by Vivian Salama
Amr Darrag is on a call when a second phone in his
Cairo office begins to ring. He’s been awake since 6 a.m., and the stack of
papers on his desk swells with every passing minute. A leader in Egypt’s
Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, Darrag
is also part of the 100-member committee scrambling to draft the country’s new
constitution—a pending document that has hit every possible bump in the road
since Egyptians toppled President Hosni Mubarak last year.
“We have a couple more days until we finish our
mission,” says Darrag, secretary-general of the Constituent Assembly. “Those
who are not interested in stability in Egypt or want to keep the Muslim
Brotherhood out of the scene are trying to stop us from issuing the
constitution. The courts want to dismantle the assembly. The president had to
stop these tricks or the country would fall into chaos.”
On Nov. 22, as Americans sat down to Thanksgiving
dinner, Egypt’s first post-revolution president, Mohamed Morsi, issued a decree
exempting all of his decisions from legal challenge. The move was a stunning
power grab that quickly earned him the nickname “Egypt’s new pharaoh”—a title
once bestowed upon his defunct predecessor. Hundreds of thousands of
disbelieving Egyptians flooded city streets from Alexandria to Aswan with a
familiar cry: “The people want the fall of the regime!” Tahrir Square came
alive once again with tents and bullhorns and a howl so loud—so
impassioned—that it was dubbed the “19th Day” of last year’s revolution. Angry
female protesters returned in masses to Tahrir, resilient after months of
deteriorating security that included repeated incidents of harassment and
sexual assault.
Morsi also
declared that the courts cannot dissolve the Assembly, which many say is
unfairly dominated by his fellow Islamists. As tensions built nationwide, the
Assembly slammed together the first finalized draft of the constitution last
week—a text that could set the course for Egypt’s future and that few have been
privy to see.
“He shot himself
in the foot,” says Steven A. Cook, the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for
Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Perhaps ‘new
pharaoh’ is an overstatement, even though Morsi is no democrat. Somewhere
within the councils of the Muslim Brotherhood, someone thought this decree
would play well in Tahrir.”
Play well it
didn’t. As antagonized protesters violently clashed with pro-Morsi
demonstrators, the president defended his decision, insisting it is temporary
and geared toward eliminating the bureaucratic hurdles obstructing Egypt’s
unraveling transition. The comment inspired the snarky headline in independent
daily Al-Masry Al-Youm: “Morsi is a ‘temporary’ dictator.” The
Brotherhood brushed off the protests as merely “politics,” distinguishing it
from the 2011 revolution, when “united Egyptians revolted against autocracy.”
The organization warned, via Twitter, that a revolution without the Muslim
Brotherhood is no revolution.
But that was a
tough sell to make to those who descended on Tahrir, driven by lingering
memories from 30 years of Hosni Mubarak’s chokehold. Less than two years after
Egyptians earned their first taste of democracy, the country once again has a
president with near-absolute power and no constitution to dictate otherwise
(the decree was ironically introduced as a “constitutional declaration”). There
is no Parliament, since the military generals dissolved it in June. Then the
generals were replaced by Brotherhood loyalists—as were the heads of most
state-run media organizations.
Egypt’s military
said in a statement that it would not prevent protesters from voicing their
opposition, an indirect slight to Morsi, who is the country’s first-ever
civilian president. Meanwhile, dozens of casualties were reported last week
amid violent police crackdowns, as pro- and anti-Morsi demonstrators squared
off. “Mubarak’s repressive regime is alive and well,” Nobel laureate Mohamed
ElBaradei wrote on Twitter of the déjà vu police brutality.
For the secular
parties quickly eliminated in this year’s election, the time has come to do
something about it. “Unity” was the catchphrase of the hour, as opposition leaders
and former political rivals including Amr Moussa, Hamdeen Sabbahi, and
ElBaradei marched through the throngs in Tahrir, arm in arm, calling for
Egyptians to rise up against tyranny once again. However, history has shown
that the secular movements—even unified—are no match for the Muslim
Brotherhood, which has traditionally commanded a deep-rooted, far-reaching
influence, even in its decades as an outlawed organization.
“This past week
Morsi has done the impossible and mobilized a completely new section of the
population—what we previously called the ‘Feloul’ [remnants of the last
regime] and the ‘Couch Party,’” the inactive segment of the population, says
secular activist Bahaa Hashem. “Most of those who were against the
demonstrations in 2011 feared instability. Irony really does have a way of
kicking you in the backside!”
In the immediate
years following its last revolution in 1952, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who
led the coup that purged Egypt of colonialists, abolished the multi-party
system in an alleged effort to cleanse the country of monarchial influences. It
was a tradition that was carried on by his successors—if not by law, then in
practice. While the Muslim Brotherhood has managed to stay organized over the
years through its grassroots work, it headed into uncharted waters this year
with its official entrance into politics. Its inexperience prompted many to
question whether the organization has what it takes to rule over a country of
91 million people, 25 percent of whom live below the poverty line.
