Tag Archives: morsi

Thailand, Ukraine

What protesters in Ukraine and Thailand are getting wrong

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The political crises in both Ukraine and Thailand took a turn for the severe last week, as government police forces clashed with protesters with even greater violence.  But what do the protesters want in each country — and can the protests, even if successful, bring stability?  Ukraine Flag Iconthailand

Amnesty: the root cause of the Thai protests

In Thailand, a country of 66.8 million people, anti-government protesters took to the streets in November (pictured above, top) after Thai president Yingluck Shinawatra tried to introduce an amnesty bill that would absolve both her supporters and opposition leaders from the worst charges, including murder, that spring from the political violence that’s engulfed Thailand sporadically throughout the last decade.  The bill died in the Ratthasapha (National Assembly of Thailand, รัฐสภา) after all sides turned against it.  Yingluck’s party, the dominant Pheu Thai Party (PTP, ‘For Thais’ Party, พรรคเพื่อไทย), the third iteration of the party Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, founded in 2001 when he came to power, didn’t want to absolve the sins of their adversaries.  The opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์) opposed the amnesty bill because they feared it would mean the return of Thaksin from seven years in self-exile.

Though Yingluck won the July 2011 parliamentary elections on a promise to de-escalate tensions in Thailand, the amnesty has brought the country back to the familiar standoff between the pro-Thaksin ‘red shirts’ and the anti-Thaksin ‘yellow shirts.’ 

EU relations: the root cause of the Ukrainian ‘Euromaidan’ protests

In Ukraine, a country of 45.5 million people, pro-European protesters also took their grievances to the streets in late November (pictured above, bottom) after president Viktor Yanukovych pulled out of an association agreement that would have engendered closer cooperation between the European Union and Ukraine.  Initially, the protests, centered on Maidan Square in the capital city of Kiev, assumed the form of the familiar political struggle between the Europe-oriented, Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russia-oriented, Russian-speaking east, which featured prominently in the 2004 ‘orange revolution’ against fraudulent elections that powered Viktor Yushchenko to power.

Yushchenko ended his presidential term massively unpopular, with his pro-Western allies fracturing into various camps, and in the February 2010 presidential race, the pendulum swung back to the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who defeated the EU-friendly former prime minister Yuila Tymoshenko (by 2010, a Yushchenko ally-turned-foe).  For much, much more background, here’s Max Fisher’s explainer today at The Washington Post.

In both cases, the protests have transcended their original rationales, and they now threaten to topple governments in both Kiev and Bangkok. What’s more, Yingluck and Yanukovych haven’t responded incredibly well to the protests. Continue reading What protesters in Ukraine and Thailand are getting wrong →

Egypt

Mubarakization watch: Egypt referendum results

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For the record, the results of last week’s constitutional referendum are in — voters approved Egypt’s new constitution by a margin of 98.13% to 1.87%, though on a turnout of just 38.6%. egypt_flag_new

With the opponents of the new constitution boycotting the vote, including the supporters of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the lopsided margin makes some sense.  The turnout was higher than the 32.9% recorded for the December 2012 constitutional referendum hastily organized to approve the Islamist-friendly constitution promulgated by former president Mohammed Morsi, and it’s only a little lower than the 41.9% turnout in the March 2011 constitutional referendum when optimism ran highest after the collapse of the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.

But it’s not a great sign for Egyptian democracy that such wide majorities endorsed two very contradictory visions for Egypt’s constitution within the same 13-month period.  It’s also not a great sign that the ‘July 3’ regime, the military government that ousted Morsi last summer and headed by interim president Adly Mansour and defense minister and armed forces chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, dispersed and harassed opponents of the new constitution in the days leading up to the vote.  By most accounts, the current government hasn’t been as heavy-handed as the Mubarak regime in the 2005 and 2010 votes, which amounted to show elections, but that’s setting the standard for Mansour and El-Sisi fairly low.

Amnesty International on Wednesday harshly condemned the military regime’s use of force and the infringement of human rights since taking power seven months ago.  The interim government has repeatedly used lethal force to break up protests, largely in support of the Morsi regime.  In a world where the government continues to refuse to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to compete freely and fairly, though, a cloud of doubt will hang over not only the constitutional referendum, but the next two sets of elections.

It’s worth noting that the new constitution marks an improvement in some areas over the 2012 constitution that Morsi pushed through (after initially trying to take dictatorial powers in November 2012) — it theoretically holds Egypt to the standard of international treaties on human rights, takes a zero-tolerance approach to torture, reduces the role of Islam in governance, and improves women’s rights and the rights of religious minorities.

So what comes next?   Continue reading Mubarakization watch: Egypt referendum results →

Egypt

Egypt’s constitutional referendum enshrines re-Mubarakization

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10.69 million.egypt_flag_new

That’s the number of the Egyptians who voted to ratify Egypt’s new constitution in December 2012 — at 68.8% of the electorate, it constituted more than enough votes to enact it, thereby promulgating the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist vision of constitution reform in the world’s largest Arab country a new constitution.

