Egypt: The Gaullist option (update)

On Sunday, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was sworn in as Egypt’s president. On 3 July 2013, Sissi, then the commander of the Egyptian army, ousted President Mohammed Morsi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then pulled the strings behind the year-long transition period which culminated in his election to the presidency. The ouster of Morsi followed months of growing popular unrest not only with the incompetence and ineffectiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government, but also with the government’s increasingly strident Islamist tone and Morsi’s own authoritarian tendencies.

The ouster of Morsi, the ruthlessness with which the transitional government and the courts dealt with the Muslim Brotherhood and its followers, and the election of Sissi – have combined to inflicted a grievous, probably fatal, defeat for political Islam in Egypt.

Two years ago, the future looked promising for Egypt’s Islamist forces.

Following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, Egypt set out for its first democratic elections for parliament – Egypt’s People’s Assembly – and the presidency. The Islamists won both.

• The elections for the People’s Assembly was conducted in three rounds. The first round started on 28 November 2011, the second round was held on 14 December 2011, the third on 3 January 2012. The new assembly convened on 17 March 2012. Of the Assembly’s 498 seats, the Muslim Brotherhood (under the name Democratic Alliance for Egypt) won 235 seats; the more Islamist fundamentalist party Islamist Bloc won 123 seats; and the moderate Islamist party Al-Wasat Party won 10 seats. The three Islamist parties thus won 368 seats, or 73 percent, of the seats in the Assembly.
• The first round of Egypt’s presidential elections was held on 23 May and 24 May 2012, and the run-off on 16 June and 17 June 2012. The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won with 51.73 percent of the vote. He assumed office 30 June 2012.

It took only months for many of the Egyptians who marched into the streets to put an end to Mubarak’s 30-year rule to realize that their gamble on the Muslim Brotherhood was a mistake. The Muslim Brotherhood may have presented itself as sympathetic to the liberal, democratic, and pluralistic sentiments of the anti-Mubarak protesters, but once in power, controlling both the People’s Assembly and the presidency, it set about imposing its old, Islamist agenda.