“Egypt’s first free presidential elections have flung up a shock as a military representative of the former regime will fight it out with a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. This direct clash between diametrically opposed authoritarian and religious visions of Egypt’s future firmly marginalizes the liberal and secular option. This kind of choice is absolutely not what the protestors in Tahrir Square were looking for when they toppled Mubarak’s dictatorship early last year.”—Excerpt of a Gulf News editorial, entitled “Shock in Cairo”, describing the official first-round results of Egypt’s presidential election. (Gulf News, May 28.)
EGYPT’S NEXT LEADER WON’T
BE A CREATURE OF TAHRIR SQUARE
Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, My 25, 2012
The prevalent view that [last] week’s presidential election is Egypt’s first experiment with the ballot box is only partly true. Egyptians of a certain age knew parliamentary life and the competition of political parties. This was during the liberal interlude between 1923, when the country became independent from British rule, and 1952. In that year a cabal of young military officers led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser upended the old order, abolished the monarchy—and delivered Egypt into six decades of authoritarianism.
The new men in charge disdained parliaments and political parties and banished the resident foreigners—Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews—who had been the driving force in the nation’s economic life. They sequestered property, and they vowed to make Egypt a dominant military power. In the process, they broke their burdened country, thwarting its bid for modernity.… Hosni Mubarak was the last centurion of that revolution.
***
Now two presidential candidates will face one another in a runoff scheduled for mid-June. Mohammed Morsi is an American-educated engineer and the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had early on indicated it would not contest the presidential election. [Egypt’s electoral commission confirmed] he came in first. His runoff opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, is a former commander of the Air Force and Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister. He ran on a platform of law and order, presented himself as a bulwark against the “forces of darkness”—the Islamists. And so it will be the Brotherhood against the feloul, the remnants of the old regime.
It is not a coincidence that this runoff is between a member of the old guard, the military-bureaucratic class, and the Muslim Brotherhood. It is rather very symbolic of Egypt today. The larger field of a dozen contenders included all the currents of the country’s political life. But to simplify, among the top five vote-getters were two Islamists and three secularists.
Amr Moussa was a diplomat with a long record as foreign minister and secretary-general of the Arab League. He had made a career of bashing Israel, but he could not sell the public on his separation from the Mubarak regime that he had served as foreign minister for years. Mr. Moussa trumpeted his secularism. But he was outflanked by Mr. Shafiq, who was unyielding in his assault on the forces of political Islam.
Rounding out the secularists was Hamdeen Sabahy, a devotee of the late Nasser, who hearkens back to the 1960s and its preference for the public sector. The labor unions and the working class in the urban world of Alexandria came out for Mr. Sabahy, so deep runs the nostalgia for Nasserism. But he was always a long shot.
Arrayed against Mohammed Morsi was Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a lapsed member of the Muslim Brotherhood with a decidedly liberal message about Islam’s “inclusiveness.” But Mr. Foutouh could not make the sale to Islamist voters. Among believers, the advantages of membership in the Brotherhood were too powerful for him to overcome.
For the Brotherhood, this election is the culmination of a dream of eight decades. Formed in 1928, it has alternated between the politics of the ballot and the resort to violence. Its founder, a plotter named Hassan al-Banna, said that the organization rested on the Quran and the gun.
The Brotherhood was dismantled and driven underground in 1954, and brutalized by the Nasser regime, but it never went away. And with Mubarak gone, it was ready: It has money and numbers, and a sense of political cunning bequeathed it by its founder, who in his time was a chameleon of supreme pragmatism and concealment. And so the Brotherhood was part of Tahrir Square—those magical 18 days that toppled Mubarak—and yet it wasn’t. It played cat-and-mouse with the armed forces and signaled its unease with the politics of mass protest.
Representing the feloul is Ahmed Shafiq. His was the appeal of the military uniform, and the promise to the Copts that his presidency was a safe alternative to the rule of the Islamists.… Mr. Shafiq [did] well among rural voters; not for them was the romance with Tahrir Square. For all the talk of an Egypt obedient to its rulers, submissive under an eternal sky, the period since Mubarak’s fall has witnessed a massive breakdown in public order. True, Mubarak had stepped aside unlamented, but the lawlessness and the rise in unemployment has offered him—and his remnants—a measure of rehabilitation.
***
This is a faded, burdened country that has known many false dawns. Its saving grace at so critical a time is innate skepticism of grand claims and those who make them.
Egypt is the top importer of wheat, and food and bread riots are the horror of its rulers. Since the fall of Mubarak, Egypt has run down two-thirds of its foreign currency reserves, unemployment has soared, and tourism has collapsed. A loan of $3.2 billion on offer by the International Monetary Fund, at nominal interest, is yet to be accepted, so sanctified is the principle of economic independence.
