Egyptian Democracy:
Smothered in the Cradle, or
Stillborn?
Tarek Masoud
Associate Professor
Harvard University
So unprecedented were the mass protests in early 2011 that eventually
brought down Egypt’s long-serving president, Hosni Mubarak, that the American
President Barack Obama is reported to have allowed himself to dream.1 “What
I want,” he allegedly told his advisors, “is for the kids on the street to win and
for the Google guy to become president.”2 The “Google guy” the president was
referring to was Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager at the famed Internet
search firm and the educated, middle-class face of the protests for many in the
international media. When Mubarak resigned his office on 11 February 2011,
after 18 days of demonstrations, President Obama was moved to declare that,
“The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will
never be the same.”3
Today, three years after that event, the American president’s remarks during
and after the protests seem remarkably naïve. Though the “kids on the street”
did win, inasmuch as they catalyzed Mubarak’s overthrow, they lost in every
other way imaginable. The youth of Tahrir Square were quickly ushered off the
stage as Mubarak’s military sought to cut a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood,
a shadowy group of religious zealots who had established themselves as the
principal opponents of the Mubarak regime. Not only did the “Google guy” not
become president—a scenario that seems laughable now—but the lion’s share
of elected offices in that ancient and beleaguered land, including the presidency,
went to the Brotherhood and other religious conservatives who hankered to
3
Tarek Masoud is an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School
of Government and a former editor-in-chief of this journal. His new book is entitled Counting Islam:
Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Copyright © 2014 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue i1
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 3
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Tarek Masoud
remake Egypt into a disciplined community of believers.
Though this transformation from Mubarak to the Brotherhood might have
at least validated the American president’s belief that Egypt “would never be the
same,” history conspired to thwart him here too. Egypt’s first democratically
elected president, a spectacularly ungifted politician named Mohamed Morsi,
so alienated Egyptians with his inept management of the country’s economy
and his blatant dependency on the secretive Muslim Brotherhood that they
took to the streets by the millions begging the military to abrogate the entire
democratic experiment. On 3 July
Further underscoring how little Egypt 2013, the men with guns obliged,
had changed since the revolution hustling Morsi off to prison to
is the fact that the presidency of await trial for treason and rounding
up members of the Brotherhood in
the republic seems poised once a purge that dwarfed anything they
again to find itself occupied by a had experienced under Mubarak.
One month later, on 14 August
faithful son of the armed forces. 2013, more than 638 supporters of
the ousted president were killed and 4,000 wounded when the Egyptian police
forcibly cleared two squares in which anti-coup demonstrators had set up camp.4
4
One week after that, President Mubarak was released from prison, although he
remains on trial for corruption and allowing the murder of demonstrators during the last two weeks of his reign.
Further underscoring how little Egypt had changed since the revolution is
the fact that the presidency of the republic, which had been occupied by former
military officers until the hapless Morsi, seems poised once again to find itself
occupied by a faithful son of the armed forces. The architect of Morsi’s overthrow, General (and later Field Marshall) Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi—after months of
disavowing any designs on power—resigned his office as minister of defense on
26 March 2014 and declared his candidacy for the presidency. If opinion polls
are any guide, he will almost certainly win that office when elections are held on
26–27 May 2014. In a February–March 2014 survey conducted by the respected
Egyptian polling firm Baseera, 51 percent of respondents said they would cast
their ballot for the general. His sole competitor, leftist politician Hamdin Sabahi,
polled around one percent.5 By the time the presidential election is over, it is
highly likely that the only meaningful distinction between the new regime and
the one that was unseated on 11 February 2011 will have been the names of
the various officeholders. If all goes according to plan and Sisi is elevated to the
presidency, we may have no choice but to conclude that the inspiring protests
the brown journal of world affairs
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 4
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Egyptian Democracy
of Tahrir Square in 2011 were more momentary than momentous.
