Mohamed ElBaradei marching in protests, Cairo, Jan. 28, 2011. Khaled El-Fiqi/European Pressphoto Agency
April 06, 2015
The
January 25 Egyptian uprising always had scant possibilities of success. The
country’s secular and Islamist revolutionaries were odd bedfellows right from
the start. They agreed on forcing President Hosni Mubarak from power, but
harbored different dreams and notions of a new Egypt, and often followed
conflicting strategies. Other political forces, including the revolutionary
youth, were weak and poorly organized. In the end, the uprising led to a
totally different outcome than what the millions who took to the streets
envisaged, and by early 2013 it had run its course.
If the possibility for success was
limited, the uprising was not completely doomed from the start. For over a year
following the forced departure of President Mubarak, different choices by
leaders and political organizations might have led to a degree of success,
although not likely to a full-blown democracy.
We should begin by
stipulating what the term “success” meant in the Egyptian political context of
the 2011–2013 period. Both secular and Islamic activists held up placards
demanding “Bread, Freedom, and Dignity,” sometimes substituting “social justice”
for the latter mantra. What they pushed for immediately, however, were
authentic free and fair elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and an end
to authoritarian rule. The key components of their ideal new political order
included a multiparty democracy, a parliament with real powers, an independent
judiciary, and unfettered media—including social media. In the end, most
Egyptians probably would have settled for less. But no group, regardless of
ideological and theological differences, would initially have considered the
restoration of authoritarian rule to be anything but complete failure. Only
with the advent of Islamist rule under the Muslim Brotherhood did Egypt’s old
upper class, including the so-called liberals, come to redefine success to the point
of welcoming the return of military rule.
The Egyptian drama from
authoritarianism to uprising back to authoritarianism unfolded in four distinct
phases: 1) the unsettled period preceding the uprising; 2) the eighteen days of
mass demonstrations leading up to Mubarak’s departure; 3) the subsequent year
under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF); and 4) the brief period
of Muslim Brotherhood rule under President Mohammed Morsi.
Cusp of Revolt
In late 2010, the social and economic
situation was exceedingly ripe for revolution. An economic boom starting six
years earlier had doubled Egypt’s Gross Domestic Product to $218 billion but
widened the gap between the poorest and richest and put the middle class in an
economic cramp. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, who came into office in 2004, had
lifted constraints on the private sector with the full backing of President
Mubarak and above all of his two businessmen sons, Gamal and Alaa. The result
was the rise of a class of nouveaux riches
led by a small number of oligarchs.
However, the middle class and particularly the five million civilian government
employees did not benefit from the boom and in fact came more and more under
financial stress. Inflation had reached 13 percent while the official minimum
wage had remained the same since 1984, at about seven dollars a day. And 44
percent of Egyptians were living on less than two dollars a day.
Most dangerous politically was the
plight of twenty million Egyptians between the ages of 18 and 29 who constituted
the “youth bulge” and accounted for 90 percent of the country’s jobless. A 2010 United Nations report noted in
particular that Egypt faced an “ever growing supply of unemployed graduates.”
(The year of the uprising, 343,500 more Egyptians graduated with university
degrees.) Already by 2008, a report by the United States Agency for
International Development was warning of trouble ahead. “Accelerated growth
juxtaposed with persistent poverty can generate social tension and instability
as people become frustrated by insufficient opportunity for upward mobility,” the
report said.
The frustration
was most evident within Egypt’s labor force affected by the privatization of
numerous state-run industries resulting in massive job reductions. Just as
vexing were persistent low wages in both the private and public sectors. The
extent of labor unrest came to public notice in 2006 with the strike of 27,000
workers over wages and conditions at the state-run Misr Spinning and Weaving
Company in Mahalla El-Kubra. By 2010, unemployed workers were camping out day
and night outside the parliament building in the capital’s downtown. A report
by the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization called
it “the largest social movement Egypt has witnessed in more than half a
century,” and estimated that 1.7 million workers had engaged in more than 1,900
strikes or other protests between 2004 and 2008.
Persistent labor unrest gave rise in
2008 to the first attempt by a pro-democracy civil society group to link
discontented elements in the work force to the struggle for political reform.
