Egyptians voting in the first round of the presidential election, Cairo, May 23, 2012. Scott MacLeod for the Cairo Review
June 08, 2012
On Thursday, Egyptian
politicians did something astonishing: they reached an agreement. A military
ultimatum—agree within 48 hours on a formula for
choosing the 100 people who will write the country’s next constitution, or expect
a fresh constitutional declaration, the contents of which you may dislike—ended
a long impasse. But the outcome sadly reinforces the narrative that only the
military can press self-serving civilian politicians to fulfill their duties to
the nation. More importantly, the “thirteenth-hour” agreement (the politicians
actually missed the deadline) nonetheless throws Egypt’s already contorted
transition deeper into confusion and uncertainty.
The original plan
was for the constitutional assembly to finish its work and put a constitution
to a referendum ahead of presidential elections. When that failed, many
political actors expected the military to issue an updated constitutional
declaration before the presidential vote. The military has now asked parliament
to convene to choose the assembly members on June 12. Few expect the assembly
to finish its work, or for a new interim constitutional declaration to be
issued, before a president is elected in the runoff
scheduled for June 16-17. But as one participant at Thursday’s meeting said, “The
only thing certain now is that absolutely nothing is certain. Anything can
happen.”
Particularly on
questions where there is little agreement, a little ambiguity can be useful.
And leaving the future constitutional assembly time to debate seems wise. But that
the generals appear willing to conclude the presidential election, and their
direct rule, under such constitutionally ambiguous circumstances is perhaps a
sign of how confident they are that former Air Force Commander Ahmed Shafik
will win.
Had the military
attempted to isolate itself from presidential and civilian control, perhaps
even under the guise of retreating from politics, and to assert that this arrangement
must be enshrined in future constitutions, or supersede them, as its legal
minds first attempted to do one year ago, this might have signaled that the military
was willing even to prepare for the possibility of a victory for Muslim
Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi.
The military might
yet be able to countenance a Brotherhood win provided the military is insulated
from the president, parliament, and civilian courts. Such a deal, including the
presidency, the cabinet (though perhaps with restrictions, such as on civilian
ministers of interior and defense), and the parliament—in
effect, all the levers of government—would perhaps be too sweet for the
Brotherhood to resist. The military, in that scenario, would perhaps hope that
they were giving the eager Brotherhood all the rope it needed, that if the
Brotherhood could take the fall for the next five rotten years, the country
might at last be rid of them. Former Supreme Guide Mohammed Mahdi Akef, in a
sentiment shared by at least some middle managers, said he prayed the
Brotherhood would lose.
For the moment,
there is no indication that the Brotherhood or the military are moving toward
such an arrangement. Even the current, Brotherhood-dominated parliament is on
thin ice, awaiting a verdict on whether the law governing the elections that
produced it is constitutional.
For the military, such
an experiment would entail risks for an institution that is naturally
particularly risk-adverse when it comes to its own future—which
it conflates, with some justification, with that of the state. For should the
Brotherhood be handed all the rope it needs to hang itself, it could just as
easily fashion the noose with someone else in mind. "The
Muslim Brotherhood are not idiots," former intelligence head Omar
Suleiman recently told a columnist for a Saudi daily.
If the military
does not yet try to score an end run ahead of the polls by attempting to cement
its immunity, independence, and, perhaps, decision-making role, by fiat, or
with the hurried imprimatur of a constitutional assembly, it will signal that
it views Shafik as a shoo-in. Indeed, Shafik might win even a fair election—he
appears to have so far managed to pick up more of the center than has his
opponent in their respective second-round pivots from their respective bases,
though a great many, perhaps an absolute majority of, demoralized voters will
abstain or spoil their ballots.
Morsi and the
Brotherhood tentatively threw in their lot with the mass protests in Cairo,
Alexandria, and elsewhere that erupted following the June 2 verdict in the
trial of Hosni Mubarak, his sons, and various of their henchmen. But those
protests found their wellspring first in the disenchantment of an urban
electorate that wants neither someone from the old regime nor someone from the
Brotherhood, and so are difficult for the Brotherhood to exploit for electoral
gain.
In Cairo, after it
was announced that he won the first round of elections in the city, almost
everyone said they voted for charismatic Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi—whether
or not, one suspects, they had. Some of Morsi’s billboards have also been torn
down. His painful flirtation with both Sabahi and Brotherhood defector Abdel Moneim
Aboul Fotouh has not yet been consummated. Brotherhood members and those urging
a boycott scuffle amid the tea-vendors of Tahrir.
