If there were lingering doubts that the military pounced on the June 30 protests to re-establish its political supremacy, Gen. El-Sisi’s Sunday address removed a lot of them. Using convoluted language and tortured logic, the speech’s organizing premise is that the “people summoned the armed forces for the mission of balancing the tipped scale and restoring diverted goals.”
“The people” are mentioned 28 times, but their sovereignty is not once affirmed. What’s emphasized is that the armed forces are the unmoved mover, guarding the country’s politics, not just its borders.
In tandem with the speech, the armed forces released a 30-minute video presenting their narrative of the Morsi presidency and the July 3 coup. After introductory scenes glorifying military exercises, the narrator launches into a story of an irresponsible, inept president who picked fights with every significant institution and repeatedly ignored the sage advice of the generals, threatening a slide to “civil war.”
Set to
ominous music, scenes of collapsing buildings, wrecked trains, long petrol queues,
and parched fields are strung together as evidence of mounting social crisis. A
scene of a voter queue from the December referendum on the “non-consensual” constitution
shows a close-up of “No” spraypainted on a wall, though the referendum was
approved by 63% of the 33% of voters who turned out.
Gen. El-Sisi
is shown addressing a worshipful gathering of actors and performers, arrayed
like schoolchildren and holding a large Egyptian flag. They cheer him wildly as
he proclaims, “And Egypt will remain Egypt.” The dramatic denouement of the
video is General Sisi’s July 3 coup announcement, described by the narrator as
“a historic moment the likes of which rarely occur in our time.” The video ends
with party music set to scenes of the pyramids and other Pharaonic antiquities.
The speech
is far more important than the constitutional declaration emitted by the
figurehead interim president last week. It doesn’t only justify the coup, it
sets the conceptual framework of the new political order, with the military as
its lynchpin.
Throughout
the speech, the armed forces are presented as an Olympian figure above the
fray, watching worriedly as a pathetic presidency fumbles and missteps, ignoring
time and again the military’s “reservations about many policies and actions.” The
Muslim Brothers are referred to as “a political faction” that placed their
representative in the presidency via elections “that the armed forces sincerely
accepted as the will of the people.” But alas, the speech laments, the
presidency presided over societal decline and disorder, as well as a regress “in
the intellectual, cultural, and artistic” domains that have always made Egypt a
model in the region.
In this
telling of a failed civilian leadership leading the country headlong into ruin,
the military emerges as the corrector and savior. Here is where the speech’s
language becomes both mystifying and mystical. The military doesn’t intervene. It
“affirms the legitimacy of the people and assists it in regaining its right to
choose and act.” And lest anyone use clear language to point out that this is
military tutelage, plain and simple, the speech preempts that by asserting that
the military is not entering “the political arena” but rather “the national
arena.”
Tortured logic
and perplexing rhetoric aside, the speech’s points are clear. The presidency is
subordinate to the military. The military has a special communion with the will
of the people. Whenever it is summoned by the will of the people, the military acts.
The crucial
sleight of hand in the speech, the core deception, is substituting the meaningless phrase “legitimacy
of the people” for the meaningful doctrine of “sovereignty of the people.” Not once
is sovereignty of the people even hinted at in a document that mentions “the
people” in every other sentence. The praxis and the promise of the Egyptian
revolution, that the citizenry constitutes its political order, is here terminated
by a group of generals backed by a world power and aided by its regional
clients.
It’s not the
first time they’ve done this. Last year, SCAF issued a ‘constitutional decree’ minutes
after polls closed in the presidential election, downgrading the presidency and reserving all its powers for SCAF. The next day, three SCAF generals held a
press conference to justify their decree, and Gen. Mamdouh Shahin openly said that
the armed forces are the constituent power, that is, the foundational entity that
has the right to construct a political order.
The main
take-away from Sisi’s address is that steering the country is not a matter to
be left to regular mortals and their representatives. The state must be in the
hands of permanent guardians. It can’t be shared with emergent forces, who will
inevitably run the country into the ground.
The speech
is the intellectual gloss on the July 3 coup. Its point is that Egypt is too
important to be ruled by its people. Too many regional and world powers are
vested in the direction this country takes and how it gets there. Its population
will be corralled to the side and left to practice their charming folkloric
political rituals, with parliamentary elections and even presidential elections
and what have you. An arena of electoral democracy will be constructed, but
many matters of grave national import will be outside its purview. And anyway, its
outcomes can always be reversed.
What about protests
in Tahrir, you ask? Certainly, the generals will generously provide the
paraphernalia of protest and drop flags on the cheering throngs (while dropping leaflets on those other people), then beam with paternal pride about how their cute
people “impress the world.”
Keeping the
public in a condition of permanent political infantilism; walling off the state
from democratic control; and above all, terminating the necessary political
struggles that societies must engage in to build their institutions and control
their destinies. This is the military’s roadmap.