According to the great scholar of democratic transitions, Guillermo
O’Donnell, “the central problem of democratic consolidation is to prevent a
successful military coup.”6 By this standard, it is safe to say that Egyptian democracy remains unconsolidated and that its first democratic experiment has
proven an unalloyed failure. The question this essay seeks to answer is why. It
is not a question that has gone unasked. If one surveys the literature on the
Egyptian debacle, one finds multiple testimonials to the role played by the
mistakes, machinations, and malfeasances of various actors. We read that the
military quietly conspired to thwart democracy from the start; that the Islamists
brought down the democratic edifice with their uncompromising commitment
to Islamic radicalism; and that so-called liberals cooperated with Mubarak
loyalists to sabotage government in a bid to foment popular anger. What all of
these arguments share—despite their identification of different villains in the
Egyptian story—is a belief that the narrative of the land by the Nile could have
gone very differently if only the generals, the Islamists, or the opponents of
Islamists had behaved differently.
These arguments, however, are insufficiently attentive to the structural
causes of the Egyptian collapse. As political scientist Jeffrey Kopstein noted in
an essay on the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, if the success or failure of a
democratic transition is truly a function of the choices made by individuals, we
still must explain the causes of those choices.7 And here, structures, not agents,
loom large. Specifically, I contend that democracy was not so much smothered
in the cradle as it was stillborn, a function of conditions that practically guaranteed that the generals, the Islamists, and others would act in ways that would
bring down the entire rickety post-Mubarak edifice and restore the country to
the equilibrium that was disrupted on 25 January 2011.
5
Explaining the Collapse
There are three prominent narratives for why Egypt’s first experiment in democracy ended in a military coup. The first blames the Egyptian military; the second
blames the Muslim Brotherhood; and the third blames the so-called secular or
liberal opposition. This essay will discuss each of these theories in turn.
Blame the military
Of course, it is trivially true that the Egyptian military is to blame for the coup—
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue 1i
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 5
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Tarek Masoud
6
it carried it out, after all. But the strong version of this thesis is that the military
never reconciled itself to the prospect that Egypt would become a democracy, and
worked quietly and consistently since 11 February 2011 to engineer the conditions under which it could sweep aside the Muslim Brotherhood and restore the
status quo ante. According to the scholar Joshua Stacher, the Supreme Council
of the Armed Forces (the shadowy conclave of senior officers who took over
after Mubarak’s resignation), is “disproportionately to blame” for the dysfunctions of the transition: “The SCAF is intent on reconfiguring executive power
in much the same way that authority operated during the tenure of Mubarak.”8
This essay does not subscribe to this thesis, even as it agrees with its premises. It is true that the military has always been envious of its perquisites and
autonomy. It is also true that the military may even have feared that democracy
would imperil its prerogatives. But the response of the Muslim Brotherhooddominated government was to bend over backward to allay these fears. The
constitution that the Brotherhood and its allies managed to have ratified in a
popular referendum in December 2012 not only failed to challenge the generals’ prerogatives, but also actively reinforced them. For example, Article 195 of
that document specified that the minister of defense—who is identified as the
commander-in-chief of the armed forces—must be a soldier, not a civilian.9
Article 197 guaranteed that the men with guns would not have to answer to
civilian oversight, but instead could govern their own affairs and approve their
own budget through a committee made up mostly of senior officers. In short,
the generals had nothing to fear from the Islamists, and they knew it. In fact,
Morsi continued to take pains to soothe the military up until the very end. In
one of the ousted president’s final speeches on 26 June 2013, Morsi harangued
his opponents instead of reaching out to them. However, he took care to offer
only the tenderest words to the army, referring to “our eternal armed forces,”
declaring that the military was “our great resource,” and pledging to protect it.
In fact, one could argue that by overthrowing Morsi, the Egyptian military
imperiled its corporate interests by putting itself in conflict with its largest patron,
the United States, which opposed the coup. What senior generals of the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces want above all, in my view, is stability.10 We can
see this in the statements and actions of the minister of defense in the months
prior to the coup. On 12 May 2013, the minister addressed those calling for
military intervention against the Muslim Brotherhood with a warning: “If the
army intervenes on the streets, it’s over. Over. Forget about Egypt for another
30 or 40 years.” Find a way to settle your differences, he said. “The army is fire,
don’t play with it, and don’t play against it.”11
the brown journal of world affairs
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 6
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Egyptian Democracy
Blame the Islamists
The second reason this article does not subscribe to the “blame the military”
thesis is that it neglects just how much the Islamists had done to alienate the
Egyptian street. It would be an understatement to say that the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power cost it the goodwill of practically every segment of Egyptian
society. Western newspapers portray an Egypt riven by a deep cleavage over
what the generals have wrought, but talking to people here, one gets the sense
that Egyptians are deeply satisfied with what many are calling a military coup.
