity to assert himself in party politics. He proposed overhauling the NDP in an effort to make it look and function more like a modern political party rather than a tool for recruiting support for the regime in exchange for government patronage. Michele Dunne, editor of the Carnegie Endowment's Arab Reform Bulletin, wrote in 2006: Drawing on largely the model of the British Labour Party, Gamal Mubarak designed and led a new Policy Secretariat that began to produce policy papers on a wide range of economic, political, and foreign affairs topics. He recruited a circle of young, reform-minded businesspeople and technocrats, some of whom were later placed in cabinet or party leadership positions. By 2004, Gamal Mubarak's imprint on the NDP was apparent, with the appointment of a cabinet full of his proteges (among them Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif) in July and the holding of a slickly package, media-friendly party conference in September showcasing the NDP's new image. Hosni Mubarak's presidential campaign in summer 2005 – which featured Western-style stumping, clear promises for policy changes, and an attempt to show that the party was not using government resources in the campaign – showed the touch of Gamal and his circle.