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Egypt

How Egypt’s el-Sisi out-Nassered (and out-Sabahi’ed) Sabahi

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There’s not a lot of doubt about the outcome of Egypt’s May 26-27 presidential elections.egypt_flag_new

Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, the former army chief and defense minister who orchestrated the coup that toppled Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in July 2013, is the wide frontrunner in what will be the eighth national election — including constitution referenda and presidential and parliamentary elections — since the fall of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

While there’s plenty of time to speculate about how el-Sisi will govern Egypt as its ‘civilian’ president, he still faces nominal opposition in the form of his only challenger, Hamdeen Sabahi.

Back in May 2012, Sabahi quite nearly made his way into the presidential runoff, and he actually won the greatest share of the vote in Cairo, the Egyptian capital. Though no one expected him to emerge as a major candidate, he slowly became a leading player in the campaign.

Unlike Morsi, he was a secular candidate, so there would be no risk that Sabahi would have turned Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون), which largely happened once Morsi eventually won the president and took office.

Unlike Ahmed Shafiq, who unsuccessfully faced off against Morsi in the June 2012 runoff, Sabahi never served in the Mubarak administration, and so couldn’t be counted among the felool — or remnants — of the old regime. Rather, Sabahi was as a liberal activist and Mubarak critic in the 1990s and 2000s. During the Tahrir protests, he was on the front lines, urging Mubarak’s fall. 

But more fundamentally, Sabahi seemed to capture the kind of nationalist spirit most often associated with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s internationally renowned president in the 1950s. Like Nasser, Sabahi is a nationalist and a leftist and Sabahi campaigned on a ‘neo-Nasserite’ platform that included a fiercely independent Egyptian foreign policy and programs to alleviate poverty and unemployment. Though Egypt remains the world’s largest Arab country, it’s no longer the cultural, financial and political engine of the Arab world that it was during the Nasser era, but Sabahi’s 2012 campaign tapped into the same sense of Egyptian pride in the same way as the 2011 revolution centered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which culminated with the fall of Mubarak’s 30-year regime.

There’s almost no doubt that in a runoff against either Morsi or Shafiq, Sabahi would have easily won the presidency. Ultimately, Morsi won 24.8%, Shafiq won 23.7%, and Sabahi won just 20.7%, leaving Egyptians with a gruesome choice between a Muslim Brotherhood lackey and a Mubarak-era air force general.

Sabahi, like many liberals, reluctantly endorsed Morsi. Also like many liberals, he initially supported military intervention against the Morsi administration in June 2013, with Morsi and his Brotherhood allies pushing the boundaries of Egyptian democracy and constitutionalism.

Unfortunately for Sabahi, he isn’t the Nasser of the 2014 presidential election.

Sabahi isn’t even the ‘Sabahi’ of the race anymore.

That’s el-Sisi.  Continue reading How Egypt’s el-Sisi out-Nassered (and out-Sabahi’ed) Sabahi →

14 in 14, Egypt

14 in 2014: Egypt referendum, parliamentary and presidential elections

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2. Egypt parliamentary and presidential elections, spring and summer 2014.egypt_flag_new

Egypt will attempt to hit the reset button once again in 2014, beginning with a constitutional referendum on January 14 and 15.  If the referendum passes, the new constitutional reforms provide that acting president Adly Mansour must hold either a presidential or parliamentary elections within three months, with the other election to follow within another three months.

But after the July 2013 coup that ousted Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first elected president, there’s no assurance that the elections will be a fair reflection of the will of the Egyptian electorate.  After a brutal crackdown on pro-Morsi protestors reminiscent of the worst abuses of the authoritarian regime of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the military interim government branded the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, Morsi (pictured above) remains jailed pending charges for murder and other crimes, and other top Muslim Brotherhood officials are also imprisoned.

There’s no real assurance that the pro-Morsi Freedom and Justice Party (حزب الحرية والعدالة‎), the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, will even be permitted to participate in the elections.  It could also mean that Islamist voters of all shades turn to the more conservative, Salafist Al-Nour Party (حزب النور‎, Arabic for ‘Party of the Light’) or to other more radical Islamist groups that have, since July 2013, worked in tandem with the current military regime.  Other secular groups, like the National Salvation Front (جبهة الإنقاذ الوطني‎) of Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who briefly served as the interim vice president of the military government, could win seats, but secular liberals failed in the two previous parliamentary elections in 2011 and 2012 to make a breakthrough.  The Tamarod (تـمـرد‎ ) movement, which powered significant protests against Morsi in June 2013 and which supports the current regime, could also emerge as a more permanent player.