The turnout in the March 2011 constitutional referendum was even higher.  In that vote, 14.2 million Egyptians (77.3% of the electorate) approved changes to the previous constitution that were designed to launch a more democratic and representative government by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that effectively took control after the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

So as Egyptians vote today (and tomorrow), it will be the third such post-Mubarak constitutional referendum.

It’s the first vote since the July 2013 military coup that pushed Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first elected president, from power.  Its passage is all but assured, in light of the arrest or dispersion of many opponents of the new constitution:

“I am telling them, they will be faced with force, decisiveness and strength never seen before,” interior minister Mohammed Ibrahim said on state TV on Monday. “Everyone rest assured, we are watching your back”… State television showed Ibrahim on Monday inspecting some of the 350,000 police and army personnel, including special forces and paratroopers backed by armored vehicles and helicopters, currently being deployed to streets across the country to secure the polls and encourage a high turnout.

That’s not the most reassuring statement that the referendum will be an incredibly free and fair election.  Nonetheless, the referendum is seen as the first step in a series of elections that will mark Egypt’s ‘transition’ from military rule to a more lasting democracy.  The current atmosphere augurs poorly for future elections set to take place later this year.  Under the constitutional reforms, Egypt’s interim government will have three months from the date of the new constitution’s enactment to call either parliamentary or presidential elections, with the other elections to follow within six months from the date of enactment.  That means by the summer, Egypt should have both an elected president and an elected legislature.

Despite a genuinely robust marketplace of political actors in Egypt today, the constitutional process seems less like a real transition than a stitch-up for Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to become Egypt’s next president.  El-Sisi (pictured above), who’s currently the minister defense and head of the armed forces, last week indicated he is edging ever closer to a formal run for the Egyptian presidency later this year.  While El-Sisi is a charismatic figure with genuine popularity throughout Egypt, it’s hard to believe that he represents much more than Mubarak 2.0 — a strongman willing to sustain a crackdown on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

More troubling is that hardly anyone in the past three regimes — the initial post-Mubarak SCAF government, the Islamist Morsi government, or the current military government — have prioritized Egypt’s crumbling economy.  Poor employment options for a young populace and stagnant economic growth were factors in the initial 2011 protests, but the economic situation has worsened over the past three years as Egypt’s political crisis has deepened.

El-Sisi’s closest competition — and perhaps the greatest hope for a civilian Egyptian government in 2014 — is Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist, nationalist, neo-Nasserite figure who rose to prominence in the 2012 presidential election.  Though Sabahi actually won the highest number of votes in Cairo, he very narrowly trailed the two frontrunners, Morsi and former air force commander Ahmed Shafiq, thereby missing the subsequent runoff.  Sabahi, who formed the Egyptian Popular Current (التيار الشعبي المصري) in 2012, has allied with the wider umbrella group of secular liberals, the National Salvation Front (جبهة الإنقاذ الوطني‎) that’s headed by Mohamed ElBaradei.  Sabahi firmly opposed Morsi and initially supported Morsi’s removal, but he’s also indicated that he believes El-Sisi should remain within the military.  Given El-Sisi’s rising popularity and control of the current government, it’s difficult to know if Sabahi (or anyone for that matter) has the political power to defeat the general if he progresses with a presidential bid.

Most immediately, the constitutional reforms expected to be promulgated in this week’s plebiscite are wide-ranging (here’s a piece by Bassem Sabry outlining 29 key provisions), and they’re not necessarily all for the worst: Continue reading Egypt’s constitutional referendum enshrines re-Mubarakization →

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

Saudi Arabia, United Nations

Why Saudi Arabia gave up its non-permanent Security Council seat

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On Friday, just one day after it was awarded a non-permanent, two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council, Saudi Arabia abruptly announced to the world that it was rejecting the seat, much to the bafflement and diplomatic dismay of the rest of the world.saudi_flag_iconUN

It’s unprecedented for a country to make a years-long effort to win a non-permanent seat, only to turn around a day later to renounce the seat.

The Saudis denounced the Security Council’s inability to act in the Middle East and called for reform:

The manner, the mechanisms of action and double standards existing in the Security Council prevent it from performing its duties and assuming its responsibilities toward preserving international peace and security as required,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Allowing the ruling regime in Syria to kill its people and burn them with chemical weapons in front of the entire world and without any deterrent or punishment is clear proof and evidence of the U.N. Security Council’s inability to perform its duties and shoulder its responsibilities.”

Security Council reform is long overdue, but it’s hard to see the Saudis becoming the poster child for political reform in Turtle Bay.

So what gives?

Commentators pointed to several immediate reasons.  The Saudis are angry that US president Barack Obama failed to hold steady in his threat to use military force against Syria.  The Saudis are upset that the United States recently cut off military aid to Egypt’s new, undemocratic government.  The Saudis are worried that the recent steps toward better relations with Iran could mean that the United States places less importance its longtime strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia.

But none of those really give us a full explanation — the Syria showdown was two months ago, and the Saudis would have more influence on the process to rid Syria of chemical weapons from within the Security Council than outside it.  Furthermore, they could use their vote on the Security Council for the next two years as leverage to curry favor with the United States.  And in the ‘P5 + 1’ talks with Iran, Saudi Arabia would certainly have a more central role if it were sitting on the Security Council while Iran struck a deal with the international community.

