Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has certified his seizure
of power with an electoral pantomime, and looks set to preside over a reconstructed
Mubarakist system. The revolution appears as a blip in the stubborn tradition of
one military dictator transferring power to another. But try as he might, the new leader
of Egypt can’t rule the way Mubarak did. Sisi faces an entirely different
set-up than the relatively tame country Mubarak inherited, and will have to
devise a ruling formula from scratch to deal with a country in a protracted
political transformation.
It’s strange to me how so many commentators are
unanimously declaring the economy to be the make-or-break test of the new
autocrat’s rule, as if the survival of any of Egypt’s military rulers depended on
economic performance. Inequality, immiseration, and corruption accelerated
under Sadat and flourished under Mubarak, but neither was brought down by those
conditions. Their fates hinged on the tools of political control they designed
to channel and contain economic discontent and political ambition.
Sisi’s survival depends on how he’ll pacify and
roll back the mass politicization that erupted post-revolution, a feat that no
other modern Egyptian ruler has had to attempt. From January 25 2011 to June 30
2013, in a spectacle unseen in the modern history of this country, crowds filling
streets determined the fate of powerholders. On July 3, Sisi terminated that
dangerous pattern, co-opting popular mobilization into state-sanctioned folk festivals
and using overwhelming state violence against oppositional protests and sit-ins.
But to build an enduring authoritarian order, Sisi
will have to go beyond his crude strategy of crushing real mass mobilization
while staging medieval pageants of mass acclamation. The limits of this
approach couldn’t be clearer in the election debacle. Apparently, Sisi and his machinery
didn’t anticipate that claiming a popular mandate is far easier with protests
than through elections. Hence the hilarious government panic and desperate
eleventh-hour measures to compel people to take part in a choreographed election,
an exercise more idiotic than herding cats.
Managing Opposition
Simply put, Sisi has to construct a
sophisticated new system for handling opposition. The state terror he’s unleashed
on opponents since July 3rd may work in the short term, but begins
to signal state weakness in the face of unabated acts of resistance. Similarly,
the spectacles of popular acclamation à la Syria’s Asads quickly become
liabilities, showcasing a ruler’s mendacity and megalomania rather than his
invincibility.
Mubarak’s rule lasted because it managed
different kinds of opposition. There was a parliamentary space inherited from
Sadat, for channeling the political energies of the reformist Muslim Brothers
and a dozen maverick non-Islamist politicians. When a protest culture began to
emerge in the 2000s, Mubarak’s police didn’t crush it but instead worked to ensure
that workers’ protests never merged with pro-democracy demonstrations. Mubarak
even kept Sadat’s risible state-created opposition, the neo-Wafd, Tagammu, and
Nasserist outfits that were useful when he needed a stooge to stand against him
in sham elections.
This system chugged along for 30 years and would
have lasted longer, had an internal and external shock not overturned everything.
Mubarak’s son and his friends over-managed the 2010 parliamentary elections and
hogged all the seats, radicalizing the tamed parliamentary opposition. A month
later, on January 14, 2011, the Arab authoritarian order was changed forever
when one of its architects ran away in the face of massive street opposition,
electrifying crowds all over the Arab world. The stage was set for the separate
worlds of opposition under Mubarak to converge and terminate his storied
longevity.
Revolutionary Creation, Military Destruction
The uprising inaugurated an era of mass
politicization, breaking down the barriers between people and politics Mubarak
had maintained so well. It seems like a different country now, but recall the heady
year of 2011, when every part of Egypt was alive with boundary-breaking political
action: protests against mini-Mubaraks in the state bureaucracy; protests
against governors; evolution of neighborhood popular committees; protests
against church burnings; the first free internal university elections; freetrade unions; the first sustained Tahrir sit-in after Mubarak’s ouster; and
crowds’ storming of two of the most fortified symbols of power in Cairo:
the State Security headquarters and the Israeli embassy.
At the same time as Egyptians were actively
remaking politics in their neighborhoods, streets and workplaces, a new
national political tradition was born: the Friday mass protest or melyoneyya,
radiating out from Tahrir in Cairo to the central squares in provincial
capitals. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to claim that this was the first
time since 1919 that crowds steered national policies, via a weekly outdoor
mass parliament more potent than any legislative body.
When that body was seated in January 2012, it
was peremptorily dissolved less than six months later, part of the military’s
long game of torpedoing every popular achievement both at the ballot box and in
the streets. In short order, the first elected president was overthrown; the
first popularly-authored constitution suspended; Tahrir Square was closed off
with barbed wire and army tanks; protest encampments at Rabaa and Nahda burned
and thousands of protestors killed; an anti-protest law promulgated; and thousands of students, activists and non-political citizens arrested, jailed or sentenced to death.
Writing of the 1851 coup d’état that arrested
the 1848 revolution in France, Marx’s words illuminate equally well the
Egyptian drama of revolutionary creation and military destruction: “Instead of
society conquering a new content for itself, it only seems that the state has
returned to its most ancient form, the unashamedly simple rule of the military
sabre and the clerical cowl.”
Sisi has yet to go beyond the primitive Bonapartist
impulses of using the state’s brute force and crude propaganda. But to recoup the
investment in him by his Gulf, US, and Israeli friends and backers, he will
have to build a viable authoritarian political order that can calibrate and not
just indiscriminately crush opposition.
Sisi's Gamble
If Mubarak inherited a country with tame levels
of conflict, Sisi seized power in a scarcely recognizable Egypt, a place that in
three remarkable years has undergone three political upheavals: a popular uprising;
an intensely competitive, hard fought presidential election; and a military
coup cheered by half the population and resisted by the other half.
Residues of these conflicts have made deep grooves:
the nightly anti-coup processions and Friday demonstrations in Greater Cairo and
several other cities; student protests of stunning bravery and heroism; an
armed insurgency in Sinai; workers’ protests that are likely to increase in
frequency and magnitude; and a thriving satirical subculture dedicated solely
to ridiculing Sisi’s every gesture and utterance.
Sisi’s gamble requires that he figure out a
workable formula for ruling Egypt without the participation of Egyptians,
at a historical juncture when Egyptians have become much harder to rule.
