Egypt’s coup The second time around , The Economist.com
Egypt’s coup
The second time around
The Egyptian army, with widespread popular support, has ended the presidency of Muhammad Morsi. It has not ended the nation’s troubles
EGYPTIANS like to think their blood is finer than the stuff that circulates in other veins. Along the Nile, someone with “heavy” blood is a dour, pedantic bore. To have “light” blood is to be quick-witted, cheeky and carefree. The national preference is for the light sort.
On June 30th, the first anniversary of Muhammad Morsi’s election as their president, Egyptians took to the streets in their millions against him, thus precipitating a coup three days later. Some of their reasons for protest were economic, some were political, some verged on the recreational: what cheaper or better entertainment, during a pleasant cool spell in Egypt’s mostly sizzling midsummer, than to take to the streets for some joyous, full-throated bellowing of insults? Perhaps the most widely felt problem, though, was that the blood of Mr Morsi, a burly, grizzled former professor of engineering, and of the Muslim Brotherhood of which he was a member, was insufferably heavy.
The hounding from power of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood leaves the most populous and influential Arab country in a dangerous state of flux, and it will have sweeping implications for politics across the Muslim world—Egypt has always been a bellwether for its region. Now that the army has shunted Mr Morsi aside, there is a real question as to whether the country will move towards a warmed-up version of military-backed rule or towards a more inclusive democracy. And with the ordinary people of Egypt empowered by the experience of revolution, that trajectory may be decided as much by how they aspire to see themselves and how they judge each other as by decisions made in barracks or smoky rooms.
The 18th Brumaire of Tahrir Square
Most of the Egyptian press put the number of protesters that poured into streets across the country on June 30th at around 14m; even the lowest estimate of 10m would have made it the largest street protest in the country’s history. On July 1st the army issued an ultimatum calling on Mr Morsi to “meet the demands of the people” baying for his departure. Egypt’s Islamists, as well as columnists in Western newspapers, were quick to decry an impending military coup. An apparent majority of Egyptians, though, saw in the coming putsch the execution of the people’s will. As with the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, Egypt’s disciplined and professional army was taking upon itself the duty of sweeping away a collapsing administration and stepping into the breach.
On July 3rd Mr Morsi was deposed and detained, as were many other leaders of the Brotherhood. Late in the afternoon armoured vehicles rolled out of bases across the country. In the evening the minister of defence and chief of army staff, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, an appointee of Mr Morsi’s, appeared on television to announce a “transition plan”. The Brotherhood-crafted constitution has been suspended; a committee of senior judges will revise it. The Supreme Court will issue a new electoral law to allow early parliamentary and presidential elections, though no specific timetable has been set. General al-Sisi was flanked by some of the religious and political leaders including the Coptic pope, who had been consulted on the army’s plan. Nearly all political parties, including Salafist former allies of the Brotherhood, have endorsed the road map. Ally Mansour, a Supreme Court judge, will be interim president.
The Tahrir Square-filling tactics that had taken almost three weeks to topple Mr Mubarak had done the same trick in just three days this time, and their new success was greeted by an even greater cacophony of joy. But that joy was not universal. Troops moved to surround a sit-in of angry and forlorn Brotherhood supporters near Cairo university. There are reports of shootings in Minya province, to the south of Cairo, and in towns along the Mediterranean coast to the west. With some Islamists having raised spirits by calling for martyrdom, and 48 people killed over several days of clashes—most of them supporters of the Brotherhood—there was a potential for further violence.
One might have expected Egyptians to be especially wary of military intervention. The period of army rule between the fall of Mr Mubarak and Mr Morsi’s election was marked by ham-fisted mismanagement, maladroit politics and vicious human-rights abuses. Before that, Egypt had suffered six decades of increasingly corrupt, army-dominated government behind a façade of civilian presidents, all of whom had previously been army officers, and most of whom had blood as heavy as anyone’s. It should have seemed the most dangerous of precedents to have the army cut short Egypt’s first, barely begun experiment with full-scale democracy.
It is not easy to see the 450,000 man force, long used to near-absolute autonomy, as an impartial arbiter of the popular will; it had its own reasons for wanting the Brothers out. Tens of thousands of retired officers form a thick and privileged web of interest, both in private business and state run firms, including those that run the oil business and the Suez Canal. They have not been amused by the Morsi government’s incompetence. Serving officers disliked the Brothers’ cosying up to Syrian jihadist groups and to countries like Qatar or Iran, which damaged the army’s long-standing links with Brotherhood-loathing Saudi Arabia and the UAE. General al-Sisi, as it happens, served for a time as military attaché in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Yet judging by the ecstatic roars with which the crowds in Tahrir Square have greeted flypasts by army helicopters, a great many Egyptians have decided to bury their doubts and ugly memories and accept the army’s intervention as in the national interest. With a 94% approval rate in one recent opinion poll, the army remains by far the most trusted institution in the country. Many believe the generals’ promise that they have no desire to linger in politics. Many also see them as better equipped than squabbling politicians to get Egypt’s revolution back on track.
