Egypt two years on

The Egyptian revolution will be two years young tomorrow.  What has it accomplished?  Where does it stand?  Where is it headed?

The revolution’s greatest accomplishment occurred two years ago:  the fall of Hosni Mubarak from power.  There ensued a terrifically chaotic year and a half, best described by Marc Lynch as Calvinball:  a game in which the participants constantly change the rules.  The period of military rule was particularly shambolic, but Egypt did not stabilize immediately after the election in June 2012 of Mohammed Morsi as president.

In the subsequent months, he managed however to push the army aside, preserving many of its prerogatives but depriving it of governing power and accumulating it for himself.  He also managed to push through a December referendum on a controversial new constitution that leaves openings for Islamist rule.  Parliamentary elections are to be held at a still unspecified date in April, under an electoral law prepared by a Shura Council (upper house) that he controls.

Muslim Brotherhood expert Eric Trager thinks Egypt will emerge from this process as a “competitive theocracy.”  The main rivals will be the highly disciplined and hierarchical Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical and fragmented Salafi fundamentalists.  It is not clear which will have the advantage, as the Brotherhood’s discipline and hierarchy is less appealing to the young than the low threshold to entry into Salafist ranks.

This discounts completely the secularists and liberals who more or less united against the parliamentary referendum, which they lost, and are trying to hold together for the parliamentary elections as the National Salvation Front.  Divided, they have so far fared poorly in Egypt’s several rounds of voting since the fall of Mubarak but hope to do better united against the now dominant Islamists.

President Morsi, while riding high on election and referendum victories, is proving less than effective in handling the economy, which is still in a nose dive, and the Americans, who distrust his attitude on Israel and find his past and present  bad-mouthing of Jews offensive.  But neither Morsi, who needs American support at the IMF and World Bank, nor his critics is interested in creating too big a breach.  Washington needs Cairo to maintain the peace treaty with Israel, act as a brake on Hamas in Gaza and remain stalwart against Iran.

Democracy, as anyone watching the U.S. Congress knows too well, is like making sausage:  unappetizing in the process, even if the product is highly palatable.  Some think the Egyptians are just learning to be democrats.  I’m inclined in that direction.  But then an Egyptian friend comes to visit and worries about whether Morsi will be deploying religious police to prevent young men and women from holding hands in public.  The Saudi precedent hovers.

The best that can be said about Islamist domination of the political spectrum in Egypt is that a) it reflects the will of the Egyptian people and b) it may not last, since the split between the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists is likely to continue.  The April elections really are the secularist liberals’ last, best chance of gaining political traction for the next four years.  If they fail, as seems likely, Egypt will experiment with a constitution that leaves a lot of room for Islamist maneuvering in a society that is more interested in economic results than theocratic correctness.  But that is how most Iranians feel also, to no avail.

The Egyptian revolution is still young.  The outcome remains in doubt.  Morsi is no democrat:  he has brought many more cases to court for supposed offenses to the president than Mubarak did.  But Morsi is not alone in determining the outcome.  The Salafists and the liberals will tug Egypt in other directions, as will the army and the business community.  How these vectors sum to determine the ultimate direction will depend on many factors:  election outcomes, the economy, the courts, relations among Egypt’s religious groups, threats to Egypt’s security, relations with its neighbors, the course of events in the region.

Ten years on we’ll have a clear picture.  Tomorrow what we’ll see are massive demonstrations pulling Egypt in dramatically different directions.

PS:  Bassem Sabry also still has hopes for democracy.