Power struggle overshadows Egypt
vote By Victor Kotsev
According to early vote counts late on
Sunday night, Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim
Brotherhood candidate, was set to become the next
Egyptian president. Almost simultaneously, the
ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF)
amended the constitutional declaration it had
issued last year, reassuming legislative powers
and limiting greatly the authority of the
president.
On the one hand, this is the
second major election the Muslim Brotherhood has
won in the last half year or so, and the symbolism
of the event should not be diminished. After being
outlawed and persecuted by army-dominated
governments for close to six decades, the
Brotherhood has received a popular
mandate to control the
major institutions of the largest Arab country.
This development comes in the context of a
growing split between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims in
the Middle East (Egypt's population is
predominantly Sunni) and a growing role of
religious politics in the region as a number of
societies, including Egypt's, seek to democratize.
However, the immediate significance of the
presidential election for Egyptian politics is
muchs less clear, and likely much less momentous.
Last week, after Egypt's Supreme Constitutional
Court annulled the parliamentary election that
took place a few months ago, the Brotherhood
suffered a serious political setback. Many people
had voted for its candidates in that election
under the premise that it wouldn't field a
presidential candidate; when it later went back on
its promise, it lost some allure. The closely
contested presidential run-offs, widely perceived
as a showdown between the army and the Islamists,
suggest that the Brotherhood might have a smaller
role in the next parliament. (A date for the next
parliamentary elections has not been set yet.)
Even more importantly, the battle over the
new Egyptian constitution, which will determine
the balance of power between the institutions, has
not only picked up but has also been relocated to
unchartered waters. The constitution is of higher
significance than the presidential and
parliamentary elections, especially during periods
of transition, when both legislative and executive
power is prone to change hands frequently.
In the last three months or so, the
Islamist-dominated parliament struggled to
establish a functioning Constituent Assembly.
After walk-outs by the secular pro-democratic
forces and a backstage clash with the military,
negotiations to resolve the deadlock drew out.
Sunday's amended constitutional declaration
effectively gives the military control over the
makeup of the Constituent Assembly, [1] but there
is little clarity as to what the next steps will
be.
Arguably, the Supreme Constitutional
Court, whose members were largely appointed by the
regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak,
stepped into the fray on the side of the military;
the army, it should be noted, was the main power
base of the old regime (Mubarak is a former air
force general and a decorated war hero).
As a side note, similar disputes about the
parliamentary elections took place in 1987 and
1990, but in those cases the courts took years to
come to a conclusion. The speed of this year's
ruling - which came within months - has
strengthened suspicions that it was politically
motivated. The situation in which, after the fall
of a deeply entrenched regime, the judiciary
remains a loyalist bastion, parallels the
drawn-out processes of democratization of other
countries (for example, in Eastern Europe
following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc).
The battle between the army and the Muslim
Brotherhood, which has raged for decades, will
likely be a drawn-out one. Some analysts estimate
that a political model similar to the Turkish one
might eventually shape up; in Turkey, the military
sees itself as the bastion of secularism, and has
historically sought (with declining success over
the last years) to keep the moderate Islamists in
check.
In the immediate future, however,
it seems that Egypt is set for more chaos. As
Charles Holmes writes in an article in Foreign
Policy Magazine, in which he analyses the Egyptian
transition using the framework provided by Crane
Brinton's 1938 study An Anatomy of
Revolution, "This week's court ruling … should
only be taken as another sign that the center,
hemorrhaging ever more legitimacy, ultimately
cannot hold."
He continues:
Brinton offers guidance for how to
think of this process by conceiving of
revolutions in terms of stages: In his model,
Egypt has traversed the first stage - the
collapse of the regime - and begun stage two,
epitomized by an ineffective, moderate interim
government that fails to deliver sufficient
political change. Depending on how you apply
this framework to the Egyptian setting, this
second stage may equate to either the interim
SCAF or some kind of "inclusive" - ie badly
fudged - government that will be unpopular, and
destined to fail. Again, whether this
administration is led by Morsi or Shafiq makes
little difference in the long run.
The
failure of the moderates will bring about stage
three: the wholesale disintegration of a
measured transition process, leading to
widespread political confusion, major clashes,
and the beginnings of violence verging on
anarchy. Stage four ushers in the radical,
purging, period - terrifying for its
uncompromising zeal and tyranny. This "fever",
in Brinton's terminology, breaks in the final
stage, as the radical leadership burns itself
out and is replaced by a more stable and
long-term representative government.
It is worth noting, as Holmes also
does, that the Egyptian economy is headed for a
crash. Still, in the long run, we can expect
Egypt, which boasts one of the oldest traditions
of continuous state structure in the world, to
pull through the transition in one piece.
Alternatives to the Turkish model are also
possible. In Egypt, differently from Turkey, there
is a powerful secularist movement which is not
aligned with the army. It served as the backbone
of last year's revolution, but turned out to be
less organized in the elections than either the
remnants of the old regime or the Muslim
Brotherhood. Still, in the months and years ahead,
there is a possibility that a secular
pro-democratic political force will emerge as a
major player in the country.
Other forces,
such as a more radical Islamist movement, have
also gained prominence. Months ago, this movement
won a quarter of the seats in the parliament;
still, speculations about a radical Islamist
takeover of Egypt, similar to the one that
happened in Iran after the 1979 revolution, seem
greatly exaggerated.
In the longer-term,
it is in the military's interests to help usher in
at least the appearance of a functioning
democracy, because this would suit the agenda of
its most important foreign ally and donor, the
United States. The ultimate outcome from the
transition, however, is impossible to predict, and
a string of economic and political crises, which
seem unavoidable over the next years, could upset
such a calculation dramatically. Amid the major
geopolitical shifts taking place in the region,
Egypt presents many more questions than answers.
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