In a country of deteriorating economic conditions, young Egyptians are using social media to create opportunities and change the way business is done.
Egyptian presidential elections underdog Hamdeen Sabbahi achieved the impossible: he came in third in a two-horse race. The 60-year-old leftist politician and sole rival to the country’s ex-army chief Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi secured just under 757,000 votes in the preliminary count as opposed to Sisi’s more than 23 million votes—as well as to the votes of a last-minute unexpected entrant: the spoiled ballot.
Egyptians have headed to the polls to elect a president for the second time since the January 2011 revolution. Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi is expected to win by a wide margin over the only other contender, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi. The magnitude of that victory, however, will have an important impact on Sisi’s electoral mandate, and many questions remain about what he plans to do with it once in power.
Egypt’s new constitution grants the country’s generals greater autonomy and an increased formal political role. The draft authorizes military trials for civilians (Article 204) and ensures that the military’s budget be beyond civilian scrutiny. The most significant change is that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) will have the final say in choosing or dismissing the defense minister for two presidential terms (Article 234).
The military, though it has been the most powerful and influential actor during Egypt’s transition since 2011, is not the great deus ex machina of the Egyptian system. Rather, it is an actor that, since the fall of Mubarak, has managed to maintain some organizational coherence and legitimacy and has served as the convener for various and changing forces that are the crux of a new ruling coalition. Consequently, civilianizing the Egyptian state will require that security sector reforms be embedded in a broader set of political reforms.
May 6, 2014: A Conversation with H.E. Amr Moussa, Moderated by David Ignatius.
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika casts his ballot on April 17.
In the current two months between mid-April and early June, five Arab countries—Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and even war-torn Syria—are holding key elections, with little sign that any is moving in the direction of meaningful democratic transition.
Since Egypt’s 2011 revolution, the country’s economy has been suffering, with almost all economic indicators pointing to a deteriorating situation—and this despite the unprecedented support of some of the Arab Gulf countries. Subsidies, which have always represented the social contract between the governing regime and the population, are a major problem. Though reforming subsidies has consistently been a concern, no regime over the last 60 years has been able to implement serious measures. Rather, a piecemeal approach has been used when adjustments to the subsidies system became urgent.
Shortly after the onset of the Egyptian revolution in January 2011, the police and many of the associated security forces abandoned their posts, creating a vacuum that has had a devastating effect on Egypt’s antiquities. With great alacrity, villagers who lived near historic sites started appropriating land, while others with more nefarious intentions, such as tomb robbers and organized mafias, began the process of plundering.
Libya’s road to democracy is shaky at best. Security is deteriorating, with targeted killings, criminal attacks, and bombings on the rise and clashes between rival armed groups—some apparently with government legitimacy and others not—growing more frequent. While these negative trends put tremendous pressure on the transition, Libya’s political process, albeit fickle, manages to keep moving. The efforts at institution building in Libya present a nuanced landscape: for every step forward in one aspect, there are steps backward in others.
The Middle East Dialogue is a regional Track II forum that meets twice a year and brings together current and former officials and senior experts from the Middle East, the United States, Russia, China, and the EU to discuss emerging political & security trends in the region. What follows is a report from the latest meeting of the Dialogue in Erbil, Iraq, on March 30-31, 2014, led by MEI’s Director of Track II Dialogues Randa Slim and VP for Policy and Research Paul Salem.
It seemed like an ordinary demonstration. Clusters of banner-waving youths marched along the sun-drenched main street of Damanhour, in the heart of Egypt’s Nile Delta, on March 6. But the banners they held, featuring a large cartoonish drop of red blood beside an emphatic “No!,” were directed not at political figures but at Hepatitis C (HCV), a blood-transmitted virus attacking the liver that counts nearly 12 million Egyptians as its victims.
U.S. diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have in the last year focused on relations between Israel and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, led by PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Yet there is arguably a far more dynamic and perilous front: one that encompasses Israel, Egypt’s lawless Sinai Peninsula, and the Gaza Strip, the latter of which is run by Hamas.
The fall of the Qaddafi regime and the loss of the state monopoly on violence gave way to a duopoly of power in Libya whereby rudimentary “national” forces—under the control of the National Transitional Council (NTC) from March 2011 to August 2012—were established in competition with the non-state “Revolutionary Brigades,” which had borne the brunt of the military struggle against Qaddafi’s forces. Since then, the Revolutionary Brigades have increasingly sought to assert themselves in the political arena.
On March 26, Egyptian Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi resigned from the military and announced his presidential bid. What do we know of Sisi’s platform, and what kind of military leadership does he leave behind? MEI spoke with resident scholar Mohamed Elmenshawy about these and other issues.
Will any challengers take on the enormously popular Sisi?