Nine months after overthrowing the elected Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the army chief who has come to embody the hopes of a prostrate Egypt, has cast off his uniform, ready to be elected president by probably a massive majority of a nation that sees him as a saviour. Yet while Egypt desperately needs a unifying figure to set an inclusive tone and restore confidence in the country’s future, it is unclear how Mr Sisi can play that role.
The electoral coronation of the field marshal in mufti, still basking in the adulation of his compatriots for rescuing them from the brief but sectarian rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, may turn out to be the pinnacle of his career.
The scale of Egypt’s problems, with its economy at a standstill, polarised politics and a gathering jihadist insurgency, is giddying. Since Mr Sisi and the army retook control in last July’s coup, moreover, the emphasis has been on rebuilding the national security state partially dismantled after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in the Tahrir Square uprising of early 2011. More generally, it is hard to imagine how military populism, the cause of so many of Egypt’s ills, can be the solution to them.
Before it came under the sway of officers and men of providence 60 years ago, Egypt was in the same position as South Korea in its stage of development. British colonial power bore heavy responsibility for discrediting constitutional politics, true, but Egyptians were easily seduced by the ultimately hollow pan-Arab nationalism and personality cults surrounding Gamal Abdel Nasser and his officer-class successors, and having the army as overarching institution and almost the only social escalator.
Now, Egypt has: 85m people crammed into the Nile valley and delta, nearly half of them below the poverty line and with millions of the young yearning for opportunities not there; a rentier economy rigged for crony capitalists and the off-budget business empire of the military; a clerical establishment that controls much cultural space, and an education system not fit for purpose; and still only one real institution, the army, along with a revived personality cult, this time of Mr Sisi.
There are important differences in this new episode of military populism.
First, Mr Sisi probably has more power than Mr Mubarak. While he has re-erected essential pillars of the police state, alongside new laws curtailing freedoms such as assembly and expression, he has tilted power away from the security services towards the army. He has also enhanced the power of the military in the new constitution, drawn up by a handpicked panel and endorsed in January by a referendum no one was allowed to contest. Mr Sisi has given up his uniform, but not its power.
Second, the Muslim Brotherhood, widely reviled after using its bitterly divisive moment in power to capture the organs of state rather than to govern, has been branded a terrorist organisation. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have been rounded up, and just this week 529 supporters of Mr Morsi were sentenced to death, and another 919, including the Brotherhood’s leader, put on trial, in kangaroo courts even previous military tribunals would have struggled to emulate.
Third, Mr Sisi comes to power after two presidents were swept away in barely three years. They have gone but the unmet socioeconomic and political demands of a restive young population remain – and it knows the route to Tahrir Square.
Fourth, by criminalising mainstream Islamist opinion, Mr Sisi has created a permanent state of emergency and opened the gates to jihadis – above all in the ungoverned space of the Sinai peninsula – which will make achieving consensus and stability very difficult. The multibillion-dollar aid packages from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf on which Egypt is subsisting are, furthermore, payment for the state crackdown on the Brotherhood.
We do not yet know the real colours of Mr Sisi, who as a chameleon general made first the Brotherhood and then the people believe he was one of them. He is revered as a saviour for something he knocked down; we do not yet know whether he can build anything except a mass following. But whatever the question is in Egypt, populism and putsch-ism are not the answer.
Fonte: FT
