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Egypt

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

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massacre

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, 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? →

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

Egyptian president Morsi caught in the crossfire in embassy riots kerfuffle

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Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi today in Brussels made his most detailed comments yet on the Sept. 11 protests/attacks that took place at the U.S. embassy in Cairo (and the more deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in Libya):

“Muslims and Christians in Egypt are equal citizens and have the same rights… We are cautious about those principles and human values, also respecting visitors and respecting tourists… and respecting and protecting diplomatic delegations and private and public properties, and not attacking them.

“Freedom, and ensuring safety of self, and protecting this freedom and people and preserving property is the responsibility of the Egyptian nation.”

He continued: “The Egyptian nation is capable now of protecting people’s opinions and allowing them breathing room, as well as protecting diplomatic delegations and all foreigners, visitors, tourists, embassies and consulates in Egypt.”

“I see in Egypt and the Arab and Islamic world a severe anger toward the violations made by a very small number of individuals. They have insulted the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. We stand very strongly against this. We don’t agree with or approve this, and we stand against anyone who tries to raise such false slogans and create these disturbances, tension and hatred between populations.”

“Those [people] are not accepted, not by people in Egypt nor other Arab and Islamic countries, nor by their own people. I affirm that the American people reject this and I’ve called on them to declare their rejection of them, at the same time with our rejection of those bad practices that bring harm and not benefit.”

Got all that?  To me, those sound like the words of a president terrified at the thought of losing any side over this week’s crisis — and the sides are too numerous to count.

At home, he certainly can’t be seen as standing weak in defense of Islam, but he also can’t be seen in the United States as condoning violent attacks on the U.S. embassy.

It’s hard to believe that Morsi has been in office for only about 10 weeks — he won (narrowly) Egypt’s presidential runoff on June 24 against former air force commander and Mubarak-era prime minister Ahmed Shafiq.

Remember, too, that it’s been just six months since Morsi has appointed his prime minister, Hisham Qandil, and less than a month since Morsi pulled off his more-or-less successful political coup in retiring the military’s chief, Hussein Tantawi, who had served as Egypt’s defense minister since 1991, thereby making Morsi the indisputable head of state.

It’s clear that the U.S. president Barack Obama is none too pleased with Morsi’s reticence in condemning the attacks, especially given the unqualified condemnation offered up across the board by Libya’s political elite yesterday.  The U.S. administration, with Obama up for reelection within 60 days, might be justifiably short on patience with the Middle East these days, given the dual crises in Libya and Egypt following the embassy riots, and an Israeli prime minister who is publicly attacking the Obama administration at every turn over Iran’s nuclear weapons program (and despite Morsi’s visit to Tehran, the first of an Egyptian leader since the 1979 Iranian revolution, there’s no love lost in Cairo for Iran).

Above all, Morsi was set to meet with Obama in Washington in October — if that meeting still happens, you better believe it’s going to be incredibly tense.  U.S. public opinion has now sharply condemned Morsi, and even the Cairo embassy has taken to snarking at the Muslim Brotherhood via Twitter for talking out of both sides of its mouth (one Arabic, the other English).

Morsi cannot lose the United States and the United States naturally wants to give him the benefit of the doubt — despite the Obama administration’s unease with an Islamist president, Morsi was elected democratically, and the U.S. will want to see the positive outcome of the Arab Spring that it so vociferously trumpeted since the early days of the protests in Tahrir Square back in February 2011.  So it’s still in the best interests of the United States to maintain a constructive relationship with Egypt.  But Morsi needs U.S. support even more — not just in luring tourists, but in encouraging the foreign investment necessary to revitalize a stagnated, bloated and state-heavy economy, including a much-needed loan from the International Monetary Foundation. Continue reading Egyptian president Morsi caught in the crossfire in embassy riots kerfuffle →

Egypt

Morsi, in firing defense minister, asserts presidential control over Egypt

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Of course, the significance of the decision by Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi on Sunday to announce the resignation of not just Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi as defense minister, but his deputy, General Sami Anan, cannot be understated.

It is easily the most significant moment in Egyptian governance since Morsi’s election — and it, surprisingly, comes just over a week after Morsi’s first cabinet was sworn in — a cabinet that seemed destined to feature Egypt’s military, with little civilian participation from beyond the Muslim Brotherhood and its sphere of allies.

But it also comes very soon after Morsi fired his intelligence chief in the wake of increased attacks and a growing Islamic fundamentalist threat on the Egypt-Israel border in Sinai.

Tantawi, the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that led Egypt’s transitional government between the fall of Hosni Mubarak and Morsi’s election, has essentially been the head of Egypt’s military since his appointment as secretary of defense in 1991.  His reappointment as defense secretary in the cabinet of Morsi’s prime minister, Hisham Qandil, was seen as a sign that the Egyptian military had reached somewhat of an uneasy truce with Morsi — Morsi may be the elected president, but the military would have enough residual power to veto Morsi on key issues, especially where national security is involved.

That changed Sunday — and the Tantawi and Anan retirements are not all that Morsi (pictured above, right)accomplished.

Morsi amended the last-minute June 17 declaration by SCAF that has attempted to limit presidential powers; instead, Morsi issued a new Constitutional Declaration that gives the president full executive and legislative authority, as well as power to set Egyptian public policy and sign international treaties.  He also appointed Mahmoud Mekki, a respected deputy head of the Cassation Court, as his vice president (although in doing so, Morsi seemed to break a promise to appoint a woman and a Coptic Christian as his vice presidents).