On April 6 that year, young pro-democracy activists from Cairo went to Mahalla
to show their support for striking workers as part of a national protest on
their behalf. Thus was born the April 6 Youth Movement that would play a
central role in January 2011. Its Facebook page quickly attracted tens of
thousands of supporters. The link
between the workers' economic demands and the young protesters' political ones
was never firmly established, however; and this became one of the weak spots of the
uprising.
Meanwhile, Egypt was preparing for the
succession to Hosni Mubarak. In office since 1981, the president was ailing and
his future uncertain, but the country’s power elite was deeply divided over who
should replace him. Mubarak’s rumored plan for his son, Gamal, to succeed him
in elections scheduled for the fall of 2011 had roiled the leadership of the
ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). The Old Guard wanted to see Mubarak run
for a sixth term while younger modernizers championed Gamal. The succession
issue became much more acute after Mubarak was flown to Germany in March 2010
for an operation to remove his gall bladder. Gamal’s presidential bid was
opposed not only by the NDP Old Guard, but most importantly by the military.
Every president since the 1952 revolution led by Gamal Abdel Nasser had been a
military officer, but Gamal Mubarak had never served in the army and had made
no effort to cultivate ties with its leadership.
Yet another factor in the unsettled
succession equation was the return in February 2010 of Mohamed ElBaradei, the
longtime head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and 2005
Nobel Peace Prize winner. He immediately launched a bold campaign against the
entire Mubarak regime, demanding authentic free and fair elections and an end to the twenty-nine-year-old state of
emergency. Although he never declared the
intention to run for the presidency, he was widely viewed as the most viable
candidate to wrest power from the Mubaraks. His supporters set up the National
Association for Change, which began gathering one million signatures on a
petition demanding all kinds of constitutional and other reforms. The staid
diplomat warned Egypt had become a “time bomb” and advocated street protests
and even civil disobedience to press for reforms. His appearance on the
political scene galvanized the opposition as never before, with leftist
parties, civil society groups, and the Muslim Brotherhood rallying to his cause.
Finally ElBaradei laid down the gauntlet calling for a boycott of parliamentary
elections in November 2010 with the declared aim to “deprive” the Mubarak
regime of its legitimacy.
Those elections primed the pump for the
uprising. The NDP had one goal in mind: to drive the Muslim Brotherhood—whose
candidates running as independents had won eighty-eight seats in the People’s
Assembly—entirely out of politics. In the run-up to the elections, it arrested
1,200 Brotherhood organizers, broke up its rallies, and blocked a number of its
candidates from running. So it came as no surprise that in the first of two
election rounds on November 28, the NDP won 209 seats outright and the
Brotherhood not a single one. In reaction, both the Brotherhood and the liberal
secular Wafd Party decided to boycott successive rounds, allowing the NDP to
win more than 90 percent of the seats. ElBaradei described the elections as a
national “tragedy” and “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” He also called
for a boycott of the presidential election scheduled for the fall of 2011.
Altogether, nearly all developments
that took place throughout 2010 were extremely favorable to the ignition of an
uprising. The level of public discontent with economic conditions was spreading
from the working to the middle class. President Mubarak was in failing health.
The ruling party was divided over whether to back him or his son Gamal. Both
the military and pro-democracy groups were opposed to another Mubarak as
president. The November elections had seriously alienated not only the Muslim
Brotherhood, but also secular opposition parties and pro-democracy civil
society groups. A credible alternative presidential candidate, ElBaradei, was
openly challenging the established elite for the first time in contemporary
Egyptian political history.
But conditions were less favorable to
the transformation of an uprising into a sustained movement for change. Egypt
lacked strong political organizations other than the outlawed but tolerated
Muslim Brotherhood. The April 6 Movement had failed either to forge an alliance
with labor or build bridges to the Muslim Brotherhood. ElBaradei’s National
Association for Change had not gone beyond collecting signatures on petitions.
Nor had civilian pro-democracy activists made any contacts with the military
even though both opposed another Mubarak as president.
