Without a vision or a program and with a lot of hopes and expectations, the republic of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has begun. Most expectations are ambitious and optimistic. They are betting on a new renaissance to restore Egypt’s due and deserved role and place among the Arabs and the world.
On the other hand, there are gloomy expectations that see a systematic attempt to reproduce the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Of course, most pessimists are from the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters. But interestingly, some civil forces and revolutionary youths share the Brotherhood’s pessimism and fears, albeit from different perspectives and justifications.
Between the two positions are those who prefer to wait a bit because Sisi’s proclamations and decisions have been few and thus not enough to pass a final judgment, especially since there are real opportunities for him to develop his positions and determine his priorities.
Apparently, each person is projecting his or her wishes and fears on Sisi’s words, thus producing tendentious interpretations that support the views of the optimists, pessimists or those in between. The irony is that all the mechanisms of interpretation ignore the context of Sisi’s speech, priorities and transformations, and give no weight to Sisi’s silence and his careful movements, which so far have seemed slow and below the level of the challenges facing Egypt, in fact much lower than the expectations of the majority, which gave Sisi their support and a new legitimacy through the ballot box.
I personally believe that “Sisi’s silence” on many issues has enabled him to gather civil forces around him during the election. But silence is no longer useful now that he is head of the executive and legislative powers, until a parliament is formed in about three months. He should speak and disclose his program and, more importantly, work to implement it at a faster pace. In this context, the formation of the second government of Ibrahim Mehleb — the first government under Sisi — was below expectations in terms of having a coherent vision, representing youths and women and having clear priorities.
In his inaugural speech, Sisi said nothing new. He reaffirmed the overall positions announced during the campaign about Arab national security, Gulf security, Egypt’s Arabism, development, working to achieve security and stability, preserving the rights of the poor, the values of citizenship, renewing the religious discourse and solving the problem of the Renaissance Dam.
But Sisi said nothing about the revolutionary youths, which was a key issue in the political and media discourse after the January 25 Revolution and its second wave on June 30, 2013. Sisi uttered the word “youths” only five times in his inauguration speech, and only as part as tackling unemployment. He didn’t promise to empower the youths or increase their participation in managing state institutions. Even the word “revolution” was said only four times in Sisi’s speech, once when mentioning the January 25 Revolution, once for the June 30 revolution, once for the 1919 revolution and once to refer to the January 25 and June 30 revolutions in the same sentence.
Rather, Sisi’s speech focused on the concept of the state, which was mentioned 22 times in different contexts. So, the state was present and the revolution was absent. Also absent were the youths, who triggered and led the revolution. Although this absence asserts the actual practices on the ground, since the law on demonstrations went into effect and many revolutionary youth figures have been put on trial, it is still better to wait and not pass quick judgment on Sisi’s performance during the first hundred days of his reign. During that period, we will learn more about the performance of the presidency, the formation of parliament, the first elected government and the relationship of the president with parliament and the government.
Not rushing to judge Sisi’s republic is not absent anxiety and fear. The “pharaoh” culture and the traditions of the authoritarian state are ongoing and could eliminate all of Egypt's post-revolution changes, particularly the values of not fearing the state, the desire for change and to revolt, and the wish to implement a humanitarian project of freedom, social justice and human dignity.
The concerns here are strongly related to the populist tendency that has grown because of the fear that the Brotherhood may return, that terrorism may continue, that the state may collapse or that there may be a civil war as in Libya, Syria and Iraq. People prefer security, stability and the strength of the state over freedom or serious reform of police and state agencies. That would mean new experiences that are not guaranteed to succeed.
In other words, the populism being fanned by the “pro-state” politicians and the one-voice media prefer what is already known rather than innovation and change. In this context, a number of “pro-state” politicians are proposing ideas about manufacturing, or engineering, the political sphere, as used to be the case in the republics of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Mubarak. Under them, the president, or the “leader of the nation,” would lead the whole country and would be supported by a large party that dominates the political space. Three ideas were put forward:
Forming a broad national front of political parties and civil forces that supports the June 30 revolution, the road map and Sisi. This front agrees on a minimum program of demands and solutions to address Egypt’s problems and would enter the parliamentary elections against the Brotherhood and the forces of political Islam, including the Nour Party. This idea, despite its luster, seemed old, outside the context of history and inconsistent with the requirements of a real democratic transformation. It deepens society’s divisions by excluding the Nour Party, which was a partner in the road map. It also doesn’t provide formulas for integrating the revolutionary youths and the political parties that opposed Sisi’s nomination. This idea disappeared, or was postponed, in the hope that it may be revived after parliamentary elections.
Creating a political backer for Sisi that would take advantage of his popularity. This would fill the void left by the death of Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP), the absence of civil parties and the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists in the street. But the idea disappeared because Sisi rejected it for fear of gathering all the hypocrites and power-seekers in this party to form a distorted version of the NDP and other parties that emerged after 1952. These political entities merged with the state’s organs. So, politics died, in the true sense, in the majority and opposition parties. Yet political opportunism flourished and the elite was hit with contradictions from which it still suffers.
Amr Moussa (who is close to Sisi) proposed the idea of coordination between a number of political parties to contest the parliamentary elections. His idea assumes the existence of rival parties and the absence of a dominant party, and seeks to create a front of parties that are politically close and agree to support the road map and President Sisi. This front would contest the parliamentary elections to achieve a large majority and form a government that works in harmony with the president, thus achieving political dominance. The idea was met with wide opposition because it deepens differences in society by isolating a large segment of Nasserists, leftists and revolutionary youths because they opposed Sisi’s election. But it was not this opposition that eliminated Moussa’s idea. His idea was eliminated by the fear of the “Wafd” and some rightist and centrist parties that would get a limited number of seats in parliament. Also, some left-of-center parties had reservations about Moussa’s openness toward the “remnants” of Mubarak’s regime, and some ex-soldiers who founded parties that don’t exist in reality. From here, the Wafd and other parties said they would stop the dialogue with Moussa and form a coalition called the Egyptian Wafd to contest the election.
The political arena thus seemed ripe for the emergence of four or five coalitions of varying power, from political parties to independent figures, that will contest the parliamentary elections. This reflects three things: one, the weakness and fragility of the dozens of parties and their inability — perhaps, except, the Wafd Party — to run alone; two, the opportunism of most political parties and members of the elite because they focused on making electoral alliances and didn’t bother changing the election law, which weakens parties; three, the possibility of engineering the political space in Sisi’s republic after the parliamentary elections in light of the size of each electoral alliance and the number of seats won by independents. Many expect them to win a majority of seats in parliament by a wide margin, compared to party alliances, because independents often represent large families in the countryside and businessmen in the cities, so they are inclined to support the president.
If this scenario, which has been frequently repeated in the parliaments of Sadat and Mubarak, becomes reality, then it would be possible to speak with confidence about engineering a parliament that is different from the political reality. But that would mean entering into a crisis because parliament wouldn’t accurately reflect the power balance of all parties and all political and social forces. That crisis may be compounded by the inability to integrate the Brotherhood and its young people in the political process, in which case they would continue to reject the political system.
Source/Fuente: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2014/06/egypt-politics-scene-ol...