Eric Voeten, writing at The Monkey Cage, now at home at The Washington Post, argues that Saudi Arabia’s approach to diplomacy has long been a backdoor, behind-the-scenes affair, and that doesn’t fit well with the high profile of sitting on the Security Council: Continue reading Why Saudi Arabia gave up its non-permanent Security Council seat →

Syria, United States

On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later

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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gives a

Even before the United States has provided any public evidence that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is responsible for what appears to be a craven chemical warfare attack in Ghouta last Wednesday, the United States is preparing to launch missile strikes against Syria and Assad in retaliation as soon as Thursday, with the support of French president François Hollande and British prime minister David Cameron.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

That marks a failure of U.S. president Barack Obama’s foreign policy in at least four senses.

The first is that we still don’t know what happened last Wednesday.  We do know that a chemical attack of some variety ultimately killed many civilians, up to 1300, on the eastern outskirts of Damascus.  But we don’t know which chemical agent caused it (was it sarin? was it concentrated tear gas? was it mustard or chlorine gas?) and, more importantly, we certainly don’t know who launched the attack.  While the U.S., French and British governments assure us that Assad was responsible, the public evidence is far from certain.  While the U.S. state department claims that a full intelligence assessment is coming later this week, it assures us for now that it’s ‘crystal clear’ that Assad is responsible.  But how credible will that assessment be if it’s delivered hours or minutes before a U.S. military strike?  If it’s delivered after the military strike?  Will it contain forensics evidence gathered yesterday by United Nations experts?  No one knows.

While Assad’s certainly a prime suspect, there’s more than enough reason to believe, in the absence of further intelligence or forensic evidence to the contrary, that anti-Assad rebels could well have perpetrated the attack to frame Assad and draw the international community (or at least the United States and Europe) into the kind of response that now seems likely to happen in the next 48 hours.  At a minimum, the United States should wait for U.N. chemical weapons inspectors, who spent at least a short time on the scene of the attack yesterday, to draw what conclusions they can on the basis of hard evidence.  What happens if we learn in one year or five years that radical Sunni elements within the opposition were responsible for the attack?  That will only encourage false-flag attacks in the future designed to provoke the United States into inadvertently taking sides in a civil war.

The second is that it’s an uncharacteristically unilateral, hasty and severe response.  Assume that we had proof that Assad is responsible for the chemical attacks.  The next step would be to determine the appropriate response from the international community, and it is telling that the United States and its British and French allies believe that a military response should be the first step, not the last step.  There’s a panoply of various responses that the United States is ready to bypass, all of which could bear the stamp of legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council.  Those include a U.N. peacekeeping and/or further inspections forces, a NATO-led and UN-approved no-fly zone, a tighter regime of diplomatic and economic sanctions against the Assad regime, and a prosecution against Assad and his military leaders for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.  Moreover, given the current stalemate, Syria is now essentially split into three disparate parts: pro-Assad territory along the coast and the Lebanese border, anti-Assad territory in the north and Kurdish strongholds in the northeast:

Main areas of control in Syria as of 3 June 2013

With Assad regaining ground over the past months, it doesn’t look like the end of the civil war will come from a military triumph but from a political settlement.  That makes an immediate military response (and not a political response) from the United States even more inappropriate.  By all means, use the threat of military action as a negotiating point with Russia and Syria’s other allies on the Security Council.  But by launching a hasty attack just eight days after the incident makes it seem to the rest of the world that the U.S. action is less concerned about punishment for chemical warfare, but rather salvaging the credibility of the Obama administration over an ill-advised ‘red line’ stand that Obama articulated last autumn in the heat of a presidential campaign. Continue reading On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later →

Egypt

Egyptian massacre, ‘state of emergency’ mocks Arab Spring with return to Mubarak-era tactics

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In slaughtering civilian protesters and declaring a one-month ‘state of emergency,’ the Egyptian military’s interim government is falling back on the methods of former president Hosni Mubarak’s three decades in power that amounted to one, long 30-year state of emergency.egypt_flag_new

If you did not harbor any doubts about the nature of the interim government before today’s massacre, you should now — even state officials agree that at least 149 people have been killed in today’s violence, but the Muslim Brotherhood believes up to 800 people have been killed, and anecdotes from journalists also suggest more fatalities than the official count.  Egypt’s liberal interim vice president, Mohamed ElBaradei resigned earlier today in the aftermath of what can only be described as a systemic nationwide assault against the supporters of deposed president Mohammed Morsi.

Even by the interim government’s standards, the violence perpetuated today far exceeds the two most violent days of the post-Morsi era — on July 8, when the army fired on Morsi supporters in Cairo, and on July 27, when the army killed 80 Morsi supporters.

At each juncture, as the military has escalated the violence against the Brotherhood, it has only narrowed the path toward a political settlement.

But Morsi didn’t kill hundreds of protesters, despite his vast shortcomings, and the surest way to engender solidarity between Egypt’s liberals and Morsi’s supporters (which barely seemed thinkable six weeks ago) is for the Egyptian military to start massacring innocent civilians.  The wiser course would have been to get on with the business of repairing Egypt’s economic infrastructure and preparing the country for yet another round of elections while ignoring what were certain to become dwindling protests in favor of a president who long ago lost the confidence of the vast majority of Egyptians — an imperfect course, but one that envisions a speedy return to ‘normal’ politics.