Running the numbers
on hypothetical electoral outcomes is now a favorite sport for Egypt-watchers.
Both candidates won roughly a quarter of votes in the first round, and can
count on their respective bases. But the decisions of the other roughly 50
percent of the voters who voted for neither candidate are difficult to predict.
Shafik has picked up endorsements from small political parties, the former
loyal opposition, and the tourism-worker association, and he can reasonably
expect many who voted for former foreign minister Amr Moussa as a less divisive
alternative to vote for him in the second round to keep the Brotherhood out.
But much of the center was shocked by the recent acquittal of senior security
officials and Mubarak’s sons, and by the judges’ conclusion that there was
insufficient evidence to conclude that police killed protesters in January
2011.
By the same token,
much of the center is alarmed by the prospect of the Brotherhood controlling
both the presidency and parliament, and Morsi has not persuasively made his
case to the dyed-in-the-wool opposition, some of whom have even said they will
vote for Shafik, in order “to hasten the revolutionary dialectic,” or “to spark
a second revolution.” Many, looking at the events of the last year, believe the
Brotherhood would be happy to strike a deal with the military in exchange for
power. As one disheartened first-round voter recently put it, the question is
now “whether one prefers one’s dictatorship straight-up, or with a bit of religion
mixed in.” Faced with such a choice, many will choose neither. Some will act on
the streets.
Either way, the
generals are perhaps banking on the notion that the battle for Egypt’s future
will be fought on the terrain of institutions and laws, not on the pavements of
Tahrir, that protests will eventually die down following concessions,
crackdowns, fatigue, and despair. The Egyptian regime has survived similar
periods in the past in similar ways.
If so, it is a tragic
miscalculation: tragic for those who will yet lose their eyes, for the bereft mothers,
for millions of poor people who will not find enough to eat, and for a new
generation of disillusioned millions, who, like their parents had in the 1970s,
dreamed of, fought for, and failed to secure a better future. But also tragic
for the lasting damage to the prestige of perhaps the last two institutions in
Egypt that had any: the military (a preoccupation a top general not long ago
confided to the press he harbored) and, now that the courts have been drafted
into the political fray, perhaps the judiciary.
In a way, Egypt is
left where it was after the initial 18-day uprising, on the verge of a
terrifying period of chaos—and perhaps, as many said they feared after
the first-round elections, of killing—hoping the army’s intentions are pure. In
the halo of the national catharsis and jubilation that erupted when the army
did the right thing then and saved the country from chaos, some of those who
are now among the generals’ most outspoken adversaries said they would give the
military more than it dare ask for now. After a year of disappointment,
mistakes, mismanagement, and, in extreme circumstances, soldiers’ use of force
against protesters, fewer are willing to give the military the benefit of the
doubt, a fact reflected in the recent resurgence of mass protest.
If Shafik makes good
on his campaign promises to endeavor not to imprison people for their opinions
and to achieve the goals of the youth’s revolution, rather than his campaign
promises to use lethal force to disperse protests, Egypt will not be a utopia,
but it will be better at the end of his term. The same, one hopes, might hold
true if he makes good on his more surly promises (he praised the use of lethal
force to clear a May protest in front of the Ministry of Defense, saying it was
a small taste of what to expect under his rule, for example). It will just take
more wasted blood to get there.
In such a
situation, there is little Europeans and other foreigners who wish Egypt well
can do. The challenge will be to maintain good relations with Egypt, the nation
and the people, without entering into what will and should be an Egyptian
struggle over the country’s future.
Egypt is in crisis.
The best donors can do is try to minimize the suffering that crisis causes, by,
for example, shoring up the currency, or by helping to ensure citizens have
access to healthcare, clean water, and electricity. If Egypt’s next government
backslides on human rights—on freedom of opinion or assembly for
example—foreign governments can and should
speak out clearly and publicly, but always as a frank disagreement among equals
with a shared interest in Egypt’s prosperity and stability.
The stakes of the
unfolding Egyptian drama are highest for Egyptians, and they are the only ones
who can and should determine its outcome. But the actual economic and security
costs, as well as opportunity costs, of an unhappy outcome in Egypt are too
high for the rest of the region and the world to bear, at a time when both can
least afford them.
Elijah Zarwan is a senior policy fellow
for the European Council on Foreign Relations