Morsi appointed as the new defense minister a little-known general, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi (pictured above, far left).  In a profile today, Al Ahram noted that the 57-year-old El-Sisi, who previously served as Egypt’s military attaché to Saudi Arabia, will be the first Egyptian defense minister who also doesn’t hold the title of field marshal.  El-Sisi is best known internationally as the general who announced that the military had conducted virginity tests on female protestors at Tahrir Square in order to prove soldiers had not raped them.  SCAF subsequently backtracked on El-Sisi’s somewhat embarrassing statement.

Much of Egypt’s independent media and figures such as Mohamed ElBaradei have welcomed Morsi’s move.  A wide spectrum, from youth protest leaders to Salafists are applauding what seems to be a bona-fide transfer of power from the military to the civilian president.

Mark Lynch at Foreign Policy dubbed Egypt’s president “Lamborhini Morsi” and offers three alternative (not incompatible) takes: Continue reading Morsi, in firing defense minister, asserts presidential control over Egypt →

Egypt

Egypt’s new government sworn in today, featuring continuity from SCAF transitional government

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The first Egyptian cabinet of newly elected Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and his new prime minister Hisham Qandil was sworn in today.

That Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi (pictured above, with US defense secretary Leon Panetta) will continue to serve as defense minister in the cabinet of tells you everything you need to know about Egypt’s new cabinet.

Qandil admitted as much in a press conference following the ceremony — the cabinet will feature continuity over rupture.

Tantawi, Egypt’s minister of defense since 1991 and the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that took over Egypt’s government after the resignation of former president Hosni Mubarak, is the personification of the Egyptian military.  Although it was widely expected that he would continue in some role in Morsi’s government, at least initially, it makes clear that Egypt’s military will still wield a considerable amount of power, notwithstanding the transition to a democratically-elected president.

Otherwise, many of the “new” cabinet ministers are holdovers from the prior transitional government of SCAF prime minister Kamal al-Ganzouri, including the finance minister, Momtaz el-Said, and the foreign minister, Mohamed Kamel Amr, both career diplomats.

The remaining positions went mostly to longtime Muslim Brotherhood figures (although not to Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s first-choice presidential candidate), including:

  • Mostafa Mosaad, a member of the Brotherhood’s direct political vehicle, the Freedom and Justice Party (حزب الحرية والعدالة‎), was appointed higher education minister.
  • Tarek Wafiq, an engineer and head of the FJP’s housing committee, was appointed housing minister.
  • Salah Abdel Maqsoof, an outspoken Muslim Brotherhood journalist, was appointed minister of information (and will, notably, control access to state television and other key media sources).

The SCAF-heavy cabinet is already being criticized as lacking enough fresh faces, lacking women and lacking any political appointees from outside the Muslim Brotherhood.  Qandil’s appointment last week has been subject to much criticism — he’s been perceived as having insufficient political experience, a lacking economic background and very close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the most promising appointments is the new justice minister, Ahmed Mekky, a prominent and reform-minded judge who is the former vice president of Egypt’s Court of Appeals, and Mohamed Mahsoub, a member of the centrist Al-Wasat party will be the minister of parliamentary affairs.

Despite an initial decision to appoint hard-line Salafist scholar Mohamed Ibrahim as minister of religious endowments, Morsi and Qandil appear to have backed down amid criticism and instead appointed Osama El-Abd, the vice-chancellor of Al-Azhar University, the oldest university in Egypt. Continue reading Egypt’s new government sworn in today, featuring continuity from SCAF transitional government →

Egypt

Morsi announces surprise choice as new Egyptian prime minister

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This is a little strange.

Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi has appointed little-known Hisham Qandil, the current transitional minister of water resources and irrigation, as Egypt’s new prime minister.

This upends several media reports over the past few weeks that Morsi was narrowing his search to more well-known economist types, such as former Central Bank of Egypt president Mahmoud Abul-Eyoun.  The announcement came nearly a month after Morsi was sworn in and after multiple delays.

Since inauguration, Morsi has struggled with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces over everything from the appointment of the Constituent Assembly (which will write Egypt’s new constitution) to the disbanding of Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament.  One of the key problems in assessing Qandil’s appointment is that no one knows what Morsi’s powers will be as Egypt’s president (especially vis-a-vis SCAF), let alone what to expect from his prime minister.

We also know what Egypt’s investors think of the appointment: not much. Stock prices in the benchmark EGX 30 fell 1% today.

Qandil, relatively young at age 50, is not a particular specialist in economics and, prior to his appointment as water minister in July 2011, was a senior bureaucrat in the water ministry.  At a press conference later, he announced that he intends to appoint a technocratic cabinet shortly, and that he would focus on Morsi’s five top priorities — his ‘100 day plan’ to focus on security, traffic, bread, public cleanliness and fuel.

The announcement does not tell us with any further clarity what official role, if any, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Khairat al-Shater will play in the new government — al-Shater, a businessman and Islamic activist, was the Brotherhood’s original candidate for president prior to his disqualification earlier this spring, and is believed to wield signficant influence behind the scenes with the new Morsi administration.

I’ll note, however, that “water” is not among those five priorities, but water management and supply is a critical issue for a desert country whose main river, the Nile, is absolutely critical to its economy, transportation, agriculture, health and sustainability.

Like Morsi, he appears to have studied in the United States — he apparently has a doctorate in irrigation from the University of North Carolina in 1993.  He has also served as a senior manager for the African Development Bank.

It’s also strange that the announcement came initially via the Facebook page of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party — Morsi has gone to lengths to sever official ties with the group since his election last month as Egypt’s new president, and he stressed in his press conference that Qandil has belonged to no official political party, but Egypt Independent has already noted one detail that could concern secularists:

The former irrigation minister’s beard has caused speculation of Islamist tendencies. He denied any affiliation with Islamist groups when he told Al Jazeera his beard was grown in keeping with religious obligations.

Photograph by Al-Masry Al-Youm of the Egypt Indpendent.