Leaderless is good, but it can’t negotiate

One of the great virtues of the demonstrations in Egypt is that they have been leaderless, or more accurately they have multiple leaders, none of whom are clearly dominant in the sense that they command and control the mass of demonstrators.  It is a virtue because it means the movement can’t be decapitated, and unity is easier to maintain without egos in the way.  Arrest a few “instigators” and others pop up.  While Mohammed El Baradei, Ayman Nour and others may have visibility in the West that others lack, there is no evidence yet that they could call off the demonstrations, or turn them back on.

The problem with this is that the process has reached the point at which negotiators are needed to work out the transition to a more democratic regime.  This is particularly difficult in Egypt’s case because the constitution gives President Mubarak powers that are needed in the transition.  As two of the demonstrators(Hossam Bahgat and Soha Abdelaty) explain in the Washington Post this morning, an interim president (either Vice President Omar Suleiman in the case of a temporary delegation of power or the Mubarak crony who is the Speaker of parliament if he resigns) cannot propose constitutional amendments, dissolve parliament or even dismiss the cabinet.

The result:  elections would have to be held within 60 days under the present constitution, which requires a parliament now more than 90% controlled by Mubarak cronies to approve candidates for president.

Hossam Bahgat and Soha Abdelaty claim that this difficulty can be overcome with an explicit delegation of authority by President Mubarak before he resigns or absents himself temporarily:

So before Mubarak resigns he must sign a presidential decree delegating all of his authorities to his vice president until their current terms end in September. Mubarak issued similar decrees, transferring his powers to the prime minister, when he was hospitalized in 2004 and 2009. In addition, Mubarak must issue decrees lifting the “state of emergency” that has allowed him to suppress Egyptians’ civil liberties since 1981 and ordering the release or trial of those held in administrative detention without charge – estimated to be in the thousands.

And they want more:

Also before Mubarak resigns, an independent commission of respected judges, constitutional law experts, civil society representatives and all political movements should draft language to amend the constitution to ensure that presidential elections are open to all credible candidates; that Egyptians abroad are allowed – for the first time – to vote; that any elected president is allowed to serve only two terms; and that the elections are supervised by judicial and civil monitors.

Tarek Masoud, in yesterday’s New York Times, even asks that Mubarak stay on through dissolution of parliament and new elections.

All of this clearly requires negotiations–this is not a simple matter like the demand that Slobodan Milosevic recognize the results of an election he had in fact lost. And for negotiations there is going to have to be credible leadership, and a solid mass of demonstrators behind it.

In its absence, the regime is already exploiting the situation by “negotiating” piecemeal with opposition political parties that are as much a part of the regime as Mubarak. If they can co-opt a few well-known oppositionists while the numbers in Tahrir square decline, Mubarak and Omar Suleiman can still hope to nickel and dime the tired demonstrators and set up a transition to something that may replace regime personnel at the top but will not require accountability or change the deep state, in particular the army’s outsized role in Egyptian politics, economics and society and the extensive internal security apparatus that keeps people in line.

So the time has come for some convincing leadership to tell Omar Suleiman (and the Americans, who have become de facto mediators) what the terms of Mubarak’s surrender will be. You would have to know more about what is going on in Cairo than I do to predict how that leadership will emerge and who will be in it, but if it doesn’t appear soon there is a real risk of losing ground in a war now almost won.