Taking the Square
The scope and initial success of the
street protests on January 25 caught everyone including its organizers and the
security services by surprise. The April 6 Movement had been gearing up to
launch a nationwide protest the coming summer to contest the expected
nomination of Gamal Mubarak as the ruling party’s candidate in the fall
presidential election. But the flight of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali from
Tunisia on January 14 emboldened Egyptians by demonstrating that even a
ubiquitous police state was vulnerable to the street. Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian
activist working for Google, mused on Facebook on the day of Ben Ali’s
departure, “If 100,000 take to the street, no one can stop us… I wonder if we
can?” Most unexpected was the readiness of virtually all segments of Egyptian
society including entire families from the middle class, even some from the
upper class, to swell the crowds gathering in Tahrir Square and on streets of
cities from Alexandria in the north to Minya in the south. Muslims and
Christian Copts stood side by side defending one another against the repeated
attempts of security forces to clear the square. Women came out in huge numbers.
Muslim Brotherhood youth fought alongside soccer fan toughs known as Ultras in
the name first of “Bread, Freedom, and Dignity” and then “The People Want the
Overthrow of the Regime.”
Also favoring the uprising’s success
was the collapse of the 325,000-man Central Security Forces that disintegrated
under the stress of night and day confrontation with hundreds of thousands of
protesters. Chaos ensued as protesters turned their ire on NDP party offices
across the country and set ablaze its headquarters in downtown Cairo. They
assaulted police stations everywhere, besieged the Interior Ministry in Cairo,
and they freed 23,000 prisoners—many of them Muslim Brotherhood leaders and
members—from Wadi El-Natroun prison. Following the January 28 so-called “Day of
Rage” protest, Mubarak dismissed Prime Minster Nazif and his government, while
Interior Minister Habib El-Adly handed in his resignation, declaring that his
security forces could no longer contain the uprising.
What finally and
irrevocably turned the tide against Mubarak, however, was the refusal of the
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to order the military to participate in
suppressing the uprising by the use of force. On January 31, SCAF issued a
statement acknowledging “the legitimacy of the people’s demands” and stating
that the armed forces “have not and will not resort to the use of force against
this great people.” It would take another eleven days of pressure before
Mubarak yielded and gave up power. But it was not the revolutionaries in the streets
who finally forced Mubarak to resign on February 11 after nearly thirty years
in office. Rather, it was his General Intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, and
SCAF leaders. In the end, Suleiman himself was sidelined and power passed to
SCAF, leaving the military in charge of the country’s fate.
With Mubarak’s
departure, the uprising had achieved its first and most pressing objective. The
massive street protests had established for the first time in contemporary
Egyptian politics the principle of “revolutionary legitimacy.” However, the
rapidity with which the uprising had succeeded created a whole new set of
thorny issues distinctly unfavorable to a transition toward democracy. No
charismatic civilian leader had emerged to take charge. Even ElBaradei, the
best placed to fulfill that role, had retreated to the sidelines when
confronted with the chaos and dangers of the street. Not until February 7, just
four days before Mubarak’s ouster, was the “January 25 Revolutionary Youth
Coalition” set up, comprising ten leading activists in what was meant to be a
collective leadership. Wael Ghonim’s description of the uprising seems pretty
accurate: “A revolution without a leader and without an organizing body.”
Another
unfavorable development during those eighteen days of revolutionary fervor was
the failure of secular activists to develop a working alliance with the
Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, which sprang up in defiance of
the government-controlled ones on the fifth day of the uprising to launch
strikes across the country. The federation quickly grew to encompass 1.6
million workers organized in a hundred unions. Strikes paralyzed public
transport in and around Cairo on February 7 and workers in Suez Canal service
companies went out as well. On February 9, the new independent unions held a
nationwide strike. But these strikes were mainly driven by grievances over
wages, job security, and union rights—workers seemed more interested in taking
advantage of the uprising to press their own demands than toppling Mubarak. No
alliance between political and labor activists emerged from the uprising.
Strained relations between secular
activists and the Muslim Brotherhood were to prove even more consequential to
the course of subsequent events. Members of the Brotherhood’s youth wing were
deeply involved in the uprising from the beginning, and four days later the
leadership exhorted its 600,000 members to join the protests. This immediately
raised fears among secular protesters that Islamists were moving in to “hijack”
their revolution. So much suspicion of the Brotherhood’s intentions arose that
on February 7, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition felt obliged to issue a
statement reassuring Egyptians that Islamists had not taken over Tahrir Square.
