The military coup against President Muhammad Mursi has ended Egypt’s first real flirtation with democracy. The man Egyptians chose to lead them away from half a century of military dictatorship, has been ousted by the military machine that he found impossible to tame.
It is hard to see how the fresh elections promised by the judge whom the generals have installed as “interim leader,” will actually make any difference to the reality that this country’s democracy has been extinguished. The second flower to blossom after Tunisia’s original Arab Spring is wilted and dying. Only the arrest of the coup plotters and the restoration of President Mursi to office could restore democracy. And that, it would seem, is not about to happen.
There can be no doubting that Adly Mahmud Mansour, the senior judge at the constitutional court, who has been sworn in as interim leader, will be acting in co-ordination with the commanders of the armed forces. Not only was he almost certainly chosen some time ago, to take on this key stopgap role, but the constitutional court was also responsible for overturning the result of the parliamentary elections. From the point of view of the generals and supporters of the old regime, this key act undermined the political basis of Mursi’s administration and served to isolate him and his party.
Moreover, since they did not have the opportunity to express their views in Parliament, opposition leaders felt that they were entitled to take them onto the streets, with the consequent deterioration in security and the rise in unrest.
None of this can have been unwelcome to the generals. Their problem from the outset was to await the moment when they could produce sufficient justification to march out of their barracks.
The armed forces had to appear to be supporting the president, to whom they had sworn loyalty. In early unrest, in part brought on by football riots, the security forces were careful to be seen to be playing a neutral role. This was easy enough. Egyptian football has a discreditable history of violence between supporters. But even so, there were suspicions at the time that outside influences may have been at work, fomenting trouble between rival football clubs.
In May however, the army high command suffered a setback. The kidnap of seven members of the security forces by Sinai tribesmen was a humiliation, which demonstrated that the generals did not have the tight grip on the security situation that they pretended. Mursi managed to insist that some commanders be fired. Some of his supporters imagined that this was the start of the president’s pushback against his generals. In reality, it may have been the start of the end, in that it determined the High Command to move against Mursi sooner, rather than later.
The final game plan of the coup plotters called for sufficient public unrest for the generals to intervene. Since last Sunday there has been escalating violence in Cairo, with at least 50 deaths, some during the indefensible torching of the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters. On Monday night, the generals issued a warning that unless the government reacted within 48 hours, to “the demands of the people,” they would be forced to take some action. There was however no indication of what the armed forces might do. Indeed, on Tuesday, one general went so far deny that there was any thought at all of mounting a coup. The worth of that denial was proven last night when Mursi was placed under house arrest and the coup went ahead.
The joy with which opposition parties greeted the military intervention is likely to be short-lived. There are serious economic and social problems to be addressed. Egypt is running out of money and has only stayed solvent thanks to generous support from other Arab countries.
That support may not now be so readily available. One of the major failings of the Mursi administration came with subsidies, which bloat the state budget and distort competition. Like every government before them, Mursi’s Freedom and Justice party chickened out of real cuts in the money the state forks out on bread and cooking fuel.
The wider economic issues were no less difficult. The IMF’s refusal over the last 18 months to release $ 4.8 billion of funding because it did not believe fiscal reforms went far enough, has complicated the task of funding day-to-day government expenditure. It is hard to believe that the IMF is going to change its view, just because the Mursi administration has been overthrown.
Editorial: ‘Egypt Spring’ gives way to military chill
