Egypt’s Uncertain Transition Towards Democracy
What is Egypt’s relationship with democracy? A question that has become increasingly controversial ever since the “Arab Spring”. This paper is going to be addressing Egypt’s relationship with democracy as it assesses its transition into it over the years. For a considerable length of time Egypt has been in a crisis. Not only has their economy taken a turn for the worst but there is also a strong sense of aloofness between the government and Egyptian subjects. Executive power has been passed from the hands of President Honsi Mubarak, to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, then won by present president Mohamed Morsi, up until he was removed from office, and now is the second transitional period that is pro the rise of Abd El Fattah El Sisi as Egypt’s new to-be elected president. The questions raised here are, was democracy ever achieved at any point in these different time periods and what is in store for the future?
The 2011 pro-democracy demonstrations across the Middle East and North Africa are akin to a wildfire. Their speed and effectiveness in removing ironclad autocrats has been bracing. But they have also been indiscriminate and largely unpredictable. The changes sweeping through the region haven’t led to uniform outcomes. Some of these dictators’ houses will be completely destroyed, burnt to ashes, while just across the street some will be untouched. Some dictators will fall – like Mubarak, their autocratic rule and dreams of despotic dynasties will be thrown to the wind – while some will stubbornly hold onto power, turning viciously on their own people in the process, as Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi has done by using his loyal military and security forces. Not all countries that have removed their leaders will necessarily get shining liberal democracies in return. Even in successes like Tunisia and Egypt the ultimate result remains uncertain. What is certain, however, is that what happens in Egypt will be the key to future regional peace and security. With due respect to the Tunisian protesters, whose bravery and courage acted as the spark for the mass popular movements sweeping the region, the transition to a democratic state in Tunisia will not have as wide-ranging a regional or global impact. Egypt has long been the linchpin of the regional security framework, and indeed the keystone of regional stability. While it is true that Egypt’s status in the region had begun to fade under the strain of numerous challenges, it is Mubarak’s regime which oversaw and contributed to this waning influence. His removal now changes the regional equation and makes Egypt’s unknown future once more of paramount relevance to regional peace and security. Accurately forecasting what may transpire in Egypt over the transitional period, and what form of government will emerge, depends on examining and understanding the motivations of the protest movement and how it operated. The transition to a genuine democratic government in Egypt will depend upon how successfully the members of the protest movement can translate the euphoria of their victory into workable grassroots political processes. The pro-democracy movement will need to transfer the techniques, tactics and processes they used to remove their rusted-on leader into organizing and establishing robust modern political parties with developed policy platforms, modern campaigning structures and broad grassroots support. This progression will need to occur in a relatively short period if the time frame for elections in September is adhered to. The powerful motivations of the demonstrators could be seen clearly throughout the protests, but, particularly near the final days of the popular uprising, the demonstrators largely represented a cross-section of Egyptian society. There were people of all ages, men and women (educated and not), poor and rich, middle class, Muslim and Christian. While the youth elements, much celebrated in the western press as the heroes of the ‘Facebook revolution’, certainly are to be commended for organising and propelling the early protests, it was the cross-section of all Egyptians that came onto the streets in such massive numbers over consecutive days that eventually defeated Mubarak.
The broad composition of the protest movement seems to belie the fear that Mubarak’s removal will result in an Islamist takeover. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was certainly a key part of the protest movement, but they were not the instigators, nor were they its driving force. Initially, the older MB leadership, a generation that had shadowed the Mubarak regime for the past thirty years, was reluctant for the MB to officially join the street protest movement instigated by the Facebook crowd. The MB as an organization only embraced the protests after its younger cohorts moved against the wishes of their elders and went out early to join other youth protesters in the streets. Just like Mubarak and his old guard, the older MB generation was slow to understand what was going on around them. What bound all the protesters together – whether they were Muslim Brothers; young, educated Facebook users; student activists; middle-class workers; or even lowly doormen – was their strong desire for change and an end to oppression. All Egyptians had had enough of the regime. The despair, the anger, the frustration and anguish at the stagnant, corrupt and despotic government was palpable. Ordinary Egyptians were tired of the lack of the most basic services, of the pervasive corruption and the lack of opportunity. Reports in 2008 pointed to UN agency statistics estimating that only 58% of Egyptians had access to basic sanitation. While it is the case that ‘almost all households in urban areas have piped connections to a public water service network, roughly 15% of households in slum areas and 13% in rural areas do not have access to piped water, let alone sanitation such as sewage services. The picture for Egypt is grim on several other key indicators published in the World Economic Forum’s Arab World Competitiveness Review 2010. Egypt ranked extremely low: 95th among 139 countries worldwide on favoritism in decisions of government officials, 79th for the burden of excessive government regulation, 68th for government transparency, and 89th on the basic requirements for global competitiveness, which include the efficacy of government institutions and services, provision of infrastructure and wastefulness of government spending on services.