But the most likely result could be the coronation of Egypt’s powerful army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi as the country’s new president, who ironically came to power when Morsi himself appointed him to the role in August 2012.  Hamdeen Sabahi, a nationalist liberal who placed third in the May 2012 presidential election, is expected to wage a strong campaign as well.  Since the February 2011 Arab Spring revolts that brought down Mubarak’s regime, political tumult has complicated the economic outlook for Egypt, where a youthful population continues to grapple with too few employment opportunities.

NEXT: South Africa

Algeria, Egypt

Egypt 2013 is not Algeria 1991 (whew!), but that’s bad news for Egyptian democracy

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Among the groups that wield real power in Egypt, democracy turns out to be not so incredibly popular.Algeria_Flag_Iconegypt_flag_new

No matter what U.S. secretary of state John Kerry says and no matter what Egypt’s army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi (pictured above) believes, the military effort to push Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, from office was hardly a lesson in preserving democracy.  Militaries in healthy democracies, Middle Eastern or otherwise, do not respond to public protests by ousting elected governments.

But Morsi, by pushing through a new constitution without ample debate last December and attempting to assume near-dictatorial powers in order to do so, and more recently trying to stack the ranks of Egypt’s regional governments with rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood members, showed that he also lacked enthusiasm for civic participation.

What’s happening in Egypt today is starting to resemble a revolutionary moment less and less.  Instead, it looks more like the same cat-and-mouse game that the powerful Egyptian military (and the ever-lurking, so-called ‘deep state’), with ties to the United States and a knack for secular realpolitik, has been playing with the today-confrontational, tomorrow-conciliatory Muslim Brotherhood for decades.

In short, Egypt 2013 looks a lot like Egypt 2003. Or 1993. Or even 1973.  The Muslim Brotherhood and the countervailing political-military structure have been repeating the same game year after year, decade after decade.

That’s good news for those who are worrying that Egypt looks a lot like Algeria 1991 instead.

The Egypt-Algeria analogy looms ominously today, so it’s worth considering the similarities in some detail.  After nearly three decades of rule by the National Liberation Front (FLN, جبهة التحرير الوطني), the guerrilla-group-turned-ruling-party that once liberated Algeria from the French during the bloody war of independence in the 1950s and the early 1960s, Algerians had grown unruly over their country’s progress.  On the back of popular protests against Algeria’s government in 1989 over poor economic conditions, officials instituted local elections in 1990.  The surprise winner of those elections was the Islamic Salvation Front, a hastily constructed coalition of disparate Islamic elements.

When the Algerian government held national elections in December 1991 to elect a new parliament, the Islamic Salvation Front performed even better, winning 188 out of 231 seats in the first round of the election.  The Algerian military promptly canceled the second round of the elections and retroactively canceled the first round, to the relief of the ruling elite that comprised the Algerian pouvoir.  The decision also relieved diplomats in Paris and, especially, Washington, where policymakers on the cusp of winning the Cold War did not envision that the new pax Americana should involve landslide victories throughout the Muslim world for Islamic fundamentalists who had no real passion for democracy.  As Edward Djerejian scoffed at the time, a victory for the Islamists might amount to ‘one man, one vote, one time.’

The military quickly ousted Algeria’s 13-year ruler Chadli Bendjedid for good measure, then banned the Islamic Salvation Front and instituted military rule.

Sound familiar?

The comparison is particularly worrisome because Algeria’s Islamists fought back with full force and the country descended into a bloody civil war.  Although the military subdued what had become an Islamist guerrilla force by the end of the 1990s, strongman Abdelaziz Bouteflika took power in 1999, he remains in power (if not in great health) today, and Algeria has been a semi-authoritarian state ever since.  So much for Algeria’s short-lived foray into democracy.

But if there is reason to believe that Egypt is merely falling back into long-established familiar patterns between the military and the Islamists, which have tussled for years without escalating their differences into a full-fledged civil war, and that bodes well for Egypt’s short-term and medium-term stability.

Sure, the faces and the names have changed.  Hosni Mubarak’s sclerotic three-decade reign is firmly in the past, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi was forced into retirement, Omar Suleiman died, and Ahmed Shafiq lost the June 2012 presidential runoff to Morsi.  But a new coterie of secular and military power-brokers, like El-Sisi and newly enthroned vice president Mohamed ElBaradei have risen in their stead and maybe one day, nationalist neo-Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi and Ambien-variety Muslim democrats like Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh.  Egypt’s priority now is to keep either side from any radical lurches.  But as long as El-Sisi doesn’t launch a wholesale slaughter of Muslim Brotherhood protesters, it seems unlikely that Egypt could unravel into the kind of civil war that plagued Algeria for a decade.

