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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 →

Egypt

Sabahi wins Cairo, but not by enough to enter runoff

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The long-awaited votes from Cairo appear to have been counted and the tally is as follows:

  • Hamdeen Sabahi, leftist neo-Nasserist — 993,464 (34.6%)
  • Ahmed Shafiq, former Mubarak official — 744,138 (25.9%)
  • Mohammed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood candidate — 579,715 (20.1%)
  • Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, alternative moderate Islamist candidate — 553,200 (19.2%)

If true, it means that the heart of Egypt’s revolution turned to Sabahi as its candidate, indicating that they were too uncomfortable with the Islamist roots of Aboul Fotouh, despite his call for moderation, and also with the ‘felool’ background of Amr Moussa, the former secretary-general of the Arab League and decade-long foreign minister for Hosni Mubarak.

Official results have not yet been announced, but as Friday closes in Egypt, it appeared all but certain that Morsi would finish in first place nationally, followed by Shafiq in second, with Sabahi following very closely behind in third place and Aboul Fotouh not incredibly far behind in fourth.

As Egypt now starts to turn toward the Morsi-Shafiq runoff, it is a bit staggering to see that the leading candidate among the voters of Egypt’s largest city will not have a place in the second round.  As such, it will be interesting to see what indications Sabahi himself gives for the second round — it’s difficult imagining Sabahi endorsing Shafiq, but it’s just quite possible to see him uniting with Morsi for a wide anti-regime front in the runoff.  Note that Sabahi could also urge his supporters to abstain from the runoff — if they did so in large measure, it would vastly reduce the legitimacy of whichever candidate wins on June 17.

Sabahi was the only one of the five major candidates to be neither ‘felool’ associated with the Mubarak regime nor an Islamist, and he caught a wave of popular support at the very end of the campaign — you wonder what he might have done if he had a few more days to capitalize on that momentum.

He was, by and far, the most anti-Israel (and anti-US) of the five candidates as well — expect to hear some more deep-throated Israel-bashing from both Morsi and Shariq over the next month as they vie for his supporters, too.

Ultimately, I think Sabahi captured, with what I’ve called a ‘neo-Nasserite’ approach, a sense of all the pride lost in the past 40 years in Egypt — despite Gamal Abdel Nasser’s failure to build a long-lasting Arab union, Nasser’s victory in the Suez crisis showdown and his nationalist approach in newly-independent Egypt emboldened the Arab world and emboldened Egyptians to believe in a brighter future.  In the Nasser era, there was no disputing Egypt was at the heart of the Arab world — militarily, economically, culturally and intellectually.  Today, Egypt is the sick man of the Middle East — under the sclerotic regimes of Anwar Sadat in the 1970s and of Mubarak from the 1980s until last year, Egypt suffered a stalemate in the 1973 October War and has been stuck in a detente with Israel ever since — supported by Egypt’s military, but not by its populace and not exactly by its Arab neighbors.  Egypt has watched as the economic center of the Arab world slipped away from Cairo, first to Beirut, and then to the Emirates and in the oil wealth of the Saudi kingdom: Riyadh and Dubai are now more important financial centers than Cairo.  Intellectually, the Emirates and Qatar are leading the way to build educational institutions in the Middle East, not Egypt.  Furthermore, the days when Egyptian film and music dominated Arab culture — the days of Oum Kalthoum and Abdel Halim Hafez — are long gone.

Whoever wins the runoff is going to have to tap into exactly that sense of wounded pride — but also show a vision for how to recover that pride.

The tragedy of the anticipated runoff is that it includes the two candidates least likely to have the political skills or the ideological breadth to accomplish that.