Those who were not in the estimated 20 per cent of Egyptians living below the poverty line, those unable to find jobs despite being educated, and those who wished to marry, but were unable to buy an apartment due to rising costs of living, were humiliated. Many Egyptians, through their access to satellite television, the internet or travel, could see the civil, political and economic freedoms enjoyed by people in the west, yet at home they had none of them. Worse, under the emergency law in place since 1981, they have been subject to arbitrary arrest and detention, and, possibly, to torture. There was also a government ban on political organizations unless they had been officially sanctioned by it. And it was illegal for more than five people to gather or protest without a licence from the government.
Over time, all these circumstances had brought Egyptians to the boil. When Egyptians saw the Tunisians topple their dictator, they asked: if they can, why can’t we? To say, however, that the Egyptian protest movement simply ignited because of the spark set by the Tunisian revolution is to ignore a number of other factors that led the Egyptian people to revolt en masse. Over the past three decades – roughly the period of the Mubarak regime’s rule – Egypt has experienced a population explosion. The population has grown from 45 million to 85 million in this period. Emerging from this has been the primary underlying factor behind the popular uprising – the burgeoning youth demographic. According to the 1996 census, ‘46 percent of the population was 20 years of age or younger’, and more recent estimates are that ‘one in five Egyptians is between ages 15 and 24, and one-half of the population is below age 25’. Since the advent of Mubarak’s rule, two cancers have attached themselves onto this demographic youth bulge – an insidious level of corruption and an alarmingly high level of youth unemployment in Egypt. The corruption has bred stagnation and anger, the unemployment has led to despair and frustration. According to the Population Council’s 2009 survey of Egyptian youth, ‘More than 40 percent thought personal connections were more important than personal skills in securing a job, one reflection of the society-wide corruption that ignited the protests’.
This toxic combination has meant that the Egyptian economy and society was structurally unable, particularly over the past decade, to adequately provide employment opportunities, or even social outlets, for its millions of young graduates. It has left the vast majority (with the exception of the small elite attached to the upper echelons of the regime) of this class of young, educated Egyptians with only a few, limited, paths. Many retreated into a fatalistic docility engulfed by the poverty that surrounded them. A very small, relatively fortunate, number used whatever connections, or wasta, they could muster to snatch a few crumbs from the regime table, and to set up small to medium sized businesses enjoying relative wealth. Some found low-paying government jobs – and some, both poor and middle class, also chose to vent their despair and to reverse their disempowerment through religion – for example, by joining the Muslim Brotherhood which, although illegal, has been intent on removing the regime and establishing an Islamic state and Sharia law through the ballot box. A very small number joined more extreme, radicalized Islamic groupings that chose violent jihad and terrorism against the state. Either way, being an angry Islamist was at least better for some Egyptian youth than the alternative of impotence. In the face of the repressive regime, a remarkable development took place: a large cohort of this young generation of Egyptians emphatically rejected the many dead ends they were faced with. They took a different course. They chose to deal with their frustration through peaceful means and through the use of modern technology. Social media allowed them to start to take matters into their own hands. Most importantly and remarkably, Egyptian youths who had known nothing else for all their short lives but the stultifying Mubarak regime, still chose to take full responsibility for their futures and for those of their compatriots. Two years ago, what came to be called the April 6 youth movement started an online support network through a Facebook page to actively support striking textile workers in the industrial city of El Mahalla. By January 2009, the April 6 Movement had some seventy thousand members. Young Egyptian people had also organized through other Facebook pages such as ‘Clean up Egypt’ sites, which supported the Zabaleen, or garbage collectors, against multinational contracts, and which also promoted their own cleanliness and sanitation programmes. Fed up with the inability of the government to provide these basic services, they decided to organize and do the work themselves.
Young, ‘tech-savvy’ Egyptians started using social media as a means to get around the corruption and the stagnation. A vibrant civil society sprang up online, and it was only a matter of a few years before this form of dissent left the virtual world for the streets of Cairo, despite the regime’s brutal efforts to halt its spread. The youth activists built the momentum online, organizing protests and events through which to express their grievances.
Moving forward, we come to address the main issue this paper is dealing with in more concentrated depth; the transition to democracy. The youth activists and opposition groups now argue amongst themselves and the interim authorities over what lines must not be crossed by the caretaker government, over who from the previous regime should remain in the caretaker cabinet, and over how much they should ‘trust’ the military to oversee the handover to a democratically-elected, civilian government. Wael Ghonim, the Google Executive who was instrumental in pushing large numbers of people to go back out into the streets for ‘the day of wrath’, was later criticized for falling in behind the army as an institution ‘we can trust’ and for asking protesters to leave Tahrir Square . Meanwhile, by now the vast majority of Egyptians that had taken to the streets will have returned to work (if they had or still have jobs) as the flush of adrenalin that came from participating in an historic moment drains away, and as they try to return to some sense of normalcy. Yet the poor – close to 40 per cent of the Egyptian population who live on two dollars a day – will want some significant gains for their efforts. They include the shoe shiners and doormen, the cleaners and street-sweepers that, when the conflict between the protest movement and the interior ministry security and police forces was at its most heated, stood up like a mass infantry and fought back with stones and rocks.
The danger to a successful transition and the emergence of a robust, genuinely representative, democratically-elected government is the forgetting and ignoring of these ordinary Egyptians’ aspirations for economic reform. If the youth activists and the various weak secular opposition groups fall into the trap of inane arguments over their respective outmoded ideologies, splintering their opposition – or, even worse, if with hubris they start dividing up the spoils of some future government, groups like the MB will be at an electoral advantage.