In a nationally representative survey conducted in June 2013 by Tahrir Trends,
more than 60 percent of the over 1100 people surveyed said their lives had
worsened since Morsi’s election.12 Even those opposed to the coup are forced
to admit that the crowds that took to the streets of Egypt on 30 June 2013 in
response to the call of the Tamarod movement dwarfed those that had gathered
to demand Mubarak’s resignation two-and-a-half years earlier. It should not be
surprising that a military that overthrew its patron, Mubarak, in order to quell
popular protest would do the same to Morsi. And in this it seems to enjoy the
support of most Egyptians. An opinion poll conducted in July 2013 by Baseera
found that only 20 percent of Egyptians sympathized with Morsi and his supporters.13 A month later, more than two-thirds of Egyptians polled by Baseera
answered in the negative when asked if they approved of the Muslim Brotherhood’s continued existence.14
What explains the popular dissatisfaction with the Brotherhood? The bill of
particulars against the Islamists is a long one, but there are four principle items.
The first is that the Brotherhood ran afoul of Egyptian moderate sensibilities by
trying to establish an Islamic state. The liberal Egyptian politician and writer,
Wael Nawara, has explained that the Brotherhood’s Islamization project was an
assault on Egypt’s very identity and was rejected resoundingly by ordinary citizens.15 The main piece of evidence in this argument is the constitution written by
Morsi’s allies in December 2012, which restricted women’s rights and deepened
the role of Islam in the country’s institutions and laws. But this too seems to be a
misreading. The December 2012 constitution with all of its religious provisions
earned two-thirds of the vote in a popular though sparsely attended referendum,
and most studies of Egyptian public opinion find that vast majorities of that
country’s citizens share the Muslim Brotherhood’s religiously conservative social
outlook. It is unlikely that a society that continues to practice widespread female
genital mutilation was troubled by the lack of constitutional provisions for female
equality.16 Similarly, Egyptians’ disdain for the Brotherhood does not extend to
7
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue 1i
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 7
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Tarek Masoud
8
the movement’s advocacy for shari‘a. In Egypt’s 2012 presidential elections, for
example, every one of the 13 candidates endorsed the notion that the nation’s
laws must be based mainly on the principles of Islamic jurisprudence. Indeed in
August 2013, Hamdin Sabahi, who ran for president against Morsi in 2012 and
is again a candidate for the office, declared that he was just as keen on shari‘a as
the Islamists, “if not more.”17 Thus, when Egyptians took to the streets to oust
Morsi, its Islamic agenda likely had very little to do with it.
If the first charge is unconvincing, the remaining charges are more difficult to dismiss. The second indictment of the Brotherhood is that the Islamists
proved during their time in power that they were not to be trusted, that their
tender paeans to democracy were mere words that cloaked a fundamental ambition toward domination. For example, shortly after Mubarak’s resignation, the
Brothers attempted to allay fears of a coming theocracy by promising not to
run for more than one-third of seats in the parliamentary elections conducted
from November 2011 to January 2012.18 In the end, however, the Brothers ran
for practically all of them. The Brothers also promised not to seek the country’s
presidency, saying that it wanted to “share” power, not dominate it. In fact, the
group even expelled a prominent member, Abd al-Munim Abu al-Futuh, for
declaring his intention to run in defiance of its decision.19 But in March 2012, the
Brotherhood reversed itself and nominated Khayrat al-Shatir, its deputy general
guide, to the presidency. When the court disqualified him on the grounds of a
Mubarak-era conviction on terrorism charges, the Brotherhood, missing nary a
beat, put forward Morsi. These actions severely chipped away at whatever trust
the non-Islamist forces might have had in the Muslim Brotherhood, making
future compromises much more difficult to cement.