Today’s bloodshed has pushed that return to ‘normal’ politics far off into the distance, giving Egypt a regime that’s, in substance, the second coming of the Mubarak era, ‘states of emergency’ and all.

U.S. secretary of state John Kerry must certainly regret his words earlier this month when he remarked that the military government was ‘restoring democracy’ in the post-Morsi era.  In the United States, president Barack Obama has strongly criticized the violence, but it’s worth wondering just what influence the Obama administration has had in failing to rein in the Egyptian military’s excess today.  Egyptian army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel have talked often since July 3 when Egyptian military forces detained Morsi and declared an interim government, even as most of official Washington spent the past six weeks wringing its hands over the peripheral question of whether the U.S. government should label Morsi’s ouster a coup.  Though the result of designation El-Sisi’s coup a ‘coup’ for U.S. legal purposes would be to strip the Egyptian military of U.S. aid, it should be a blinding glimpse of the obvious by now that the aid Egypt’s military receives from other Gulf nations now outweighs U.S. aid, and U.S. support is clearly not sufficient to bend the Egyptian government’s actions to American will.

But in a familiar pattern, the interim government is becoming more isolated, much like the Morsi administration and the Mubarak regime before it.  The interim government long ago lost the hesitant support of the conservative Salafist movement, an even more pro-sharia group than the Brotherhood.  It has now lost ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the most prominent of several liberal leaders within the National Salvation Front (جبهة الإنقاذ الوطني‎), and one of the most respected Egyptian voices abroad.

So tragic as today’s massacre has been, it’s no surprise that Egypt looks today more like one of the repressive Gulf states, like Bahrain, and less like a liberal democracy.  Morsi remains in detention, and former prime minister Hesham Qandil and other top Brotherhood leaders remain in prison.  Transitional president Adly Mansour still has not set a timetable for new elections, and it is hard to know just how free and fair any elections can be when one power base within Egypt has declared a state of emergency to hunt out, disperse and kill supporters of another power base within Egypt.  Certainly the lesson that Islamists in Egypt have taken from the Morsi episode is to mistrust democracy as a legitimate tool of governance — it’s not the end of political Islam, in Egypt or elsewhere in the Arab world, but it remains to be seen just how much Muslim Brotherhood supporters should trust promises of free elections in Egypt’s near future.

Despite today’s horrific violence, it is still too early to throw around louche analogies to Algeria 1991 and fret that Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, will slip into a civil war.  More likely, the Egyptian military will continue to assert control, obviously though violent and repressive means as necessary and, elections or not, Egypt 2013 will come to look more like Egypt 1993 than anything else.  The best-case scenario now seems to be a kind of neo-Kemalist system where Egypt’s military returns to elections, but takes a strong hand in ‘guaranteeing’ democracy by knocking down Islamist governments that become too aggressive.  Continue reading Egyptian massacre, ‘state of emergency’ mocks Arab Spring with return to Mubarak-era tactics →

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

Why the ultraconservative Salafi movement is now the key constituency in post-Morsi Egypt

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alnour

With a level of speed breathtaking even for an Egyptian political crisis, the Egyptian military’s role has soured in record time since removing Mohammed Morsi from office last week.egypt_flag_new

On Monday, the Egyptian army gunned down protestors in favor of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, apparently killing at least 51 people in the process.  That came after top Muslim Brotherhood leaders had been detained or arrested in the wake of Morsi’s ouster.  It also comes after the new military-backed administration, headed by interim president Adly Mansour, all but announced (then all but retracted) the appointment of Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as the country’s new prime minister over the weekend.

Both the short-lived ElBaradei appointment and Monday’s brutality have now alienated one of the most surprisingly odd bedfellows out of the coalition that initially supported army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in pushing Morsi from office — the Salafi movement’s Al-Nour Party (حزب النور‎, Arabic for ‘Party of the Light’), an even more conservative group of Islamists that have long competed with the Muslim Brotherhood for influence in Egypt.  Like other groups that have come to oppose Morsi over the past year, the Al-Nour Party has criticized Morsi for increasingly centralizing power within the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their backing for Morsi’s removal last week provided El-Sisi and the Egyptian military crucial support from within Islamist ranks.

But in the wake of Monday’s deaths, the Al-Nour Party announced that it was suspending its participation in the ongoing negotiations over Egypt’s political future.  Mansour has now signaled he may appoint Samir Radwan, a technocratic economist and short-lived finance minister in the final days of Hosni Mubarak’s government, as the new interim prime minister, and Mansour yesterday announced an ambitious timetable that would submit the Egyptian constitution to a review committee, submit any revisions to a constitutional referendum within three months, which in turn would be followed in two weeks by the election of a new Egyptian parliament and in three months by the election of a new Egyptian president.

Monday’s bloodshed has increased the pressure on Mansour to bring some semblance of calm to Egypt’s now-chaotic political crisis, with Morsi supporters and followers of the Muslim Brotherhood continuing to demand the restoration of the Morsi administration.