The bad news is that doesn’t bode well for Egypt’s experiment in democracy over the past two years.   Continue reading Egypt 2013 is not Algeria 1991 (whew!), but that’s bad news for Egyptian democracy →

Egypt

El-Mursi Hegazy and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Egyptian Economy

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While most of the attention on Egypt in the past couple of months has been over constitutional battles — president Mohammed Morsi’s decree asserting extraordinary powers and a hastily called referendum on what’s now become Egypt’s constitution — it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the Egyptian economy has gone from bad to worse.egypt_flag_new

Indeed, since the initial Tahrir Square revolts began two years ago that ultimately pushed former president Hosni Mubarak out of office, the Egyptian economy has taken a backseat to more philosophical arguments about Egypt’s future and its governance.

But Egypt’s sclerotic economy remains, perhaps, a key ingredient in determining how Egypt’s political and constitutional debate will ultimately be resolved, and it’s probably one of the most important issues that U.S. and international policymakers should be watching as they try to discern what’s happening in Egypt and in the Middle East more broadly.

So with the third round of parliamentary elections in two years set for this spring, which will certainly feature another round of debate about the weighty issues of the role of Islamism in government, the relationship between the presidency and the Egyptian army, the separation of powers in Egyptian government, and the freedoms and rights that should be granted to Egyptians, Morsi’s cabinet reshuffle over the weekend is an opportunity to remember that Egypt’s economic condition will feature prominently as well.

Morsi replaced 10 of the cabinet members (retaining the current prime minister Hisham Qandil, a former minister for of water resources and irrigation), but the most important appointment was a new Egyptian finance minister after what’s been seen as a disappointing six months for Morsi and the Egyptian economy.

Al-Mursi Al-Sayed Hegazy, a professor of economics at Alexandria University and an expert on Islamic finance, will replace Momtaz El-Saeed, who had served as Egypt’s top financial officer since December 2011 and who had served as a budget undersecretary in the finance ministry during the Mubarak era.  We don’t know much more about him other than that, although any change is probably a good sign, given the horrific state of Morsi’s economic policy.

Although Hegazy doesn’t have ties to the old Mubarak regime, and he is seen as much closer to the Muslim Brotherhood (جماعة الاخوان المسلمين‎) than his predecessor, his selection is curious, because he’s not incredibly well-known, and certainly, not someone who would have immediately reassured international investors or the International Monetary Fund (in the way that, say, the appointment of Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of investment manager PIMCO would be).

At the top of Hegazy’s to-do list will be to secure a postponed IMF package for up to $4.8 billion in loans — the package was signed in November, but later postponed in December amid the political tumult surrounding the constitutional referendum.

That gives IMF managing director Christine Lagarde (pictured above in Egypt) incredible influence over the Egyptian economy, and it means that the tax increases that Morsi had been preparing before December, not to mention additional austerity measures, are all but certain to be enacted.  With parliamentary elections expected in April, I’m not sure we can really depend on austerity measures being implemented too soon.

On the other hand, if the IMF deal isn’t sealed shortly, Egypt’s economy could face a meltdown that would also harm Morsi and the Brotherhood, which will contest the upcoming elections through its Freedom and Justice Party (حزب الحرية والعدال).  With the country’s foreign reserves rapidly declining, Qatar provided a $2 billion loan to Egypt on Tuesday, with an additional grant of $500 million in immediate aid.  Qatar has taken the most active role in keeping Egypt afloat since the end of the Mubarak era — last September, it committed $8 billion for power, iron and steel investments at the northern end of the Suez Canal and $10 billion for additional tourism infrastructure.

For Morsi, the sweet spot is securing the IMF deal ASAP, with austerity measures expected to begin very shortly after the spring elections — he gets the institutional benefits of stabilizing Egypt’s economy without taking the politically painful steps that the IMF may ultimately require under the deal.