The third item in this running list of indictments is that the Brotherhood
killed Egypt’s democracy in the cradle by failing to reach out to its opponents,
instead trying to “Brotherhoodize” the state by stuffing the bureaucracy with
its well-wishers and supporters. On 3 August 2013, General Sisi complained
to the Washington Post that Morsi’s removal was necessary because he was “not
a president for all Egyptians, but a president representing his followers and
supporters.” In an 18 August 2013 speech to members of the police and armed
forces, Sisi swore that the Muslim Brotherhood had revealed to him “that they
came to rule for 500 years,” establishing a regime more totalitarian than the
one it replaced. President Obama has also echoed this charge, declaring on 15
August 2013 that, “While Mohammad Morsi was elected president in a democratic election, his government was not inclusive and did not respect the views
of all Egyptians.”20 According to the Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany, Morsi
the brown journal of world affairs
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 8
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Egyptian Democracy
“climbed the democratic ladder to power only to kick it away after him so that
no one else could join him up there.”21 Of course, one might also counter that
Islamists didn’t kick the democratic ladder out behind them as much as they
had the democratic rug pulled out from under them.
In any case, it remains for future historians to determine definitively
whether such accusations have merit. There is evidence that they do not. According to Mohamed al-Masri of the American University in Cairo, “The opposition
systematically rejected participation in government. Many high-level posts,
including vice president positions, have been offered to opposition figures, and
nearly all have declined.”22 Masry notes that Hamdin Sabahi—one of the leaders
of the anti-Morsi opposition who is now running for president against Sisi—has
admitted that the former president once offered him the vice presidency, which
he rejected. Moreover, of 36 ministries, members of the Muslim Brotherhood
or other Islamist parties held only 10, although several of the “independent”
members appointed in Morsi’s final cabinet reshuffle in May 2013 are also said
to have had Islamist sympathies.23
There is perhaps no more powerful or damning exhibit in the argument
that the Brotherhood is to blame for extinguishing Egypt’s democratic experiment than Morsi’s decree in November 2012 that all of his decisions were to be
considered final, binding, and above any kind of judicial review. This apparent
power grab has been described by the scholar Jason Brownlee as a kind of autogolpe that echoed Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 dissolution of his
country’s legislature and assumption of full legislative powers.24 The declaration
was the occasion of mass protests in Cairo and for many marked the beginning
of the end of the Morsi government.
The analogy to Fujimori’s autogolpe, however, is inapt. Whatever Morsi’s
flaws—and they were many—it is worth noting that his declaration came only
after a long struggle with a Supreme Constitutional Court that seemed intent
on thwarting every one of the Brotherhood’s fairly won electoral victories. For
example, in June 2012, on the eve of Morsi’s election to the presidency, the Court
ruled unconstitutional the electoral law that had governed the parliamentary
elections from late 2011 to early 2012, and thus dissolved the entire legislature.
In fact, one of Morsi’s first decisions upon being elected to office was to try to
reinstate the dissolved legislature—in other words, to do the exact opposite of
what Fujimori did in 1992—but he was deterred by the army, which barred
the entrances to the people’s assembly. Morsi portrayed his November 2012
decree as aimed at preventing the Court from dissolving the only two remaining
democratically legitimate bodies in Egypt: the constituent assembly (which was
9
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue 1i
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 9
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Tarek Masoud
writing the constitution) and the upper house of parliament (which he declared
would serve as the legislature until a new election). Thus, while Morsi’s decision
to put himself above judicial authority was utterly objectionable, it was not the
straightforward assault on democracy that his opponents claim.
Blame the non-Islamists
10
This brings us to the third “villain” in Egypt’s political drama: the so-called
“liberal” or “secular” opposition as embodied in the National Salvation Front,
headed by former foreign minister Amre Moussa, International Atomic Energy
Agency chairman Mohamed ElBaradei, and Dignity Party chairman Hamdin
Sabahi.25 The basic argument against this group is that they were intransigent,
unwilling to accept the president’s olive branches, and unwilling to play the
democratic game. After all, there were parliamentary elections scheduled for
later in 2013, and Morsi repeatedly pointed to those elections as offering the
opposition an opportunity to curb his power through constitutionally legitimate means. Instead of preparing for those contests, however, the opposition
made Morsi an offer he could not accept—cut short his own, constitutionally
mandated term and hold early presidential elections.
