CAIRO — Tens of thousands of protesters crammed Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday for the eighth day of anti-Morsi demonstrations that were sparked by a Thursday, Nov. 22, constitutional declaration that gave President Mohammed Morsi vastly widened and unchecked executive powers.

Some of Egypt’s most prominent politicians started an open-ended strike at Tahrir Square until Morsi withdraws his constitutional declaration and dissolves the disputed constituent assembly which passed a draft constitution after almost twelve hours of internal voting held on Thursday, Nov. 29. 

Leaders of the strike included the 2012 presidential candidates Hamdeen Sabahi, Amr Moussa and Khaled Ali, Nobel Prize winner and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed El-Baradei and dozens of celebrated liberal, leftist and labor figures.

Coinciding with the constituent assembly’s internal vote, Morsi, the first president to be elected in Egypt’s history, appeared in a pre-recorded television interview and bluntly challenged dozens of political powers and hundreds of thousands of Egyptians whose votes brought him to a presidential palace that was monopolized by the country’s military since a 1952 coup that declared the republican system.