That timing may be fine with the IMF, though, so long as Morsi commits to raising additional revenue and other structural reforms shortly after the April elections.  Certainly, the IMF must realize that a deal will boost the chances for a more stable Egypt.   Continue reading El-Mursi Hegazy and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Egyptian Economy →

Egypt

Morsi’s Egypt spirals further into chaos with apparent Dec. 15 constitutional referendum

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It’s hard to believe that 10 days ago, Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi seemed firmly in control of events in the Arab world’s most populous country — he had just been instrumental in achieving a ceasefire between Palestinians in Gaza and Israel, and Egypt’s constituent assembly, despite some difficulties, was plodding its way toward the draft of a new constitution for a newly democratized nation.

Today, of course, Morsi stands at the most controversial point of his young presidency, defending the unilateral decree he announced on November 22 asserting extraordinary (if temporary) presidential powers, and hoping to push through a referendum in just 12 days — on December 15 — over a constitution rushed out by the constituent assembly just last week.

Morsi announced the referendum over the weekend, which means there will be no shortage of tumult in the days and weeks ahead.

I’ve not written much about the latest political crisis in Egypt, the latest act in what seems like an unending drama that began with the Tahrir Square protests in January 2011 that pushed longtime Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak from office, through over a year of military rule by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the 2011 parliamentary elections and their subsequent cancellation, even more parliamentary elections and their (second) disqualification, and a roller-coaster presidential election that ended with Morsi’s narrow victory over former Air Force commander Ahmed Shafiq on June 24.

Morsi, just over five months into his tenure as Egypt’s president, has argued that the decree is necessary to safeguard Egypt’s strides toward democracy, and if he wins his latest gambit, he’ll have pushed Egypt from the post-revolutionary phase into something more enduring, although at the cost of an Egyptian constitution that remains incredibly controversial and at the risk of having enacted it in a manner entirely inconsistent with democratic norms and the rule of law.

Pro-revolutionary forces took to Tahrir Square last week once again in opposition to Morsi, and pro-Islamist forces counter-protested over the weekend in favor of Morsi.  But with now, apparently, less than two weeks to go until the constitutional referendum, it’s worth taking a look at where each of the key players in the unfolding events stand.   Continue reading Morsi’s Egypt spirals further into chaos with apparent Dec. 15 constitutional referendum →

Egypt

Early returns indicate a likely Morsi-Shafiq runoff

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UPDATE: 11:25 a.m. Cairo time.  With nearly 20 million votes counted, it looks like Morsi is leading with 26.9% and Shafiq is second with 24.2%. Sabahi is in third place with 19.4%, Aboul Fatouh is close behind with 17.9%, and Moussa lags far in fifth place with 11.2%.

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It’s still not official, Giza and Cairo returns are yet to be counted, and early returns are just that — early — but it’s looking increasingly like the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohammed Morsi has done fairly well, and that his opponent in the June runoff could well be Hosni Mubarak’s former prime minister and Air Force commander and civil aviation minister Ahmed Shafiq after a first round that could see any of five candidates emerge for the June 16-17 runoff.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been increasingly confident as the counting has gotten underway — even in a country like Egypt, which is undergoing its first free and fair presidential election in history, campaigns generally are not this cocky unless they are pretty certain of victory.

If indeed Shafiq is headed for a top-two finish, it would explain why former Arab League secretary-general and former Mubarak foreign minister Amr Moussa picked such an odd fight with Shafiq, calling for Shafiq to drop out of the race in the middle of the two-day voting window.  In essence, Moussa may have been trying an 11th hour to paint Shafiq as the true ‘felool’ candidate of the race — the ‘remnants’ of the Mubarak era, attempting to undermine his voter base at the last minute.

As Ian Black wrote earlier for The Guardian, this is sort of a worst-case scenario for Egypt, a runoff between a ‘felool’ Mubarak deep-state retread versus the most conservative Islamist (and Muslim Brotherhood-approved) candidate in the race:

Mubarak’s last prime minister and former commander of the air force is described pejoratively by opponents as the “fuloul” – regime remnant – candidate. This run-off is the nightmare scenario because many people hate both men. A contest between them would be a highly polarised choice that would take Egyptians back to the bad old days before the revolution. The Brotherhood would mobilise massively behind Morsi, with the army and police supporting Shafiq. Violence would be highly likely to erupt. Abstention rates would soar.

A Morsi-Shafiq runoff would remind me of the Peruvian election in 2011, when leftist Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori (daughter of the former Peruvian dictator) advanced to the second round runoff, while moderates Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alejandro Toledo and Luis Castañeda split the moderate vote.  Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s Nobel laureate, likened it to a choice “between AIDS and cancer.”