Since no would-be ruler today has a magic wand for the country’s maladies, it is perhaps no wonder that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has been so eager to cede power to a civilian government. The officer corps will protect its economic and security prerogatives—it will keep for itself the domain of security and defense, dealings with Israel and the U.S. military—but it is keen to be relieved of the burden, and the responsibility, of the economy.
In the vision of the Islamists, Egypt would be ruled by Shariah law and the secularists reined in. This cannot be sustained on Egyptian soil. Theocracies like Iran, or Saudi Arabia for that matter, rest on oil wealth, on the margin such wealth allows the rulers to mold the society. In Egypt, so dependent on foreign aid, remittances, the revenues of tourism and the kindness of strangers, a religious utopia would be undone.
Today Egypt’s social and political balance has ruptured, and the population explosion—to 80 million from 18 million in 1952—has damaged its old stability. And yet the stereotype of a (largely) cautious country on the banks of the Nile that dreads grand causes is still true.
This is not a people known for violent jihads. Egypt has been spared the kind of bloodletting that visited Lebanon, Syria and Iraq in recent decades. May it be so for years to come. This election may have had its flaws, a constitution is yet to be drafted, but the old civility still holds.
A new republic has emerged, born in Tahrir Square. Two contenders for the presidency of the republic are not creatures of that square. But this is not the first time that the fruits of a revolution were picked by those who were strangers to its exertions.
(Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.)
REPORTS OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD’S
DEMISE WERE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
Eric Trager
New Republic, May 28, 2012
In the run-up to the first round of Egypt’s presidential elections, which concluded last Thursday, the Muslim Brotherhood’s downfall was widely anticipated. Only four months after winning a 47-percent plurality in the parliamentary elections, The Washington Post reported that the Brotherhood’s stock was “plunging,” while The Wall Street Journal insisted that the Brotherhood’s fortunes had “faded” due to “mounting public criticism” and “internal defections.” Pre-elections polls bolstered this storyline, pegging support for notoriously uncharismatic Brotherhood nominee Mohamed Morsi at a paltry three to nine percent, and it was widely expected that many Muslim Brothers would buck their parent organization and support ex-Brotherhood leader Abdel Monem Abouel Fotouh.
Yet reports of the Muslim Brotherhood’s demise, it seems, were greatly exaggerated: Morsi won a first-round plurality with roughly 26 percent of the vote, and will face former Mubarak regime figure Ahmed Shafik in the second round, which begins on June 16. Morsi’s strong performance, which comes despite his many deficiencies as a candidate, is a testament to the Muslim Brotherhood’s unmatched mobilizing capabilities, which have made the organization’s political dominance practically inevitable since the moment that Hosni Mubarak resigned.
It is not merely that the Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt’s “best organized” group, as many commentators frequently note. It is the only organized group, with a nationwide hierarchy that can quickly transmit commands from its Cairo-based Guidance Office (maktab al-irshad) to its 600,000 members scattered throughout Egypt. The hierarchy works as follows: The twenty-member Guidance Office sends its marching orders to deputies in each governorate (muhafaza), who communicate with their deputies in each “sector” (quita), who communicate with their deputies in each “area” (muhafaza), who communicate with their deputies in each “populace” (shoaba), who finally communicate with the leaders of each Brotherhood “family” (usra), which is comprised of five Muslim Brothers and represents the organization’s most basic unit. This chain of command is used for executing all Guidance Office decisions, including commanding Muslim Brothers to participate in protests, organize social services, and—during the most recent elections—campaign and vote for Mohamed Morsi.
There are two additional elements of the Muslim Brotherhood’s internal structure that ensure that the Brotherhood leadership’s commands are followed. First, the social lives of members are deeply embedded within the organization. Muslim Brothers meet with their five-person Brotherhood “families” at least weekly, where they study religious texts, discuss politics, organize local Brotherhood activities, and share their private lives with one another.…
Second, the very process of becoming a Muslim Brother ensures that only those who are deeply committed to the organization and its principles become full-fledged members. Indeed, becoming a Muslim Brother is an intricate five-to-eight-year process, during which each member is gradually promoted through four tiers of memberships before finally becoming a “working Brother” (ach amal).… Those who become Muslim Brothers are highly unlikely to turn their backs on an organization in which they have invested so much time and energy in joining.
Morsi’s victory in the first round of the presidential elections demonstrates the importance of these structures in determining Egypt’s political future. While other constituencies—including Egyptian Christians and Salafists—are significantly larger than the Brotherhood, none can mobilize similarly committed supporters as consistently or cohesively.…
The Brotherhood’s unmatched mobilizing capabilities suggest that, in a certain sense, it hardly matters whom they nominate for office. The gruff, uncharismatic Morsi was, after all, the Brotherhood’s “spare tire”—a reluctant understudy forced to perform after the group’s initial nominee, Khairat al-Shater, was disqualified from the elections due to a technicality. Moreover, Morsi made little attempt at reaching out to the non-Islamist public, whereas the eloquent Abouel Fotouh drew support from a broad coalition that included Salafists on the far right and socialists on the far left. But in a presidential contest featuring five major candidates, Abouel Fotouh’s broad coalition was no match for the Brotherhood’s reliable legions of foot-soldiers, who could mobilize superior get-out-the-vote efforts in every Egyptian governorate.