With more regards to the MB and their contributions to the democratic transitions, in 1972, the MB renounced violence as the path to establishing Sharia law and an Islamic state in Egypt. Henceforth, they claimed to pursue them only through political means. In short, the MB is playing the long game, participating in democracy as a means to its ultimate objectives. But are they the Islamist wolves in democratic sheep’s clothing that the west fears? Will they eventually gain power through the ballot box – only to never again allow the ballot box to be used? The answer to these questions depends upon the outcomes of a number of unknowns. How moderate are the younger generation of the MB? Do they genuinely disagree with some of the more extreme interpretations of Islam favored by the older leadership, or are they just being strategically smarter by hiding their true intentions? Do they genuinely believe in democracy as an ongoing political system or do they just see it as a Trojan horse for an Islamic state that ends democratic participation?

There are some encouraging signs that younger member of the MB do reject extremist interpretations of Islam and have a real belief in pluralistic democracy as an ongoing system of governance. For example, young Islamist bloggers have had the courage to be highly critical of their elders, criticizing official MB positions which stipulate that a women or a Christian could not be the country’s President, or that all politicians must be devout Muslims. The real test for these moderates, though – assuming that these young brotherhood members are moderate in the sense that they see themselves a part of a pluralistic, representative democratic system which is not simply a stepping stone for an eventual power grab – is whether they will eventually take control of the MB. They have youth and time on their side and, as recently as 24 February 2011, the MB announced the formation of the ‘Freedom and Justice’ Party to run in parliamentary elections in September, a political party clearly modelled on the success of the Turkish Islamist template.

Also basing itself on the Turkish Justice and Development Party (or AK party) is another breakaway from the MB, the Wasat or Centre party led by Abou Elela Mady, who split from the MB in the mid-1990s and has been attempting to register Wasat as a party for over a decade. The development of these new Islamist-based, or at least Islamist-inspired, political parties is critical to the future success of representative democracy in Egypt because through them the MB and its sympathizers and supporters seek to come ‘inside the tent’. Since they crave acceptance and legal status within the emerging governing system, they accept and encourage that system to become democratic. Therefore their willingness to participate can only strengthen a genuine pluralistic democratic system. In the past, the MB has been held up to the USA and the international community as a bogeyman. It has been put forward by Mubarak as the worst alternative to the ‘stability’ of the Mubarak regime. Now they are but one of many emerging political alternatives, although the MB has already built a degree of grassroots support, been relatively well organized and has (they claim) the power of religion on their side. While it was not the primary driving force, and did not even play the major role in toppling Mubarak in the days of demonstrations in Tahrir Square, it will be a major player in post-Mubarak Egypt. Yet for them to participate effectively in a pluralistic democratic system (assuming it has the right checks and balances in place) will mean that they will have to blunt their worst tendencies towards dogmatic Islamist policies and as a result be feared a little less by the west.

There is, however, a risk that extremist and violent Islamists who believe in terrorism and violent acts as means of exploiting the current political vacuum during this transitional period of uncertainty is real. This risk is more likely to come from the offshoots of the MB – for example, from those groups such as Al Qaeda (AQ) who continue to believe in and use violence as a means to establish an Islamic state. AQ and its affiliates have been dealt a mighty blow by the pro-democracy protests across the region. They had always espoused violence and terror as the only way to defeat and remove the autocratic and corrupt rulers of the region – yet, in a matter of weeks, peaceful protesters, restraining the use of violence and rejecting terror, have succeeded where they failed. Most importantly, the protesters in Egypt and across the region called for democratic systems (anathema to the AQ ideology of an Islamist Caliphate state) to replace their dictators. There is no doubt that the MB will have a head start in the upcoming elections because by default it has been and still is the best-organized of the groups who opposed the former regime.
Even Mubarak allowed the MB some space to operate, so that, ironically, with a grassroots reach that other, disempowered, opposition groups lacked, it became by default the unofficial opposition. Much has been written regarding whether the MB’s ability to provide social services to the poor will translate into popular support at the ballot box. But this will also depend upon how well organized other opposition groups are over the next few months.

