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April 29, 2013

A Democratic Revolution? Egypt at Two Years

Since the Egyptian revolution of January, 2011, the democratic process has been working in fits and starts. The international press has focused its attention on the machinations of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose political party won the first round of elections handily and then forced its vision of the new constitution through the constitutional referendum of December, 2012. However, other movements and parties have also been organizing and working to proliferate political forces beyond the pre-revolutionary establishment and the typical big business interests and crony networks of neoliberal governance.

Two large coalitions have emerged on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the well-known National Salvation Front on the center-left and the less-known Umma Alliance (or Nation Alliance) of Islamist political parties. The National Salvation Front brings together a number of liberal parties, including parties associated with established public figures, like Mohamed El Baradei, Amr Moussa, and Hamdeen Sabahi (who placed third in the presidential election runoff), but also several rising figures from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition or RYC. The Umma Alliance includes a number of Islamic political parties, and has been formed to attempt to counter the work of liberal and secular parties and to pressure the Muslim Brotherhood towards more conservative policies.

The RYC was a coalition of nine youth groups that helped coordinate the 2011 protests which forced Mubarak to step down that splintered following the successful revolution. This coalition included secular youth and also Muslim youth that had left the Muslim Brotherhood after they were defeated during the struggles for Brotherhood leadership and direction in the months after the January 2011 successes.

After the RYC breakup, several prominent individuals in the RYC took leading roles in political parties, such as Shady El-Ghazaly Harb of the Constitution Party and Mostafa Al Nagar, a founder of the El Adel or Justice party. Several of these parties did not last long, either encountering difficulties securing funding or dissolving to join with El Baradei when he founded his own political party, El Dastour.

The Social Democratic Party is one new political party formed by members of the RYC together with other political groups that has survived, joining the National Salvation Front as an independent political party. The RYC youth partnered with a variety of political groups, such as labor activists, Copt Christians, and women’s organizations to form the Egyptian SDP, which has positioned itself in support of civil rights, social welfare programs, and state services following a time-honored post-World War II international model. They have also been organizing internationally, according to a recent interview conducted in Cairo, working with Social Democratic parties in other Arab Spring countries to form the Arab Social Democratic Forum and also with other Social Democratic parties from various countries where the social democratic model remains strong.

The National Salvation Front has worked to oppose the Muslim Brotherhood in various ways, such as fighting for reforms to the national constitution forced through by the Muslim Brotherhood and, most recently, announcing a boycott of the upcoming parliamentary elections and demanding the dismissal of the Interior Minister and the General Prosecutor. Just this past month pressures deriving from recent protests and violence have split the coalition, which had planned a consensus-building dialogue on constitutional amendments and other topics.

Several of the member parties in the National Salvation Front coalition have experienced struggles as youth activists with a few allies among the ranks of established leaders fighting for more democratic procedures within the parties. The various parties that make up the Salvation Front have gone through a series of internal struggles as established leaders have been pressured to reshape their party processes into more democratic and transparent operations.

El Baradei’s Al Dastour or Constitution Party was racked by the resignations last month of two important leaders, Hossam Eissa and Ezz El-Din El-Hawary, due to obstacles to party restructuring that might give youth an opportunity in fair and transparent party internal elections. As a result of the resignations, youth members met with El Baradei and negotiated for earlier internal elections in June rather than September.

Likewise the Social Democratic Party, has been working at reforming its internal workings in attempts to strengthen the openness of their internal electoral process (a party congress, a supreme council, an executive council) as well as to broaden their base. This past March they had a series of meetings with the Danish Social Democratic Party to move this process forward and to open the process up to some of the younger party activists who were successful in the January 2011 revolution. They have also begun work to broaden their base in the rural grassroots and the urban unemployed and underemployed, women head of households, and other demographics.

In addition to these political parties, there are at least three important groups active in street protests that are actively pressuring Egypt towards more democratic practices in government practice and beyond. These groups have continued to pressure not only the Muslim Brotherhood but also the NSF and other liberal or progressive parties and coalitions. The larger and more established pressure group is the April 6 movement, a group first founded during a textile factory strike in the industrial city of Al-Mahalla Al-Kubra that many see as the beginning of the 2011 revolution. This group is a formidable force at present, complete with an organized leadership, including founding member Ahmed Maher and others together with lawyers and media spokesperson Khaled El-Masry. The group has 15,000-20,000 members across Egypt as well as hundreds of thousands of supporters.

After having supported Morsi during the presidential election, they have now turned against him as the Muslim Brotherhood and the new president have failed to satisfy their demands for democratic governance practices. President Morsi’s presidential decree last November 22 rejecting judicial oversight of the presidency was seen as anti-democratic by many inside and outside of the April 6 movement, as were multiple arrests of protestors, the use of military trials for protestors, and other restrictions on free speech. Mass rallies calling for “the downfall of the regime” of President Morsi marked the group’s anniversary this past April 6 rather than the celebrations of 2011 and 2012, and they were joined in these rallies by several political parties as well. 