The Brotherhood’s disciplined infrastructure has thus put Mohamed Morsi one election away from Egypt’s presidency, and—barring massive fraud—he stands an excellent chance against former prime minister Shafik. While Shafik can count on support from Egyptian Christians and many of the rural clans that previously backed Mubarak’s ruling party, Morsi is already drawing support from many non-Islamists who fear a return to the old regime more than a Brotherhood-dominated Egypt. Moreover, early reports indicate that, faced with the choice between the autocratic Shafik and theocratic Morsi, many voters will stay home—a decision that will bolster Morsi, since low turnouts benefit well organized parties.…
(Eric Trager is the Next Generation Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.)
WHITHER EGYPT?
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, May 28, 2012
Were preliminary results in Egypt’s first round of presidential elections good for the Jewish state or bad for the Jewish state?
On the positive side, there was a sharp fall in support for the Islamists. If in the parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Nour party garnered between them 75 percent of the vote, in the presidential elections the two Islamist candidates—Mohammed Mursi and Abdel Moneim Abul-Fotouh—managed to receive just 44% of the votes. This seems to indicate a public backlash against calls on the part of the Islamists to implement Islamic law.
Also, the man who garnered the second largest number of votes was Ahmed Shafiq. An Egyptian Air Force commander, a long-time aviation minister and the last prime minister under the Mubarak regime, Shafiq enjoys strong support from the Coptic Church and the liberal-minded upper-class who stand to lose most from increasing emphasis on Islamic piousness in the public realm. Shafiq has voiced his willingness to visit Israel provided the Jewish state “gives something to show it has good intentions.” He would undoubtedly maintain the peace treaty with his country and Israel.
Unfortunately, Shafiq, whose popularity is less a product of his personal attraction and more to do with the fear of the meteoric rise of extremist political Islam and concern over lawlessness, is also a defender of some of the less democratic aspects of Egyptian rule. He has close ties to big business and high-ranking military personnel and seems to endorse continuing Egypt’s much hated, 30-yearold “emergency law” allowing extrajudicial detention. In cases of emergency, his platform suggests, the application of such measures should still be exempt from parliamentary review.
Still, Shafiq is undoubtedly the best candidate from an Israeli perspective. However, it was Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, who appears to have received a slim plurality of the votes. Mursi, who has a PhD in engineering from the University of Southern California, has a track record of inflammatory statements about Israel, including repeatedly calling its citizens “killers and vampires.”
Last month, Mursi sat impassively at a Cairo stadium rally on his behalf as a radical preacher pledged to create a new Islamic caliphate based in Jerusalem, and an emcee led the crowd in chants of “Banish the sleep from the eyes of the Jews; come on, you lovers of martyrdom, you are all Hamas!” The candidate has called for the 1979 peace treaty with Israel to undergo “revisions.”
Mursi is also a proponent of basing Egyptian law on Shari’a, the religious code of Islam. He led a boycott of a major Egyptian cellphone company because its founder, Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian, had circulated on Twitter a cartoon of Mickey Mouse in a long beard with Minnie in a full-face veil—a joke Mursi said insulted Islam.
In essence, in the final stage of presidential elections, slated for June, we will be witnessing a rematch of the struggle that has driven Egyptian politics for six decades, between secular authoritarians—represented by Shafiq—who vow to restore stability, and Islamists—led by Mursi—who promise a novel experiment in religious democracy.
Shafiq still has a real chance of beating the Islamist Mursi: The three non-Islamist candidates enjoyed a majority of the vote. If these votes go to Shafiq he would win. To succeed, Shafiq will have to woo most of the 20% of Egyptian voters who supported the communist-Nasserist Hamdeen Sabbahi, no easy task.
In an interview with the Iranian Fars news agency, Sabbahi said he would “tear up” the peace treaty with Israel and would not recognize a “Zionist element” that occupies Arab land. He also called to form an Egyptian-Turkish- Iranian alliance, noting relations with Iran had deteriorated “for no clear reason.” In short, Sabbahi’s supporters might be more inclined to support the Muslim Brotherhood than the pragmatic Shafiq.
And even if he succeeds beating Mursi, Shafiq will preside over a parliament controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists that can effectively marginalize him. He will also have to cater to an Egyptian society that is virulently anti-Israel.
A recent BBC poll found 85% of Egyptians hold negative views of Israel, up 7% from the year before. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to be overly optimistic about the future of Israeli-Egyptian relations.
