By Marwa Awad and Patrick Werr
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's new military rulers appointed a few ministers who opposed Hosni Mubarak on Tuesday, but exasperated the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups by keeping key portfolios chosen by the deposed leader unchanged.
The Islamist Brotherhood, Egypt's biggest political organisation, said the new cabinet showed Mubarak's "cronies" still controlled national politics and that a call for a million man march on Friday would show people's anger and frustration.
"This new cabinet is an illusion," senior Brotherhood member Essam el-Erian told Reuters. "It pretends it includes real opposition but in reality this new government puts Egypt under the tutelage of the West," he added.
"The main ministries of defence, justice, interior and foreign remain unchanged, signalling Egypt's politics remain in the hands of Mubarak and his cronies," Erian said.
Others involved in the movement that toppled Mubarak's 30-year rule with an 18-day uprising rejected the reshuffle put together by the military council, led by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who has been defence minister for two decades.
As the military struggled to organise a handover to power with free and fair elections in six months after the downfall of Mubarak, its neighbour Libya was engulfed by a fierce crackdown on a mounting revolt to the 41-year rule of Muammar Gadaffi.
About 500 Egyptians protested in the capital on Tuesday demanding that the military install a new government with fresh faces and lift the emergency law in the Arab world's most populous nation which Mubarak used to impose his iron rule.
"The public demands the downfall of the government," the protesters chanted at the revolution's landmark Tahrir Square, with banners calling for a government of technocrats.
"We warn of the dire consequences of defying the will of the workers," the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS) said. "The centre shows its deep surprise at the government's insistence in continuing the bad reputation of the former political regime," it said in a statement.
DIPLOMATIC INITIATIVE
The latest reshuffle brought into the cabinet several opposition figures including Yehia el-Gamal, deputy prime minister, the Wafd party's Mounir Abdel Nour as tourism minister and Tagammu party's Gowdat Abdel-Khaleq as minister of social solidarity and social justice.
Egypt's new oil minister, Mamoud Latif Amer, replaced Sameh Fahmy and was previously the CEO of state-owned EGAS Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Companies.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was in Cairo to offer international aid to help the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to get Egypt back to work and to secure a peaceful, orderly and swift transition of power.
"I am certainly looking at ways for us to offer support," Ashton told reporters, after visits by British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. officials, offering help to the rulers of this key American ally that has a peace treaty with Israel.
"Tomorrow in Brussels, officials will come from all over the world ... to again look at what we can do in support of Egypt," Ashton told journalists. "We're already discussing the capacity to give an extra billion euros in extra support," she said.
Millions turned out for Egypt's uprising, centred around Cairo's Tahrir Square, to protest about corruption, repression and poverty, whipping up a revolution that toppled Mubarak, a former air force commander who took over after Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
The military dissolved parliament, suspended the constitution and promised presidential and parliamentary elections in six months but reformists are urging wider reforms and the lifting of emergency law imposed after Sadat's killing.
The military, facing protests over wages and conditions that sprang out of the nation's new found post-Mubarak freedom, has effectively banned strikes and industrial action to get the nation back on its feet and to restart the damaged economy.
Egypt is planning a stimulus package to spur its economy after it was badly hurt by the political turmoil, Finance Minister Samir Radwan said on Tuesday.
He estimated that the political unrest that led to the ousting of Mubarak would cut growth in the financial year to end-June to 4.3 percent from the previous forecast of 6 percent.
"The goal of the stimulus package is to get the economy on its feet again," he told reporters.
(Reporting by Marwa Awad, Patrick Werr and Sarah Mikhail, Writing by Peter Millership)