The Al-Nour Party’s leadership is walking a difficult line — on the one hand, it is now well-placed to influence events in post-Morsi Egypt; on the other hand, it’s long been split over how much support to provide Morsi as an Islamist president, some of its supporters opposed Morsi’s removal, and the Muslim Brotherhood will be quick to point out that the Al-Nour Party has turned on its fellow Islamists.  By initially supporting last week’s coup but turning on the new transitional government this week, the Salafists may be trying to maneuver the best of both worlds.  But after a year where the Al-Nour Party has already splintered, its controversial support for the Egyptian military may shatter it further.

But regardless of whether Mansour can somehow bring the Salafists back into the ongoing political process, and regardless of whether the actual Al-Nour Party can manage to form a united front, their Salafist supporters have now become the key constituency in the latest act of Egypt’s existential drama.  After decades of disdain for active politicking, the Salafi movement has shown itself to be a relatively canny political actor in the post-revolution Egypt, and it makes Al-Nour’s leader, Younes Makhioun (pictured above), one of Egypt’s most important politicians.

With the Muslim Brotherhood rejecting Mansour’s timetable and continuing to agitate for Morsi’s return, it’s not clear whether the Brotherhood and the Freedom and Justice Party will even participate in any upcoming elections, even if Mansour manages to avoid delays and carry out three sets of free and fair elections in the next six months. It’s likewise equally unclear whether El-Sisi and the Egyptian military will even let the Muslim Brotherhood contest the elections uninhibited.

Having avoided the taint of being part of Morsi’s ill-fated government and all of its failures — from the November 2012 push to force a new constitution into effect to the ongoing failures of economic policy — the Al-Nour Party stands a strong chance of picking up many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s disillusioned voters as an Islamist alternative.

So who are the Salafists and what would their rise mean for Egypt?  Continue reading Why the ultraconservative Salafi movement is now the key constituency in post-Morsi Egypt →

Egypt

ElBaradei set to become interim Egyptian prime minister in post-Morsi gamble for ‘reset’

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UPDATE: Egyptian officials are now distancing themselves from earlier reports that Mohamed ElBaradei will be Egypt’s next prime minister — that doesn’t incredibly change the analysis, though.  ElBaradei’s ties to the West, not to mention the other drawbacks mentioned below, help us understand why Egypt’s new military-backed government may have had second thoughts about ElBaradei, especially if they are hoping to bring Salafist Al-Nour Party leaders into the fold.

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Mohamed ElBaradei is set to become Egypt’s interim prime minister just four days after Mohammed Morsi was deposed as from the Egyptian presidency by the country’s armed forces.

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ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a well-known figure whose international credibility runs far deeper than that of newly-installed interim president Adly Mansour, formerly the chief justice of the Egyptian constitutional court.  His selection as prime minister will bring instant gravitas to the emerging post-Morsi regime in Egypt, at least vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

But deploying ElBaradei into power is not risk-free — for either the new government or for ElBaradei’s reputation.

The danger is that his selection won’t be enough to ameliorate the governance crisis that has now accelerated with the Egyptian military’s decision to remove Morsi.  After all, though Morsi’s government had few allies after its troubled year in office, it’s hard to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood still doesn’t command the largest bloc of supporters within Egypt, and their wrath at the military’s turn against the Muslim Brotherhood may not be soothed by the appointment of any caretaker, no matter his seniority or even-handedness.  ElBaradei’s appointment comes just a day after pro-Morsi supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood staged a day of protest — the ‘Friday of rejection’ — demanding the return of Morsi to the presidency that met with tense, sometimes violent, resistance from the Egyptian military.  It’s too early to predict that Egypt is descending into a kind of civil war — despite a troubling lynching of four Shi’a Muslims last month, the largely Sunni Egypt doesn’t really feature strong Sunni-Shi’a schisms that have propelled sectarian violence more recently in countries like Iraq and Syria, and most Egyptians, even its more conservative Islamists, hold the military in high regard, for now at least.  But there’s no guarantee that ElBaradei can keep political violence from spiraling further out of control, propelling ever more turmoil to Egyptian industry, trade and tourism.

Even if no one will miss the ineptitude of the Morsi government, ElBaradei’s new power doesn’t come imbued with much of a mandate.  Though Egypt’s post-Mubarak transition was troubled from its inception, the successful conduct of free and fair presidential elections last summer was a key milestone on Egypt’s road toward a more democratic state.  While it’s true that the anti-Morsi protests had ballooned to a size even larger than those against Mubarak in February 2011, the more relevant factor is that Mubarak was never elected in a free election the way that Morsi was only a year ago.  So while political scientists debate whether last week’s events amounted to a coup (spoiler: yes, of course it was a coup, even if the U.S. administration doesn’t use the word ‘coup’), ElBaradei and his military supporters will come to power having undermined the most visible democratic credential that Egyptians could boast since the Arab Spring began.

