January 18, 2013
There will be three impacts for
the decision by a court this week to overturn President Mubarak’s—and former
Interior Minister Habib El-Adly’s—life sentences and retry them. First, the new
trials will stir up new confrontations between supporters of the former
president and activist groups, especially those attached to the hundreds who
died during the uprising. The confrontations are likely to be limited. But the
timing could trigger wider complications. As the trial proceeds during the
campaigning for the coming parliamentary election—arguably the most important
milestone in the current political transition—it will be used by different
groups, in the ruling side as well as the opposition, to inflame feelings and
mobilize voters. This could cause conflicts in a society that is already disenchanted
with the political process, with two years of intense fluidity, and is
increasingly very distressed by acute economic conditions, and the prospect of
more difficulties in the near future.
Second, the trial is a signal in
the hugely important political confrontation currently taking place between, on
one side, the economic and financial power centers that have entrenched themselves
in the last decade of President Mubarak’s reign, and, on the other, the
economic elites that have been rising in Egypt in the last 18 months. The
interests of the former are immense; the ambitions of the latter are enormous.
This confrontation remains at a nascent stage. The coming parliamentary
election will be an important episode in this confrontation, because the next
parliament will have very wide legislative powers on regulations and frameworks
that will shape very lucrative economic sectors and industries. As the old
economic powers try to preserve the most important of their interests and the
new players attempt to grab market shares, both will seek to widen their
political coalitions. And influencing street sentiments is a perfect vehicle for
that. President Mubarak’s retrial will offer a golden opportunity.
And third, President Mubarak’s
fate will be the finale of the dramatic story of the
first Egyptian Republic—and of course the final act of his own political
career, which is much more complicated than is currently portrayed in local and
international media. Mubarak represents the last of the Pharaonic leaders of
Egypt who ruled supreme relying on unquestioning loyalty from the sprawling and
highly influential institutions of the old Egyptian state. Mubarak also
represents the last episode of the overt control of the military establishment
over the country. And he is the last Egyptian leader to rule the country with a
mind-set anchored in the post Second-World-War period. He is the last in the
thread that connected Nasser’s macro socio-political project in the 1960s, with
Sadat transformations in the 1970s, to the last three decades. What followed—and
will follow—is/will be a jump into a new phase; the six decades from the 1950s
to the end of the first decade of the twenty first century (the life of the
first Egyptian republic) exerts a major influence on the future, but does not
mould it.
To a very large extent, the future
will be a function of the behavior of a gigantic, and uncontrolled, eruption of
bottom-up energy, fuelled by the aspirations, wills, and desires of over
45-million Egyptians under 35 years old, bent on changing the different crippling
failures they have inherited. Dying in prison or as a free man, President
Mubarak will not impact the flow or direction of this energy, but his fate—the
final scene in the story of the first republic—will shape the background of the
theatre in which this energy is unleashed.
Tarek Osman is the author
of Egypt
on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak. The
first edition of the book was published by Yale University Press in 2010 and
was translated to Arabic, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Osman's writing has
appeared or been cited in the Economist,
Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Boston Globe among many other
publications.