Hosni Mubarak, ruler of Egypt for three decades until the Tahrir Square uprising of 2011 brought him down, walked free from jail last week. Next week, Abdel Fattah al Sisi, the former army chief who overthrew an elected Islamist government in a popularly backed coup in mid-2013, is due at the White House, invited by Donald Trump, who last year described him as a “fantastic guy”.
Egypt’s two modern pharaohs look like bookends for its abortive transition from autocracy. Its rubber-stamp parliament, meanwhile, last month expelled Mohammed Anwar al-Sadat, nephew of Anwar Sadat, the president assassinated by Islamist soldiers in 1981, and one of few remaining dissident MPs. Thousands of the young protagonists of the Tahrir rebellion rot in Egypt’s jails.
Egypt, in its present parlous state, is unlikely to be a pivot for anyone’s Middle Eastern policy. Yet the fact remains that history, its geographic position and its population of nearly 100m make it, by default if nothing else, central to any regional calculus.
The US, the Europeans and its Arab neighbours keep having to review what sort of Egypt they have in front of them — and the governance signs are, to put it mildly, not good.
For two decades until President Sadat expelled Russian advisers in 1972, Egypt was central to Soviet stratagems in the Middle East. After Sadat sealed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Egypt became a regional pillar of US policy. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the country was touted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as a regional laboratory for economic reform. In fact, the Mubarak regime was just widening the circle of crony capitalism — paving the road to Tahrir.
President Sisi’s 2013 coup came after mass protests against President Mohamed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood had won a string of elections after the youthful leftwing and liberal forces behind Tahrir failed to organise effectively. The Brotherhood, after a year in power, had abused its slim mandate to appropriate a revolution it was hesitant to join, and instead of governing attempted to colonise Egypt’s weak institutions.
In Mr Trump’s view, Mr Sisi then “took control of Egypt . . . really took control of it”. Another view is that Egypt’s would-be saviour has steered his country into an old confrontation. The army is entrenched on one side, with increasingly radicalised Islamists on the other, and no space left in between.
A veteran former official says Mr Sisi hopes that the advent of Mr Trump heralds radical change in western policy, which Egypt’s rulers saw as naive and destructive response to the upheavals of the so-called Arab Spring. “Our military and security services truly believe it’s all one big conspiracy and that the target is to destroy Arab armies”, he says. Their control is absolute. This shows not just in the blanket repression of civil liberties but in the destabilising incompetence of policymaking, too.
Late last year, parliament passed a law placing all Egypt’s non-governmental organisations under central government control, all but cutting them off from foreign funding. This blunderbuss was fired at an estimated 25,000 NGOs in order to get at some 200 that defend human rights. If implemented, it would erase what is left of civil society, as well as curtail welfare services the state is unable to provide.
The president has yet to sign the law, which a former minister says was cobbled together by Egypt’s real government, the security cell attached to the cabinet, which it bypassed altogether and ordered parliament to rush its draft through in closed session and presumably to expel Mr Sadat junior for objecting. As a governance model — legislate first, without debate, then study what it means — it does not work.
Mr Sisi has also managed to sour Egypt’s single most valuable relationship, with Saudi Arabia, which cut off billions of dollars in aid. One reason was a spat over barren Red Sea islands Egypt ceded to the Saudis, sparking a nationalist backlash and the biggest protests since the coup. Talk to former Egyptian ministers and, as one of them puts it, “not one of us had ever seen a file on the islands — it was simply not an issue”.
After losing the Saudi stipend, Egypt had to rush the fences of reform to unlock a $12bn IMF package to replace the lost petrodollars. Late and hasty measures included a huge devaluation and scattergun subsidy cuts that provoked bread protests and a U-turn — unsurprising for those who recall the bread intifada against the IMF in 1977.
There may be no alternative to Mr Sisi except another man of providence in uniform — at least for now. But Mr Trump’s notion that the Egyptian leader is “really” in control is not borne out by the pile-up of policy debris. Even a sympathetic western diplomat says “the problem is that they do policy without politics, which they regard as factional, antinational and downright subversive”.
If Egypt cannot chart a way forward between extremism and autocracy its prospects, as well as those of a region in turmoil, are bleak, and made no brighter by a west retreating into its comfort zone of backing Arab autocrats. Encouraging authoritarian rule risks taking the country so far backwards that it risks joining the pyre of failing states in the region. Except Egypt is not just another state.
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