A final heavy legacy of the uprising
was the absolutely central role played by the military in ousting Mubarak. It
had done this without consulting with any of the civilian groups involved in
the uprising. Secular and Islamist groups found themselves equally sidelined,
highly dependent on what SCAF might do next, and as suspicious of the military
and its motives as they were of each other. Both were suddenly aware that SCAF
was in a position to dictate the outcome of their respective bids for power.
The Year of SCAF
In the almost eighteen months between
the removal of Mubarak by the military and the election of President Mohammed
Morsi, the contradictions that would eventually doom the uprising started
emerging. It was a period of constant turmoil, with political battles played
out partly in the streets and partly at the polls and in the courts.
The military was determined to follow a
formally democratic political process, leading to the formation of a civilian
government that would allow the military to resume its preferred role of
exerting influence behind the scenes, rather than governing directly. The
military, the Islamist parties, the secular parties, and revolutionary youth
groups all agreed that Egypt had to move quickly toward restoring political due
process. That meant holding elections for a new parliament and president as
well as writing a new constitution.
There was no
agreement at all, however, on the sequencing of these steps. A commission
appointed by SCAF quickly revised the most controversial articles of the old
constitution and submitted them to a referendum on March 19. Secular parties
opposed the referendum, arguing that more discussion was needed, but everybody
else supported it, including the Muslim Brotherhood. SCAF then incorporated the
articles into a Constitutional Declaration issued on March 30. With this
interim charter in place, Egypt would then hold parliamentary and presidential
elections, to be followed by the writing of a new constitution. Secular parties
again opposed the plan. First, they wanted to postpone the elections as long as
possible, claiming that early elections would give the Muslim Brotherhood,
which had been organizing for years, undue advantage. (It is worth noting that
one of the most important secular parties, the Wafd, had existed longer that
the Brotherhood.) Secular parties also wanted to be sure that the new
constitution would not be shaped by Islamist parties and thus did not want it
to be written by an elected body, where Islamists were bound to be well represented.
The proposed compromise solution was
that all political parties should agree on a set of irrevocable “supra
constitutional principles” that would bind whoever wrote the constitution. The
idea gained acceptance, but different groups, from Al-Azhar, the historic
center of Islamic learning, to the government itself, set forth their own sets
of such principles. They were extremely contradictory, with secularists
insisting Egypt must be a civil state and Islamists demanding an Islamic state
with sharia the main source of legislation.
The most
controversial of these sets of supra constitutional principles was the one
proposed by Deputy Prime Minister for Political Affairs Ali Al-Silmi on behalf
of the government and the military in November 2011. The document reflected the
demands of SCAF in stipulating that the military and its budget remain outside
any form of civilian oversight. It also reflected those of secular parties in
proposing the constitution be written not by an elected body, but by an eighty-member
committee based on corporatist representation: seats would be allocated for
political parties, labor unions, and business associations as well as for
social and religious groups like workers and peasants, Muslim and Christian
authorities, and even “people with special needs.” The document was rejected in
the midst of angry street protests demanding that SCAF speed up the election
process and return to the barracks. The principles and process it spelled out
endured, however, and became the basis for the writing of the 2014
constitution.
Meanwhile, the growing imbalance
between secular and Islamist political forces was becoming more and more
apparent. The Muslim Brotherhood was well organized and so too, to the surprise
of all Egyptians, were the newly formed Salafi parties, above all the Al-Nour
Party. On the other hand, the youth groups that had led the uprising seemed to
abhor strong, hierarchical organization on principle, favoring instead
egalitarianism and loose networks held together by Twitter, Facebook, and cell
phones. While these means had worked well in mobilizing street protests, they
failed to give youth groups any traction in organizing for elections or
influencing policy decisions.
The mainstream political parties were
also ineffective in generating public support and knew it. They responded by
trying, unsuccessfully, to postpone elections. When the parliamentary elections
in late 2011 and early 2012 confirmed their worst fears—with Islamists winning 70 percent of the People’s Assembly seats and secular parties of all
ideological colorations combined only 30 percent—secularists simply rejected the
new parliament.