By contrast, though French president François Hollande remains incredibly unpopular after just one year into a five-year term,  no one seriously thinks the French military is set to remove him from office to install a center-right president in France.  Moreover, ElBaradei will become Egypt’s new leader after having pulled out of last year’s presidential race, and it was not entirely clear that ElBaradei would have won in any event.  But it would have been better for the country today if ElBaradei had remained in the race to make a full-throated case for a secular, liberal democratic Egypt and to bring the fight to Morsi on the basis of the merits of his own ideas, not on the coattails of the military’s guns.

Unlike former foreign minister and Arab Council secretary-general Amr Moussa and former air force chief Ahmed Shafiq, ElBaradei is not tainted as felool — the ‘remnants’ of the government that Hosni Mubarak led from the 1980s until 2011.  But as the Tamarod (‘Rebellion’) movement has gathered steam in its efforts to oust Morsi, ElBaradei has managed to unite a disparate coalition of anti-Morsi interests, including Moussa, much of the former military establishment, elements of the so-called ‘deep state’ and supporters of former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi, whose leftist, Nasser-style nationalism nearly vaulted him into last June’s presidential runoff.  If Monsour, ElBaradei and the new interim government succeed in organizing a new presidential election, Sabahi would certainly be the frontrunner to win it (unless ElBaradei himself runs, though he’s said he’s not interested in the presidency for himself).

As ElBaradei has noted in the days leading up to and following Morsi’s forced removal, the Morsi presidency was far from perfect — ElBaradei had routinely accused Morsi of becoming a ‘pharaoh’ in office, and he mocked Morsi’s Islamist agenda by noting acidly that ‘you can’t eat sharia.’  Though Morsi won only a narrow victory last June over Shafiq, he triumphed by assembling a broader coalition that transcended his own Muslim Brotherhood supporters, and, in recognition of that reality, Morsi initially called  for a broad inclusion of diverse views in formulating policies in office.  One of his first steps in August 2012, in firing longtime army chief and defense minister Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, and replacing him with Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, was an incredibly successful masterstroke, temporarily at least, in marrying the political interests of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military.  Ironically, it was El-Sisi, who owed his position as commander-in-chief of the Egyptian armed forces to Morsi, who green-lighted the action that toppled Morsi.

But as Bassem Sabry explained in illuminating detail on Thursday in Al-Monitor, the clear point at which Morsi lost control over the country was his ill-fated decision last November to push through a vote on the country’s new constitution.   Continue reading ElBaradei set to become interim Egyptian prime minister in post-Morsi gamble for ‘reset’ →

Egypt

What comes next for Egypt

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PARIS, France — Honestly, I cannot tell you  (and no one outside Egypt can tell you) what comes next for the country.egypt_flag_new

If the army has decided that Mohammed Morsi is no longer the head of state, well, Morsi’s probably no longer the head of state.  That’s significant, and it’s probably the most significant moment since former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power over two years ago in February 2011.  It’s even more significant because Morsi himself elevated Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to the top of the Egyptian military last summer.  Revolutionaries who wanted a liberal democracy will be happy with today’s apparent putsch by the Egyptian military after days of illiberal restraints upon anti-Morsi protestors. Proponents of pure democracy, however, will be unhappy.  After all, despite the dissatisfaction with Morsi, he was the duly elected president of the Egyptian electorate.

Though Egypt now seems headed toward a state where a secular military ‘guarantees’ the Egyptian democracy — giving the Egyptian military the role that Turkey’s military played for nearly a century in Turkish democracy — it’s not certain that Egypt is anywhere near the end of its revolutionary tumult.  If anything, its future is now more likely violent and uncertain.

What comes next is incredibly unsure.  In the immediate future, Aldy Mansour seems sets to become the choice of the Egyptian military as head of state.  But who knows if the Muslim Brotherhood will contest that decision.

In the meanwhile, keep an eye on two persons.

The first is Ahmed Shafiq, who only narrowly lost the presidency to Morsi last year.  He was quite clearly the preferred choice of the Egyptian military, and if it wants to install a leader with the most amount of democratic legitimacy, Shafiq is their man.

The other is Hamdeen Sabahi.  If the army looks to place a civilian leader into power, it would be Sabahi, who placed a narrow third to Morsi and Shafiq in the 2012 presidential election, and who has assumed a position as the most credible opposition leader to Morsi.  As a nationalist political leader, it was Sabahi who seemed like, more than either Morsi or Shafiq, the next potential Gamal Abdel Nasser, the only 2012 presidential candidate with the scope and ambition to chart a course toward a new era of Egyptian dominance of the Arab world.

Egypt, it seems pretty clear, won’t put up with a government led by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces for the next year.  It has economic problems that, unlike in 2011, it can no longer push aside.  Egypt needs a full-time president, with a full-time agenda for the Egyptian economy and, Morsi, with his increasingly pro-Islamist agenda, was simply not in a position to fulfill that need.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi have failed to make even the smallest progress.  So the armed forces will be looking to the civilian most likely to succeed where Morsi failed — and that’s more likely than not going to be Shafiq or Sabahi.

We’re in for a very long 48 hours or more in Egypt — no one can tell you what will happen.  Uncharted territory.

Egypt, Ethiopia

Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics?