These people yearn for a return to stability. They also long for a more comforting and inclusive notion of what it is to be Egyptian than the Brotherhood held. The Islamists’ rule posed questions about Egypt’s national identity that decades of dictatorship had buried. The underlying quandary was whether Egyptians should be defined chiefly by their faith, as Islamists see it, or rather as free participants in a pluralist society with shared values.
Egypt’s small number of outright secularists, as well as the tenth of its people who are Coptic Christians or Shia Muslims, were never going to be happy under the Brothers. A lot of middle-class, better educated folk were also suspicious from the outset of a secret society which believed itself both morally superior to them and more authentically Egyptian. The surprise has been how many in Egypt’s ideologically uncommitted political centre have turned from the group so quickly. These people tilted in the Brotherhood’s direction in the 2012 elections because they thought they were untainted and competent. They have now been disabused of those notions and alienated by the Brotherhood’s attitude in power.
Hello Brothers, goodbye
For much of the time between its founding in 1928 and Egypt’s 2011 revolution, the Brotherhood was forced to work in the shadows. Repressed by Mr Mubarak—though he let them stay viable enough to serve as a bogeyman to the regime’s Western supporters—the group soldiered on with gritty determination. Mr Mubarak’s abrupt exit revealed the Brotherhood as the only well organised and broadly based force in politics. It swept the parliamentary polls in late 2011, taking 47% of seats. Its Islamist rivals, the Salafist Nour party, captured a further 24%.
Mr Morsi’s victory in 2012’s presidential election was a more modest overall success for the Islamists—he got barely 52% of the vote in the two-person run off—but served to sustain the Brothers’ view of themselves as the freshly revealed, authentic and lasting voice of Egypt’s true self. Western capitals signed on to this narrative, with some reservations. Embracing the Brothers seemed a clever way of repairing links to the Muslim world damaged by post-9/11 belligerence. It helped that early on in his term as Egypt’s first-ever freely elected President Mr Morsi’s poll ratings soared to almost 80%.
Mr Morsi made assiduous efforts to keep the army and police sweet. The Brothers also refrained from pushing an overtly “Islamic” agenda, for instance banning alcohol or enforcing corporal punishment, with the zeal which might have been feared. But in power the Brotherhood began to abandon its previous caution regarding its foes. Mr Morsi appeared to dismiss secular opponents and minorities as politically negligible. Instead of enacting the deeper reforms that had been a focus of popular revolutionary demands, such as choosing provincial governors by election rather than presidential appointment, or punishing corrupt Mubarak-era officials, the Brothers simply inserted themselves in key positions.
When nearly all the non-Islamist members of a body charged with drafting a new constitution resigned in November 2012, the Brothers brushed the problem aside. Mr Morsi issued a snap decree rendering him and his constitution-writers immune from court oversight. This was when his popularity started to slide (see chart 1).
The Brothers pushed through a hastily drafted constitution to a national referendum despite angry criticism from all other parties, and the referendum went Mr Morsi’s way. But his high-handedness lost him a crucial part of the electorate: Egyptians in the middle of the spectrum who had voted for him because they could not abide his challenger, a former air force general who had been prominent in the Mubarak regime.
The Brothers then lost an even bigger part of their electoral base. During his campaign Mr Morsi had made sweeping promises of economic growth. During his 12 months in office hardly a single one of his economic promises came to fruition. The main indicators worsened markedly, from government debt, to its borrowing cost, to the state of foreign reserves, to unemployment (see chart 2).
Without bail-outs from governments friendly to the Brotherhood, including $8 billion from Qatar, Egypt would have gone bankrupt earlier this year. Yet these stopgaps allowed Mr Morsi’s government to dither, over enacting economic reforms needed to unlock still bigger flows of aid and investment, such as a long-proffered $4.8 billion IMF loan.
The long-delayed rationalisation of ruinous energy subsidies was particularly aggravating. Having once been an exporter of hydrocarbons, Egypt is now a net importer, and the state can no longer afford to pay the difference between world prices and the prices charged domestically. There has been a dire lack of diesel, which powers not only most of Egypt’s transport fleet but the tens of thousands of pumps that irrigate the country’s precious farms. Power cuts and kilometre-long queues for fuel stoked anger against the Brothers even among the rural poor—previously a loyal part of their base.
Luckily for Mr Morsi, no rival political factions, excepting the Salafist party well-ensconced in slums and villages, looked likely to tap into this growing anger. But in a reprise of the unexpected forces that toppled Mr Mubarak, a youth group disillusioned with both the Brothers and squabbling secular opposition decided to take things into its own hands. In April a circle of five friends began circulating a petition calling on Mr Morsi to resign.