Instead, they turned to various state
institutions, particularly to the courts controlled by the old elite, and used
them to oppose the newly elected parliament and later the presidency. The main
battle was waged between the Supreme Constitutional Court on the one side and
the Islamist-dominated parliament and constituent assembly on the other. The
result was the permanent dissolution of parliament and of the first constituent
assembly, while the second one survived but remained under imminent threat of
court-ordered dismissal.
The
possibility the parliament would be disbanded by a court decision, as it
eventually happened, convinced the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood to
present a candidate for upcoming presidential elections, reversing an earlier
decision not to do so. The decision was controversial even within the
organization, where many considered it ill-advised, while other political parties
saw it as an attempt to dominate Egyptian politics and impose their own form of
authoritarian rule.
The presidential election was hard
fought, with the second round of voting coming down to a close contest between
Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi and Ahmed Shafik, a former air
force commander and Mubarak’s last prime minister, who was favored by the old
elite and military. Many had predicted that SCAF would not allow an
Islamist victory, but the military council took another tack instead. On the
eve of the run-off vote, it issued an amended Constitutional Declaration that
specified all legislative power would remain in the hands of SCAF until a new
parliament was elected, thus hemming in the president. When Mohammed Morsi won
the elections by a narrow margin, SCAF accepted the victory, confident that the
new president would have limited power.
In summary, this second phase of the
unfolding Egyptian revolution ended in a draw. SCAF had allowed a Brotherhood
leader to win presidential elections, though it still sought to hold onto
legislative power. The Islamists had shown that they could muster widespread
electoral support, but still had to demonstrate they could parlay that asset
into institutional power. The secular parties had found out just how little
popular support they could mobilize, but discovered a way to compensate by
enlisting the judiciary for their cause.
Only the revolutionary youth groups
could be said to have suffered a clear defeat as they had failed to translate
their claim to “revolutionary legitimacy” derived from the street into
“constitutional legitimacy” based on democratic elections. Constant resort to
street protest had had a positive impact in keeping the demand for change alive
but also engendered a sense of fatigue among many Egyptians increasingly
yearning for a return to normal life.
Brothers in Office
After Morsi’s election, the Brotherhood
tried to play by the rules. It decided to accept the Supreme Constitutional
Court’s authority and thus the dissolution of parliament, although the decision
was based on somewhat flimsy legal grounds. However, it successfully repealed
the supplementary Constitutional Declaration that SCAF had issued in June
transferring all legislative powers to SCAF. It also continued working on the
new constitution through a constituent assembly, the composition of which had
been negotiated with the military and the old elite. The effort to produce a
constitution acceptable to all sides proved futile, however, after most
secularist members of the assembly refused to participate in its work. In
Tunisia, Islamists and secularists fought over the new constitution article by
article, word by word. In Egypt, by contrast, secularists stayed home, and most
battles were fought between the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more
fundamentalist Salafis. In the meanwhile, a swirl of lawsuits threatened the Brotherhood.
Some were aimed at dissolution of the constituent assembly, others at the
banning of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party or of the
Brotherhood itself. The cases were never adjudicated, but hearings were always
postponed, thus prolonging the threat. Playing by the rules was an uphill
battle. Although the Brotherhood theoretically controlled both executive and
legislative power, its hold on the country was extremely flimsy because of the
constant legal challenges and because it did not control either the military or
the bureaucracy. Accused by its adversaries of having “brotherized” the state,
the Muslim Brotherhood in reality remained on the margins of a state apparatus
that had been shaped by three decades of Mubarak rule and was still largely
controlled by his people.
Morsi appeared
briefly to have won a major victory in August 2012 when he fired Minister of
Defense and SCAF Chairman Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi as well as the
Army Chief of Staff Sami Anan, replacing them respectively with General Abdel
Fattah El-Sisi and General Sidki Sobhi. Because Tantawi and Anan had controlled
SCAF and governed Egypt directly or indirectly since the overthrow of Mubarak,
their dismissal was initially seen inside and outside Egypt as a shift in the
balance of power between military and civilian. El-Sisi, many concluded, owed
his appointment to Morsi and would accept his leadership. In reality, the
removal of Tantawi had been negotiated between Morsi and El-Sisi, the main
beneficiary of the change.