If Egypt is indeed headed for a Morsi-Shafiq runoff, I think it indicates that we would have been otherwise seeing a runoff between two even more controversial candidates, had they not been disqualified in May: former Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Mubarak’s vice president in the final days of February 2011, and Salafist preacher Hazem Abu Ismail or perhaps even the Muslim Brotherhood’s first presidential candidate Khairat al-Shater.  Suleiman would have appealed to the same “security first” voters that Shafiq has attracted.  Abu Ismail was, as Morsi is now, the most conservative Islamist in the race — Abu Ismail was, in fact, much more conservative than al-Shater — in the same way, Morsi is a more conservative Islamist than his rival Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, (forget for a moment that Aboul Fotouh, confusingly, has been endorsed by the more conservative Salafist Al-Nour Party and not by the relatively more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, of which he was a member until just last year).

In any event, a Morsi-Shafiq runoff would indicate that the May 15 disqualifications were the absolute pivotal turning point in the presidential race, for what it’s worth.

It would also indicate that, despite Egyptian frustration with the parliament’s dithering after January elections that saw the Brotherhood win nearly half of the parliament’s seats, the Brotherhood is clearly the most potent and organized political force in Egypt today.  Morsi is neither the most charismatic nor the most accomplished candidate in the race — if he emerges not only in the runoff, but as the top choice in the first round, it will indicate that the Brotherhood has even more impressive organization and political muscle than we thought.

Egypt

Egypt runoff: who is Ahmed Shafiq?

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If vote counts continue on their current course, Ahmed Shafiq, 71, will finish in second place in the first round of the Egyptian presidential election with around 24% of the vote, thereby vaunting him into a runoff with the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohammed Morsi.

Shafiq, among the top five candidate vying for the Egyptian presidency, is the most ‘felool’ — the ‘remnants’  associated with the former Mubarak regime.  A senior commander in the Egyptian air force dating back to the days of the Sadat era, Shafiq served as commander of Egypt’s Air Force from 1996 to 2002.  Thereupon, he served as the minister of civil aviation from 2002 to 2011.

He was Mubarak’s final prime minister as well, having been appointed at the end of January 2011 in response to the Tahrir Square protests against Mubarak’s rule.

As such, he is seen not only as the premier ‘felool’ candidate, but also the favored candidate of the Egyptian army, and the favored candidate of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces that has governed Egypt during its transition since the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.  He is seen as the stand-in, in many ways, to Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s longtime intelligence chief and Mubarak’s final vice president.  Either one, in a runoff against an Islamist, must certainly represent the “deep state” of Egyptian public life. Continue reading Egypt runoff: who is Ahmed Shafiq? →

Egypt

Egypt runoff: Who is Mohammed Morsi?

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UPDATE 6/24/12: Follow the latest on the Egyptian runoff results here.

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It appears that Mohammed Morsi, 60, the candidate of the Freedom and Justice Party — the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood — has placed first in the first round of Egypt’s May presidential election with around 27% of the vote. 

So, who is Morsi? What does his success mean for Egypt? And what are his chances in the runoff? Continue reading Egypt runoff: Who is Mohammed Morsi? →

Egypt

Abdoul Fatouh v. Moussa v. Morsi v. Sabahi v. Shafiq: five vie for two runoff slots in unpredictable Egyptian race

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Egyptians go to the polls today and tomorrow to cast votes in a presidential election unprecedented in not only Egypt, but the Middle East.

Since the disqualification of three of the top candidates just one month ago, the bumpy race has settled into a vibe that has electrified the 82 million citizens of the world’s largest Arab nation, the latest and, perhaps, greatest act in a drama that began with the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that led to the downfall of longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. 

Polls have shown any number of candidates in the lead, and two weeks ago, two of the presumed frontrunners, Amr Moussa (above, right) and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh (above, left), sparred in Egypt’s first-ever presidential debate.  But they are not the only candidates with a chance to win the presidency.

The truth is that, for all the interest — both in Egypt and abroad — no one knows who will emerge as Egypt’s next president (which is in itself a fascinating statement on the success Egypt’s democratic transition).  The only safe prediction is that this week’s vote will result in no candidate winning over 50% of the vote, necessitating a runoff among the top two winners on June 16 and 17.

Any of the top five candidates could advance to the runoff — including also Mohammed Morsi, Hamdeen Sabahi and Ahmed Shafiq: Continue reading Abdoul Fatouh v. Moussa v. Morsi v. Sabahi v. Shafiq: five vie for two runoff slots in unpredictable Egyptian race →