When Muhammad Mursi led Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to electoral victory, there were high expectations that he would form a pluralist and inclusive government, that would set about undoing the injustices and economic incoherence of the years of military dictatorship.
That he did not, from the very beginning, seek to reach out to the opposition, that indeed the opposition was able so quickly to find reasons to reject his administration and claim that it was illegitimate, was very much why, within almost exactly a year, the Mursi government had collapsed into incoherence and rancor and lost control of the streets.
It is disturbing that the military intervention led by army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi appears to making the same mistake. Ousting the president in the cause of national unity and peace made sense, if the actions that were then taken clearly supported those two ideals. It was a no-brainer that many of Mursi’s supporters would be furious at the takeover and would in their turn flood onto the streets in protest. It can be expected that attempts were made to persuade Mursi and other leading Muslim Brotherhood personalities to appeal to their people to avoid confrontation. At the same time, the military must have realized there was little chance of their complying.
Therefore everything should have been done to avoid the confrontation that saw 54 people, mostly Brotherhood supporters, killed when they clashed with the police and army. Equally these demonstrations should not have been used as the excuse for a dragnet of top Brotherhood officials. With each step, the armed forces were burning another bridge behind them and reducing the route back to dialog and some sort of political settlement. That Egypt’s new interim administration and its military backers have made very much the same mistake of uncompromising behavior toward the opposition, is having wider consequences beyond the domestic political stage. In the US there are legal limits on the financial support that the government can give to any country, whose elected head of state and legislature is deposed by a military coup or a revolt, in which the military plays a decisive role. Hence the White House has been going out of its way to avoid characterizing the overthrow of Mursi as the military coup that some respected senior US politicians are calling it. While the Obama administration can hold off any final decision by Congress to cast what has happened in Egypt as a coup, it could not delay this indefinitely. At stake is around $1.15 billion of annual aid, which is almost entirely military. Thus Obama’s decision to delay the delivery of four F-16 fighters may be seen as a warning shot fired toward Egypt’s top brass. If the crackdown on members of the ousted regime — the Muslim Brotherhood head, Mohammed Badie is reported to have fled to Libya — continues, then it will be ever harder to pretend that this was not the military-led coup that was expected for such a long time. Moreover by isolating Mursi and his people from the new political process, the generals are making an even bigger mistake. In the end, the problems Egypt face all boil down to its failed economy.
A system of subsidies on food and fuel has grown up over the years like a parasitic plant that both sucks coin out of the treasury and, because of its financial distortion, dynamism out of economy as well. Egypt’s oil bonanza is not being invested in badly-needed new infrastructure but is being largely squandered on subsidies. To break this wasteful spiral will cause considerable short-term pain to millions as the subsidies are abolished. One of the great sources of political strength for the Muslim Brotherhood has been the social welfare programs they have run among the nation’s poor. These have earned them respect and affection. If a new military-backed government seeks to end the subsidy system once and for all, with the Brotherhood now excluded from the political process, it will be a simple matter for them to mount a cogent and potentially fatal opposition to the move. Politics will move back again to the streets and the divisions between Egyptians will become the deeper and more bitter.
More importantly, if subsidies are not ended, because of a violent political standoff, the very root cause of the misery and unrest that is driving the greatest part of the political protest, will survive, to continue to wreck Egypt’s economic chances and with that, its hopes of stability.
Editorial: Egypt’s non-inclusive politics