Morsi was convinced, erroneously as it
turned out, that the military was now on his side and tried to exercise, even
in small ways, his prerogatives as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. One
example was the annual celebration on October 6 marking the 1973 crossing of
the Suez Canal into the Israeli-occupied Sinai. Morsi invited to the
traditional parade Islamist leaders who were completely unacceptable to the
military because they had been involved in the assassination of President Anwar
Sadat on the same occasion in 1981. The provocative gesture infuriated El-Sisi
personally and made the rift between the two leaders unbridgeable.
Morsi only made matters worse by
issuing on November 22, 2012, his own amendment to the Constitutional
Declaration, putting the constituent assembly and himself above the reach of
the courts—above the law, as it was generally interpreted. The provision, a
last ditch attempt to prevent the courts from dissolving the constituent
assembly, would only remain in effect until the new constitution was enacted,
which happened a month later. But the damage was done. From that point on,
Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood lost whatever legitimacy they had left in the
eyes of a growing portion of the general public. Their credibility had already
been severely eroded by a combination of a deteriorating economic situation,
secularist fears that the Brotherhood would try to impose strict Islamic law,
and hostile media. The ever squabbling secular parties which had been trying
for months to forge alliances that appeared to dissolve the day after they were
announced were sufficiently provoked by Morsi’s amendment to finally come
together in a National Salvation Front.
From then on, the situation only
worsened. The revolutionary mood had been replaced by a longing for stability
and jobs. The revolutionary youth groups had no sense of direction and even
less of organization. A new movement, Tamarod, emerged, apparently intent on
renewing the revolutionary fervor of 2011 but in reality with a totally
different agenda and sponsor.
The Tamarod, or Rebellion, movement
declared itself in late April 2013. It claimed to be a youth group whose main
aim was to collect signatures on a petition demanding Morsi’s removal. Whether
or not the movement was genuinely started by young people acting on their own,
as its leaders claimed, it was soon taken over by state security. In a matter
of weeks it spread to almost all governorates in a well-orchestrated campaign
that required extensive organization and resources way beyond the capacity of
such a small new group to have mustered. Soon Tamarod started calling for a
massive anti-Morsi demonstration on June 30, the day he had come into office
just one year earlier. It was those demonstrations engaging once again millions
of Egyptians that provided the military with the political cover to arrest
Morsi on July 3. The number of protesters clamoring for Morsi’s removal
certainly did not reach the thirty or forty million claimed by the organizers,
but the demonstrations were nationwide, massive, and more widespread than those
seen during the 2011 uprising against Mubarak. They left no doubt that public
sentiment had turned against the Muslim Brotherhood.
A Failed Transformation
The dream of idealistic youth groups,
the intelligentsia, and many secularists and Islamists of establishing a
parliamentary-based democracy in place of military-backed authoritarianism
vanished in July 2013. The initial uprising had begun as a spontaneous
happening loosely coordinated by cyberspace-connected networks of would-be
revolutionaries. Islamists had soon superseded the original organizers as the
emerging political force. But eventually Egypt had been taken over by a much more powerful and well-organized coalition of the military,
security services, judiciary, and state bureaucracy, all determined to bring
down the Brotherhood and restore the old order.
The uprising was not doomed to complete
failure from the beginning, but it quickly ran up against shortcomings in
leadership and organization and the widening divide between secularists and
Islamists. Major political actors bear much responsibility for the failure:
certainly the Muslim Brotherhood, but also the leaders of the so-called liberal
parties who, after their debacle in the 2012 parliamentary and presidential
elections, turned their backs on the democratic process and looked to the
courts and the military for their salvation even at the cost of renewed
authoritarianism. Ironically, secularist fears that Islamic rule would mean
“one man, one vote, one time” turned out to be true but not because of the
Muslim Brotherhood. Secular liberal parties in alliance with the military and
state institutions were primarily responsible for Egypt’s return to
authoritarianism.