Boosted by social networks and a web of grass-roots enthusiasts, the movement, which adopted the name Tamarod, meaning “Rebel”, grew at an extraordinary pace. Its members set a target of collecting a seemingly impossible 15m signatures by June 30th, the anniversary of Mr Morsi’s inauguration. When the day came around they claimed to have gathered 22m.
All the while the Brothers were savaged by their opponents in cartoons, merciless television sketches and endless jokes. In May a popular comedian, Bassem Youssef, outpolled Mr Morsi by more than two to one when Egyptians were asked to identify public figures they respected as a leader. Mr Morsi also brought shame on himself. In a 150-minute televised speech in June he failed to even mention the grisly lynching of four people for the crime of being Shia, which had happened a few days earlier. The omission did not go unnoticed. The president enraged citizens of Luxor, a city entirely dependent on tourism, by appointing as governor a member of a hard-line Islamist party associated with the massacre, in 1997, of 62 people, most of them tourists.
As the Brotherhood’s stature diminished—a fall from grace underlined by a series of ministerial resignations—those around Mr Morsi began to see conspiracies everywhere. Egypt’s independent media were controlled by vengeful cronies of Mr Mubarak; disgruntled civil servants were deliberately sabotaging their policies; fugitive millionaires were secretly funding the Tamarod campaign. Not all these charges were necessarily unfounded. No one has yet explained the sudden infuriating collapse in petrol supplies just days before Tamarod’s June 30th demonstration. And since the 2011 revolution, Egypt’s police force has abandoned many of its duties, helping generate a threefold surge in serious crime.
No more for Mr Morsi
As Mr Morsi’s fatal anniversary approached, the Brotherhood appeared increasingly isolated. An opinion poll in June found that while 98% of those who supported the Brothers thought their lives had improved under Mr Morsi, 80% of everyone else thought the reverse. Asked to name the best decision Mr Morsi had made, 73% of the population told pollsters that he had made no good decisions.
As the prospect of vast demonstrations loomed, Mr Morsi called on his supporters to put on a show of force. The Brothers came out in impressive numbers, to the accompaniment of blistering sermons denouncing Mr Morsi’s critics as infidels, drunkards and Nazarenes. The far larger competing crowds were marred, as the Brothers were quick to point out, by sexual assaults, a scourge of demonstrations since the 2011 revolution. But in the main they showed a cheerfully irreverent dislike for the Brothers on a remarkable scale.
The triumph of hope over experience
In a conspiracy-obsessed country, it is not surprising that some whisper that the army, which disliked the Brothers’ flirtation with jihadist groups and its links to Hamas, the Brothers’ Palestinian branch currently running Gaza, helped plan the uprising as a cover for its own move against Mr Morsi. A narrative that paints Egypt’s Brothers as betrayed by quislings, or victims of the perpetual Western plot to thwart the advance of Islam, has already spread to other countries, where Islamist parties may now be tempted to act more aggressively than the Brothers did as they seek to consolidate power.
Back in Egypt, after the euphoria has died down, the situation will look grim. When Mr Mubarak was overthrown, Egypt’s economy was fairly healthy, its institutions intact, if creaky, and the country pretty much united. Now the economy and institutions are much the worse for wear. It is possible that aid promised by Saudi Arabia and the UAE following the 2011 revolution, but suspended while Mr Morsi was in charge, will start to flow again. But Egypt’s support in the West will be less easily maintained now that its first democratically elected leader has been deposed in a coup; among other considerations, America’s generous military aid to the nation may well be under threat, in principle at least. Barack Obama has called on the army to restore power to an elected government—not “the elected government”—as soon as possible.
And its 84m people, who in 2011 banded together around the simple, easily stated aim of dislodging a dreary and discredited leader, are now dangerously divided. The hard core of the Brothers’ support is a minority of the country, but not a negligible one. And though the generals and secular politicians speak of the need for inclusiveness the army has shut down pro-Brotherhood television channels. Arrest warrants are reported to have been put out for up to 300 Brotherhood leaders, and Mr Morsi appears to be under house arrest. These measures may be less a sign of future repression than a temporary precaution against an armed uprising, which some people on social networks are calling for. But they are hardly a good omen.
It has been a hard lesson for the Islamists: for all the powerful attachment Egyptians have to their faith, in politics they want practical results. They no longer want paternal figures, but people who speak to the ambitions of youth. These demands may yet see the Brothers modernise, in Egypt and elsewhere, perhaps becoming more like Turkey’s long-ruling Islamist Justice and Development party. But it may instead see a turn to something darker and more desperate.
In the past, Egypt’s Islamists have proven most dangerous and prone to violence when shut out of the system. The country needs to find ways to avoid such exclusion this time—which, in the wake of a coup, may be hard. And reform of the parts of public life dominated by the army, always an important post-Mubarak goal, will now be more difficult than ever. For now, most Egyptians feel their own blood a little lighter. But given the depth of the challenges their country faces, they will need to find something to unite them that runs deeper than temperament and shared antipathy, and to dip into their traditional source of strength: patience.
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