As part of the new decree, Morsi fired Prosecutor
General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, who had his fair share of critics for failing to
carry out harsher sentences on Mubarak-regime stalwarts. The move ignited a war
between the executive and judicial branches, with the judges declaring a
strike. At a press conference last week, judiciary spokesman Maher Samy lashed
back: “The court will not be intimidated by any threats or blackmail and will
not submit to any pressures practiced on it from any direction, regardless of
its power.”
Freedom and
Justice Party chief Essam el-Erian described the response as “harmful to the
democratic transformation process.” The strike threatened to add to a growing
backlog of court cases at a time when law and order are crumbling and amid
mounting pressure to prosecute businessmen and politicians linked to the ousted
government.
Morsi’s decision
was reportedly a preemptive block on rumored intentions by the court to
dissolve the Constituent Assembly. In response, more than two
dozen on the committee—mainly secular and Christian
members—tendered their resignations. With almost one third of the
constitutional committee gone, the predominantly Islamic members who remained
vowed to finalize the constitution within days to end the political crisis—a
move that has the opposition crying foul.
“The Egyptian
street is no longer with [the Brotherhood],” says Emad Gad, an official with
the Egyptian Social Democratic Party who held a seat in the dissolved
Parliament. “We are not saying [Morsi] has to go, but he will not last in
office if he turns his back on the opposition.” Gad hails the judges for
joining the protest, expecting this would create enough pressure for Morsi to
rescind the declaration.
“I do understand
the concerns and I have the same [ones] because we have a bad history of
dictatorship,” says Darrag. “If this doesn’t change after the constitution is
finished, then I support the people to go into the streets and do whatever they
want.”
But Egypt
literally can’t afford to wait much longer. The country’s benchmark stock index
plummeted 9.5 percent after Morsi granted himself sweeping powers. Economic
growth slowed to 2.6 percent in the third quarter, down from 3.3 percent a year
earlier. Tourism, once the nation’s bread and butter, has slowed to a trickle.
Foreign investors, who once deemed Egypt a cash cow for its robust natural
resources and large consumer base, are anxiously waiting on the sidelines for
calm to return. This raises red flags, in particular, for officials from the
International Monetary Fund who are scheduled to reach a final decision on a
nearly $5 billion financing agreement for Egypt this month. The loan rides on
the assurance that the government’s economic-reform program will not be
derailed by political upheaval or a breakdown of law and order, IMF officials
have said.
The revolution has
cost Egypt $70 billion in lost economic output and put pressure on its currency
and public finances, says Simon Williams, HSBC chief economist for the Middle
East and North Africa: “There are allies overseas and investors in the region
ready to put money to work, and policymakers at home with plans for reform—but
without political order, there can be no economic recovery.”
In many ways,
Morsi was an embattled president even before he was named the winner in June.
Deemed one of the most unlikely candidates from the get-go, he just barely
squeezed by to the runoff and edged out his opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, the last
prime minister under Mubarak, to win with 51.73 percent of the vote. The victory
was bittersweet for many activists, particularly those with secular political
aspirations, who wanted to see the government free from anyone linked to the
ousted regime but didn’t want an Islamist head of state. Morsi, who earned a
Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Southern California, had been
considered a soft power in the Muslim Brotherhood. Prior to the runoff, there
had been significant buzz around another Brotherhood contender, Abdel Monem
Abou al-Fattouh, who is regarded as an Islamist reformer.
But Morsi quickly
earned the approval of many skeptics, forcing Egypt’s distrusted generals out
within weeks of winning the election and taking a resolute stance on certain
foreign-policy issues, including the Syrian government’s brutal response to
protests. Only a day before passing the decree, he successfully brokered a
truce deal between Hamas and Israel, which includes a promise by Hamas to end
the smuggling of weapons and ammunition from the Sinai Peninsula into Gaza. The
ceasefire earned Morsi a reputation globally as a serious political player. But
the fanfare was short-lived—critics of the decree said he was merely playing
off the victory.
“An explosive
cocktail of a budding dictator losing popularity day by day, a deteriorating
economy, and a changing political culture that pushes Egyptian people to be
more daring and challenging to their own government will not lead to
stability,” notes Said Sadek, a secular activist and professor at the American
University in Cairo. “We will enter a period of instability and more popular
revolts as the economy crumbles and his government fails to meet the basic
needs of the people.”
While Morsi
promises to be a president for all Egyptians, his critics accuse him of
favoring his Islamist allies and failing to honor his election platform, which
called for the establishment of a coalition government. What most of the
parties can agree on are the potential dangers of pitting state institutions
against each other, particularly at a time of extreme vulnerability. A country
that once found itself unified, regardless of political and ideological
differences, is now more divided than ever.
“The major result
of the revolution is that leaders should not take the people for granted
anymore,” says the Brotherhood’s Darrag. “They can’t issue decrees anymore
without being questioned, and so we encourage people to go to Tahrir. It is
normal for any transition to take time after a long period of dictatorship. In
the end, Egypt will come out healthy and the people will be more alert than
ever.”
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