In retrospect, it is clear that Morsi’s
election did not represent the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the
second step in its undoing. The first step had been its overwhelming victory,
together with the Salafi Al-Nour Party, in the parliamentary election. This
mobilized the judiciary and more broadly the old secular elite into action to
deprive the Brotherhood of power. Morsi’s election then reinforced the
secularist resolve to halt the Muslim Brotherhood by switching from the polls
to the courts and state institutions. The Brotherhood made one last attempt to
move the fight back to the electoral arena by calling for new parliamentary
elections in April 2013, but the Supreme Constitutional Court aborted this plan
by rejecting the proposed election law twice, even after it was amended to meet
its own demands.
Muslim Brotherhood leaders were
extremely slow to understand that the political dynamics had radically changed.
Perhaps because they had invested so much in the formal political process, they
remained convinced that elections conferred upon them unassailable
“constitutional legitimacy.” They confused legitimacy and effective power,
which continued to reside with the military and state institutions where the
Brotherhood had a minimal presence. Even their legitimacy in the eyes of the
Egyptian public was quickly dissipating as a result of their own poor decisions
and under a relentless propaganda campaign in the media.
Muslim Brotherhood
leaders made many mistakes and provoked their adversaries unnecessarily, but in
the end they succeeded in bringing about almost no change. They did not
“Islamize Egypt” or “brotherize” the bureaucracy—they simply did not have the
power or the time to commit the outrages of which they were so roundly accused.
What they did was less important than what they represented: a counter-elite
with a different value system and a threatening alternative to the old liberal
and military establishments. Their own missteps made it easier for the military
and the deep state to engineer their downfall, but a competent, well-managed
government led by the Muslim Brotherhood would have been even more threatening
to the old political elite and military.
That elite must share responsibility
for the revolution’s failure. Weighed down by a sense of class entitlement, it
made little effort to fight for popular support, the sine
qua non for success in a democratic system.
Instead, from the beginning its leaders complained of the unfairness of
elections held before they had time to organize. Time was not their major
problem, however. Secularists were divided and disorganized before the 2012
parliamentary elections, but they were still that way when Morsi called for new
elections in April 2013. Indeed, they appeared to be just as riven by personal
rivalries among competing leaders and just as disorganized in the run-up to the planned 2015 parliamentary elections.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who emerged at
various time as the great hope of Egyptian secularists, stands out as an apt
symbol of the old elite’s political failings. He refused to run for president
on the ground that Egypt was insufficiently democratic, but did little to make
it more democratic. Nor did he seem upset when his supporters tried
unsuccessfully to convince the military to name him president, skipping elections.
He launched the Destour Party but also did little to build it into a viable
force. After the July 2013 military takeover, he readily accepted an
appointment as El-Sisi’s vice president. But ElBaradei resigned six weeks
later, after the military dispersed pro-Morsi demonstrators in Cairo at a high
cost in lives—Human Rights Watch reports that
at least 817 were killed—apparently appalled by the violence that had been
predictable ever since his appointment. Whatever ElBaradei’s commitment to
democracy in theory, he was never ready to lead secularists in the hard
struggle to make it a reality and was all too ready to accept unelected high
positions in government.
The overwhelming
victory of Islamist parties in the 2012 parliamentary and presidential
elections doomed the revolution. Afterward, any hope for an Islamic-secular
governing coalition such as evolved in Tunisia vanished, and polarization
between the two opposing forces became unstoppable. No interposing third force
emerged to mediate between Islamists and military, reflecting the persistent
inability of secularists to get their own house in order. The failure of
leadership on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood, secularists, and revolutionary
youth made the return to military rule inevitable.
David
Ottaway is a senior scholar at
the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars. For thirty-five years, he worked for the Washington Post as a foreign
correspondent in the Middle East, Africa, and Southern Europe and later as a
national security and investigative reporter in Washington. He is the author,
most recently, of The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia. His forthcoming book
is entitled Anatomy of the Arab Revolution.
Marina
Ottaway is a senior scholar at
the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
and a long-time analyst of political transformations in Africa, the Balkans,
and the Middle East. She spent fourteen years at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. She is the author of numerous books, including Democracy Challenged: The
Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism; Africa’s
New Leaders: Democracy or State Reconstruction?; and South Africa: The Struggle for a New Order.