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Though you might think of the Nile as a primarily Egyptian river in Africa, its roots go much deeper.  The White Nile originates far within sub-Saharan Africa at Lake Victoria, winding up through Juba, the capital of the newly-minted country of South Sudan, and the Blue Nile originates at Lake Tana in northeastern Ethiopia, and it joins the While Nile near Khartoum, the capital of (north) Sudan. egypt_flag_newethiopia_640

But the rights to the water originating from the Blue Nile have become the subject of an increasingly tense showdown between Egypt and Ethiopia, with Ethiopia moving forward to bring its long-planned Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam into operating, sparking a diplomatic showdown between the two countries and a crisis between two relatively new leaders, both of whom took office in summer 2012 — Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

The Renaissance Dam and the politics of the Nile were no less fraught between former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the late Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi.  But with the project moving forward, Hailemariam and Morsi are locked in a diplomatic tussle that could escalate into something much worse.  Morsi has recently warned Ethiopia that ‘all options are open,’ which conceivably includes an Egyptian air attack to bomb the Renaissance Dam, which would initiate military confrontation between the second-most and third-most populous countries on the continent of Africa.

The Renaissance Dam is Meles’s legacy project and, with a price tag of between $4 billion and $5 billion, it’s embedded with an atypical amount of Ethiopian national pride.  When it is completed, the dam will make Ethiopia a huge hydroelectric producer, perhaps Africa’s largest energy producer, with an estimated generation of 6,000 megawatts of electricity.  To put that in perspective, the Hoover Dam in the southwestern United States has a maximum generation of around 2,100 megawatts and Egypt’s own Aswan High Dam has a maximum of around 2,500 megawatta, while China’s Three Gorges Dam has a maximum capacity of 22,500 megawatts.

Egypt’s chief concern is that the dam will reduce the amount of water that currently flows from the Blue Nile to the Nile Delta, and Ethiopia has already started to divert the course of the Blue Nile to start filling the Renaissance Dam’s reservoir (see below a map of the Nile and its tributaries).  While that process is expected to temporarily reduce the amount of water that flows to Sudan and to Egypt for up to three years, Egyptian officials have voiced concerns that the Renaissance Dam might permanently reduce the flow of the Nile through Egypt, despite technical reassurances to the contrary.  Moreover, Egyptian officials point to colonial-era treaties with the United Kingdom from 1929 and 1959 that purported to divide the Nile’s riparian rights solely as between Egypt and the Sudan, without regard for Ethiopian, Ugandan, Tanzanian or other upriver national claims.  Ethiopian anger at exclusion from the 1959 Nile basin negotiations led, in part, to the decision by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I to claim the independence of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from the Coptic Orthodox Church based in Alexandria, Egypt.

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It’s clear however, where Ethiopia’s Nile neighbors stand on the issue — the leaders of South Sudan and Uganda have voiced their approval for the project, and even Sudan, which will also mark some reduction in Nile water while the dam is constructed, is inclined to support it, which will result in a wider source of crucial electricity throughout the Horn of Africa, east Africa and beyond.  Ironically, it could even be Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for atrocities stemming from the Darfur humanitarian crisis in the mid-2000s, who has the regional credibility with both Cairo and Addis Ababa to diffuse the crisis.  Continue reading Will Egypt and Ethiopia come to blows over the Renaissance Dam and water politics? →

Jordan

Muslim Brotherhood boycott highlights Jordanian elections

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King Abdullah II

Sheikh Hammam Said

Jordan goes to the polls in the second election in as many days in the Middle East. But unlike Israel’s topsy-turvy free-for-all, don’t expect much change as a result of today’s Jordanian parliamentary elections.jordan flag icon

The salient feature of today’s election is that the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t participating — many of the parliamentary seats will be won by ‘independents’ who support Jordan’s monarchy.

Though it didn’t threaten to topple Jordan’s monarch like it did the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, the Arab Spring nonetheless visited the country in February 2011 in the form of protests for more representative government and, more recently, riots in November 2012 following cuts in fuel subsidies last year.

Budget austerity has come even to the Hashemite Kingdom, where times are tough, economically speaking — the country, which lacks the rich mineral and oil wealth of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, is notching some of the lowest GDP growth in a decade and its budget deficit rose in 2012 to 6.5% of GDP.

Within Jordan’s bicameral Majlis al-Umma (National Assembly), the Majlis al-Nuwaab (Chamber of Deputies), newly expanded to 150 members, are elected in single-seat constituencies, and those 150 deputies are who will be elected in Wednesday’s vote.  The upper house, Majlis al-Aayan (Assembly of Senators), remains more powerful and is comprised of 60 senators, all of whom are appointed by Jordan’s king.

Much of the Jordanian government’s power resides in the Hashemite monarchy, headed since 1999 by Abdullah II (pictured above, top).  The king holds the executive power to sign, implement (or veto) Jordanian laws, may suspend or dissolve parliament, appoints (and dismisses) all judges, retains all military power and the ability to set foreign policy.

In recent years, Abdullah has attempted to open, however slightly, the governing process.  For example, after the 2011 protests, Abdullah agreed to an elected cabinet determined by the Chamber of Deputies — the idea is that the Chamber of Deputies, and not Abdullah, will choose the next prime minister, even if the deputies themselves are pro-government.  Although most of the seats (108) are eligible to be contested only by ‘independents,’ 15 additional seats are reserved for women, and just 27 seats are eligible to be contested by political parties on the basis of a national proportional representation vote.