The second group includes what are known as ultras, soccer fans that support Cairo’s Al-Ahly soccer club and who were very active in the mass mobilizations that led to the overthrow of Mubarak. They have continued their activities through the trials and recent court verdicts of both police officers and soccer fans of a rival club that killed Al-Ahly fans during a February, 2012 match with its historic rival, El-Masry of Port Said. Struggles in the streets between Al-Ahly ultras and other soccer fans with the police and around courthouses across Egypt have led to police strikes and various other complex maneuvers for power.

A third group first emerged on the second anniversary of the January 25 revolution, and is known as the Black Bloc. Some have suggested they are modeled on the European Black Bloc protestors of the 1970s and the global justice protests against the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization from the 1990s and the past decade. However, others attribute their tactics to the direct action tactics used by the 2011 protestors of the mass mobilizations that produced the revolution, when protestors were confronted with the armed thugs hired by the Mubarak regime and at times also by groups allied with the Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike the European Black Bloc, this group claims to protect protestors, who have repeatedly come under assault by not only uniformed officers of the state but also unidentified groups of men in various ways, including sexual assaults and armed assaults.

There are plenty of young people available to support a wide range of political parties, social movements, soccer clubs, black bloc activists, and other parties to the democratic process, because there are lots of young unemployed in Egypt; a recent survey put the jobless rate at 60%. At times it seems unclear who is behind various street actions, such as the March 23 attacks on the Muslim Brotherhoods headquarters both in Cairo’s Moqattam district and in other cities across Egypt which were condemned by both the April 6 movement and the NSF.

Street pressure is seen as central to democracy not only by these three movements (and those political parties that at times follow their lead) in Egypt but also by many active in the democratic transformations that have swept Latin America. For many careful observers of democratic movements, the moment of entry into government service from social movements almost invariably becomes a moment of appropriation and reduction of sovereignty from the people to those few who are in the oligarchy. Yet the street protests cannot be understood as always promoting democracy, since at times they undermine the rule of law (as on this past March 23) and can be manipulated by specific interests, including the military and the Muslim Brotherhood who can turn out large numbers of protestors when it benefits their interests.

Competing claims to support the rule of law are made not only by the different parties from across the political spectrum but also by the April 6 movement, which some associate largely with street actions and protests. This contest is central to the surge towards democracy in Egypt, if an effective and independent national legal system is seen as supporting democracy. The political question many are struggling with in Egypt is how to counter entrenched interests in control of the courts and the state without eroding the rule of law, a problem that has faced all movements that consider the use of civil disobedience.

The strong presence of street movements outside the political parties is an important factor in the democratic process, suggested Mohamed Abolnaga of the Social Democratic Party in a recent interview in Cairo. By providing a balance to state institutions and the ballot box, street movements can make a call for justice that is needed over the long term to produce structural transformations in society, increase party and state transparency, reduce cronyism and sectarian or tribal factionalisms, and pressure all sectors towards more gender, religious, and class equality. Yet it is a measure of the understanding of the historical centrality of the state in Egypt that many activists from the January revolution went into jobs in the government bureaucracy to work towards administrative reforms that might benefit the country as a whole rather than narrow interests.

As the parties struggle to establish more democratic processes internally, they work at times with the street activists of various stripes to pressure the new Muslim Brotherhood government towards democratic practice. The problem of established opposition groups based in mosques and nationally organized under the neoliberal dictatorships that fell during the Arab Spring is not a problem unique to Egypt, as it has appeared in Tunisia and elsewhere. This may appear largely as a problem of religion, but to many in Cairo it is not the religion of the Muslim Brotherhood that is the problem: it is their resistance to policies that would benefit groups beyond their narrow party interests and their consistent refusal of political practices that are capable of responding to public opinion, as in the constitutional referendum process.

In the end one measure of the success of the Egyptian Arab Spring will be whether it benefits the populace as a whole. Women have been met with increased levels of direct and indirect violence and harassment in the post-revolutionary period. The middle class was shrinking under Mubarak, as it generally does under neoliberal cronyism, and it has not expanded under Morsi while the Muslim Brotherhood has continued many of Mubarak’s economic practices and policies. The large population living in poverty and in severe poverty has yet to benefit from the 2011 revolution, with the primary impact on this group having been limited to arrests, imprisonment, and military trials for participating in protests. As one street activist pointed out, “The [homeless] street kids are the ones who have suffered the most at the hands of the police, and their demands are much lower — some dignity, respect from the police, a little better life economically.”

In addition to economic measures, the general Egyptian faith in the possibility of democracy is being tested. Despite the elections and a new constitution, many in Egypt are rapidly losing faith that the Muslim Brotherhood is the answer. Since open elections and a new constitution do not seem sufficient indications of a burgeoning democracy, many in Egypt have turned to transforming other aspects of society that must also be made democratic.

The promising aspect to the Egyptian process has led to the presence of both young street activists who remain involved in protests and also youth active in political parties who will not allow anti-democratic practices in their government or in the opposition parties. The struggles for the streets, for transparency and democracy within political parties, for the rule of law, and for reforms that have broad social benefits are ground zero for democracy in Egypt. Those same struggles may be a measure for democracy not only in Egypt and in other Arab Spring countries, but also in other countries worldwide that claim to practice democracy.

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