This year, political events in Egypt have had to yield most of the international media limelight to more pressing global occurrences like the conflict and the diplomacy attending the intractable power struggle in Syria and the more recent East-West face-off over the Crimea.
Egypt, however, remains part of a Middle East matrix that is of immense global geo-strategic significance so that current events in that country ought not to be allowed to unfold without at least occasional contemplation.
Last Saturday’s killing of six Egyptian soldiers at a checkpoint near Cairo – which the authorities have blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood – appears to point to an intensification of the conflict between the Egyptian military and forces opposed to the removal from office of the Mohammed Morsi administration last year.
Since Mr Morsi’s removal, political events in Cairo would appear to be taking the country back to a status quo with which Egypt has now become familiar.
In the course of what we had grown accustomed to describing as the Egyptian ‘revolution’ the military had remained the country’s sole political constant. Indeed, with hindsight, Mr Morsi’s one-year presidential tenure now appears to have been no more than a fleeting interregnum that allowed the military to pursue a process of recalibration necessary to re-position itself at the apex of political power. It has now done so decisively and with lightning speed.
Mubarak, before his removal from office, had been preceded by Anwar Sadat and before him, Gamal Abdel Nasser in a succession of soldiers-turned-presidents that lasted close to sixty years. Now, it seems the fleeting period of the Morsi presidency is destined to be followed by the pattern that preceded it. Another military heavyweight is being prepared to rule Egypt.
The writing had been on the wall since the ouster of Morsi and the unleashing of a bloody crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, an ominous warning even to those Egyptians who, for the moment at least, appear to back Abdel Fatah al Sisi’s presidential bid.
After the crackdown the Egyptian military placed a constitutional seal on its own new set of political rules, some of the ‘gems’ of which include the banning of political parties founded on a “religious basis,” and making constitutional provision for civilians to be tried in military courts. Those apart, Egypt’s next parliamentary election, scheduled to be held this year will be run under a system that allows for two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly to be allotted to individual candidates and one third to party lists, an arrangement that reverses the poll which Mr Morsi won.
The creation of a constitutional format that ensures the realization of political arrangements favoured by the Egyptian military had unfolded in tandem with a sustained military lobby for the now Field Marshal al Sisi candidature for the presidency. Al Sisi himself used the occasion of a March 4 speech to army cadets to all but confirm that he would stand as a replacement for Morsi. Given the support of altered constitutional arrangements and the backing of the military he is unlikely to lose those elections.
So that in less than two years the military appears to have stood Egypt’s revolution on its head and if, as expected, al Sisi sheds his military uniform for a statesman’s suit there is really no telling where yet another Egyptian experiment with soldier-politicians will take one of the Middle East’s most strategically important countries.