The ability of the old ‘officially-sanctioned’ secular opposition groups to consolidate in time for the elections in September is another unknown. Blighted by over half a century of irrelevance, the official political opposition parties (the centre-right liberal al Wafd, the union- and labourbacked Tagummuu, the Nasserist Socialists, the Ayman Nour-led Al Ghad ‘Tomorrow’ Party, which saw Nour jailed on trumped up forgery charges, as well as many smaller groups) are all relatively weak. Experienced largely in internal academic debates and without any real grassroots support, they are more akin to ‘hummus socialists’ who meet regularly over some pita bread and dip to bemoan how awful it has been to be so terribly constrained by the regime. These opposition political parties are locked in their headquarters, unable to communicate with the public. As if to give some spine to these weak, if officially-sanctioned, parties, the umbrella Kefaya (‘Enough’) grouping emerged in 2004 – as a ‘cross ideological’21 movement which had a modicum of success in bringing under its banner anyone and everyone who said ‘no’ to Mubarak. Modestly successful in getting the fractured opposition groups to work together, they succeeded in organizing a number of street protests over the past few years. However, it is the newer youth-inspired movements (including the Facebook youth activists such as the April 6 Movement and Youth committee and, to an extent, Mohamed el Baradei’s Movement for Change) which have all, in contrast to the officially-sanctioned opposition, and building on Kefaya’s earlier modest successes, had much more traction in effectively opposing the regime and in removing Mubarak from power. However, if all the opposition groups are going to capture the votes of the ordinary Egyptians and the disaffected youth that are flushed with success, the old existing political parties still have a lot of grassroots political work to do: it may be more likely that, in coordination with many of the youth and labour activists, new political parties will be formed. Whatever the result, all of these new (or old) political parties will need time and space to organize themselves to prepare for elections and to be able to present a viable policy and political platform to the Egyptian people – and they only have a few months to do so.

Lastly, the idea of a democratic system, rather than a leader pleads its case. The structure of the democratic reforms is also a critical issue. Democracy is not just elections – it is a deeper system built on democratic institutions and structures, including: a free press; freedom of expression and association; accountability; an independent judiciary; the checks and balances that come with a separation of religion from the state, and also of the executive from the legislature; and the upholding of human rights, protections for minorities and freedom of religion. Whether the current constitutional amendments passed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and caretaker cabinet will be accepted by the Egyptian people in a referendum due on 19th March is just the beginning of a long reform process. While such reforms as fixed four-year terms, with a two-term limit and the mandatory appointing of a Deputy President, are a good start to the establishment of a genuine democratic system, they are only a start.

There has been much speculation over which individual leader will emerge as the new force in Egyptian politics. Many have hailed the Google executive Wael Ghonim as the new leader for Egypt’s future. Ghonim catalysed the protest movement when it looked as if it was starting to lose steam. When he emerged from twelve days in jail, his emotional and heartfelt television interview on an independent satellite channel added needed momentum to the protests. Likewise the return of Mohamed al Baradei (the Nobel Peace prize laureate and former head of the IAEA) and Amr Moussa (the former Egyptian Foreign Minister and until recently the General Secretary for the Arab League), who have been promoted as potential presidential material.

In conclusion, the previous speculations miss the point: without the right democratic reforms in place, without the institutions and structures that would protect, foster and allow democratic principles to flourish, no individual would be able to move the country forward successfully. Without these reforms, at best Egypt would only have a leader who could provide a fleeting vision of generational change that would lead to disappointment; at worst, it would get just another strongman in the Middle East that would frustrate the aspirations of the Egyptian people for genuine political and economic reform. The key, in order that the newly-emerging democracy be properly supported, is not only that there be free and fair elections in September, but that genuine democratic reforms (including wholesale rewriting of the constitution and reform of institutions) precede and follow those elections. Unlike the wildfire of protest and revolution that has spread through the region, the key to successful transition in Egypt will be whether the Egyptian people can manage through a new political system to control that flame of democracy they have ignited. This democratic system must be robust enough to survive what will be a turbulent beginning in which many frustrated and expectant voices will clamor for attention, and resilient enough to be passed onto future generations of Egyptians.

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