by HAZEM KANDIL
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the mass death sentences of Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt CARTOON/Latuff Cartoons
In the spring of 2011, you gave us a memorable interview on the situation soon after the fall of Mubarak. Since then, you’ve published three books on different aspects of Egyptian society and history. [1] Sisi has now been in power, de facto and de jure, for over three years. How far has his record in office conformed to or confounded your expectations at the point when Morsi was overthrown?
The regime is still in a state of formation. It remains fluid and we do not know yet how it will consolidate itself. There are two main issues here. One is the political institutionalization of the Sisi regime. Since Nasser’s time, Egyptian presidents have always relied upon a single party that organizes state control over trade unions, universities and the media, while also managing a vast patronage network in the bureaucracy, the legal system and the Egyptian countryside. This party had different names, from Nasser to Mubarak, but the President usually sat at its apex and governed through it. One of the consequences of the 2011 revolt has been the release of the old-regime political network from that institutional setting: the ruling party has been dissolved, and the old network has discovered a way to function without necessarily working together in a formal institutional setting. This makes them less identifiable as the source of all evils in the Egyptian political system, and also gives them greater flexibility. As a result, when the moment came for them to contemplate joining together in a single party once more, they chose not to do so. Rather, they have been operating in politics—and especially in the Egyptian parliament—through a number of smaller parties or as independents, and in the ambit of various electoral coalitions.
Sisi, on the other hand, has also broken with the pattern established since the days of Nasser, by deciding to work through the presidency alone. Nasser attempted to do this at the very beginning of his reign, boosting the role of the presidency and making it an institution in its own right, but he changed course from 1962 onwards. Sisi has said that he will not form a ruling party or be the head of a party. He believes in the idea of a presidency that will direct a cabinet of technocrats implementing his will, with directions flowing from the top; that cabinet and its executive decisions should be approved by his allies and supporters in Parliament, but not in a systematic way. Over the past three years, there has been constant tension between these two wings. Sisi attempted to reform the civil service and shrink the bureaucracy, which would reduce the power of the old-regime network within that structure; he did this by presidential decree, awaiting the approval of the new Parliament once it had been elected and had started to exercise its legislative powers. But Parliament then set about trying to stall the civil-service reform, first by rejecting it outright, then by unpicking it. There have been a number of cases, in terms of both political changes and economic policy, where it is obvious that control has been decentred, and things do not flow as smoothly as they did before. It remains to be seen what this decentring of political power will lead to. A number of people believe that it will enable them to secure greater concessions—especially if we recall that many of those in the old-regime networks are businessmen, often with regional and international alliances; they think they can be a kind of aspirant bourgeois oligarchy, working separately from the head of state, while securing concessions from Sisi over time. Another view is that Sisi will consolidate power and realize, as Nasser did, that he needs to have institutional control over the political organs if he is to govern without any kind of obstruction (a better term than opposition, I believe).
In addition to this, the second question that has to be resolved is the security aspect. At the beginning of the revolt, my analysis was that the military had been marginalized in many ways during the period leading up to 2011, but especially in terms of its role in domestic repression. Since the war of 1967, military police and intelligence had no longer been responsible for dealing with Egyptian dissidents and maintaining control on the home front; it was State Security, the Interior Ministry and the civilian intelligence services that played the major role there. After 2011, the military began to increase its role in this field, and attempted to rein in State Security; there were a few skirmishes in the first two or three months of the revolt. However, the fact that they found it very difficult to stabilize the situation to their liking led to a tactical alliance between military and security institutions, which remains in place today. For the first time since the 1960s, there has been a decentring of repression in Egypt. When people are locked up or disappear altogether, rumours abound: was this person taken to Military Intelligence or State Security? Was it the military police or the central-security riot police that were responsible? Once again, as Nasser had realized after 1967, it is quite difficult to manage things when you have two different kinds of institutions carrying out the same function of domestic repression without much coordination between them. Security becomes a much blunter instrument than is required for regimes that want to create a more stable mode of authoritarian rule. These two questions—how political power and state repression are going to be organized—remain open. This is a fluid situation which cannot last for very long.
Does it follow from this that, in comparison with the Sadat and Mubarak regimes, and indeed with much of Nasser’s time in power, the Egyptian Army now occupies a far more central and much less contested role in the system of power?
New Left Review for more