Despite the reforms, the Muslim Brotherhood has demanded that at least 50% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies be determined by party list, so the relatively narrow opportunity to compete is high on its list of rationales for boycotting the election.

The Muslim Brotherhood created a Jordanian political party in 1992, the Islamic Action Front (جبهة العمل الإسلامي), which is relatively more liberal than most Islamist parties throughout the Arab world (for example, it’s pro-democracy).

Although it won 20 out of 84 eligible seats in the June 2003 parliamentary elections, it won just six seats in the subsequent November 2007 elections, and it boycotted the 2010 elections.

Other smaller parties, including Jordanian communists and Arab nationalists, are also boycotting Wednesday’s parliamentary vote.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s leader, Sheikh Hammam Said (pictured above, bottom) has argued that the 2011 reforms don’t go far enough — in addition to the 27-seat limit, he has called for an end to corruption practiced by the various governments appointed in the past by the monarchy.

The boycott by Jordan’s largest opposition force, however, threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the elections.

Continue reading Muslim Brotherhood boycott highlights Jordanian elections →

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 →

United States

Time names Barack Obama Person of the Year. Is that too US-centric?

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So Time Magazine’s decision to anoint a Person of the Year since 1927, for reasons unknown, holds a rapt audience among folks in the United States, myself included.

This year (oh the suspense!), Time chose U.S. president Barack Obama. USflag

In those 85 years, of course, Time has chosen every U.S. president (except Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and poor Gerald R. Ford), and in recent years, it’s made some pretty silly decisions (‘You’), but even as recently as 2007, chose Vladimir Putin as its Person of the Year.

Indeed, over its long history, it’s identified many world leaders as Person of the Year — Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi in 1930, Ethiopian emperor Haile Sellasie in 1935, (controversially) Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler in 1939 and  Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1940, (less controversially) U.K. prime minister Winston Churchill in 1941 (and again in 1949), Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1951, West German chancellors Konrad Adenauer in 1953 and Willy Brandt in 1970, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, French president Charles de Gaulle in 1958, Saudi King Faisal in 1974, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978 (and in 1985),  Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, anti-Communist Polish Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa in 1981 and even the anti-Marcos Filipino president that toppled the Marcos family, Corazon Aquino, in 1985.

Many of those decisions were thoughtful and, perhaps, even courageous.  As a platform for highlighting key issues and illuminating the mechanics of how cultures, politics and economics shape our world, the ‘Person of the Year’ concept isn’t a bad one.  

But before Putin in 2007, you have to go back to 1987 and 1989, when reform-minded Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen twice.

Is it really true that Time can’t find anyone in the world (outside the United States, of course) in the past 25 years worthy to be ‘Person of the Year’ other than Russian autocrats?

Certainly, Obama’s reelection was an important moment with wide implications for world affairs, but is Time really being too US-centric?

Consider all of the other options:

  • German chancellor Angela Merkel, who has nudged and cajoled the eurozone to bailouts of Greece, Portugal and Ireland that have kept those countries in the eurozone, while centralizing more fiscal policy and banking policy decision-making powers in the hands of the European Union.  In doing all of this, she’s maintained or even gained in popularity in Germany.
  • European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, whose commitment to stabilizing the eurozone in no uncertain language last summer may well have turned the page on the eurozone’s ongoing crisis.
  • International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, for assistance in cleaning up most of Europe’s economic mess and the rest of the world’s besides, all the while trying to initiate a discussion about balancing austerity with the need for higher growth.
  • Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood now controls the government of the world’s most populous Arab country in the wake of the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year, and whose rule, above all over this week’s constitutional referendum, remains subject to increasing uncertainty and doubt among secular liberals?
  • Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas achieved recognition of Palestine as a state in the United Nations last month.
  • The incoming leader of the world’s most populous country, Xi Jinping, as the new general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.  Hell, Time could have chosen the entire new seven-member Politburo Standing Committee.
  • Time could have been timely — and creative — and chosen the four new leaders of four East Asian countries — Xi, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Japan’s incoming prime minister Shinzo Abe and South Korea’s incoming president Park Guen-hye, the latter two being elected just this week.
  • México, poised to overtake Brazil as the largest economy in Latin America in the 2020s, has returned the longstanding PRI to power under the leadership of new president Enrique Peña Nieto, who promises tax reforms, privatization and development of México’s oil industry and a new approach to drug violence and security.
  • Maybe even Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, who’s staked his presidency on peace talks with the longtime rebel guerilla group FARC?
  • How about Aung San Suu Kyi, who after years of house arrest is now serving in the parliament of Burma/Myanmar, with the once nearly-autarkic regime engaged in reforms to not only its economy, but human rights and democracy as well, garnering the re-establishment of relations with the United States?

U.S. power isn’t infinite, especially in the increasingly multipolar 21st century — and at some point, it’s a little ridiculous for Time to focus on Americans to the exclusion of those outside the United States.  Maybe it’s time to call it what it’s become — the Person of the Year Most Relevant to the United States.

Photo credit to Nadav Kander for Time.