The main justification offered by the opposition for its uncompromising
stance is that they could not risk allowing Morsi three more years to consolidate
power.26 But these arguments are undermined by the fact that an opposition victory in Morsi’s proposed parliamentary elections would have given the opposition
a surfeit of instruments with which to thwart the president’s alleged designs. If
the opposition gained a majority, Article 139 of the constitution—passed in
December 2012 by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated legislature—would have
allowed it to select the prime minister and the cabinet, thus enabling Morsi’s opponents to isolate him almost entirely. Moreover, Article 152 of the constitution
would have even made it possible for them to expel the president from office if
they could obtain two-thirds of the vote in the legislature. It is thus difficult to
credit the argument that early presidential elections were necessary to prevent
Morsi from consolidating power. An opposition success in the parliamentary
elections that Morsi called for would have offered it ample opportunities for
clipping Morsi’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s wings.
The common response to this counterargument is that legislative elections
held under a Morsi presidency were sure to be manipulated.27 Tharwat al-Kharabawi, a self-described former Muslim Brotherhood member and now one of
the group’s foremost critics, warned in March 2013 that the Muslim Brother-
the brown journal of world affairs
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 10
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Egyptian Democracy
hood was planning to rig parliamentary elections, and likened the movement’s
assurances of “international and civil society monitoring to ensure the fairness
of elections” to the empty promises made in “Banana Republics.”28 Shortly after
the coup, the writer Wahid Abd al-Magid elaborated on the opposition’s fears:
No one outside the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters trusted
in the fairness of any parliamentary elections under Morsi and the
government of [Prime Minister] Hisham Qandil. It is clear enough
that preparations for rigging these elections had begun in earnest
through the [Brotherhood’s] hegemony over the relevant ministries
and executive agencies. The rigging of parliamentary elections would
have yielded results that contradicted the true balance of power on
the ground, and which would have weakened in turn the legitimacy
of the call for early presidential elections.29
It is not possible for us to know whether the fears of the president’s opponents were well founded, although it is worth asking why they believed that
early presidential elections were less likely to be rigged than parliamentary ones.
And, given the Egyptian military’s subsequent muscular intervention in domestic
politics, one is further left to wonder why the opposition did not just call for the
military to safeguard the electoral process. That task would certainly have been
far less costly for all involved than the overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically
elected president.
11
The Structural Causes of the Collapse
This article makes the alternative argument that all of these observations—the
Brotherhood’s inability to limit its electoral ambitions, its failure to compromise
with opponents, the president’s attempts to ride roughshod over the judiciary, the
opposition’s unwillingness to wait for parliamentary elections, and the military’s
intervention—are functions of a deeper, structural cause. Specifically, Egypt
lacked the social infrastructure necessary to sustain democratic competition.
After all, the country’s per capita income hovers at just under $6,000, putting it
on par with such places as Sri Lanka (ranked by Freedom House as only partly
free), Paraguay (partly free), and Bhutan (partly free). The political scientist
Adam Przeworski and his co-authors argue the poorer a new democracy, the
more likely it is to collapse.30 By their calculations, the richest democracy ever
to have failed was Argentina in 1976, when democratically elected president
Isabel Peron was overthrown in a coup d’état. Egypt’s per capita income today
is around half of what Argentina’s was then.
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue 1i
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 11
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Tarek Masoud
Why does Egypt’s poverty render it prone to the kind of democratic failure
witnessed on 3 July 2013? One argument—that this article does not credit—is
that Egyptian citizens were ill-equipped for democracy. Shortly after Mubarak’s
overthrow, one eminent scholar declared that Egyptians “were a people made
stupid by 60 years of autocracy” who cannot tell a fact from fiction, and who
“don’t know how to think about politics,” and reportedly advocated “a massive
education project” to render Egyptians fit for democratic citizenship.31 Egypt’s
high rates of illiteracy (almost 30 percent by official reckonings) and endemic
poverty might suggest that such dim estimates of the Egyptian people’s qualifications for self-government are correct.32 In fact, Egypt’s rates of male and female
illiteracy today are approximately equal to those of England in the middle of the
nineteenth century (see figure 1).33 Decades ago, the scholar Seymour Martin
Lipset contended that mass literacy was a prerequisite for democracy, as educated
citizens were more likely to partake in the kind of rational compromises that
democracy requires.34
Figure 1. Male and female literacy in Egypt (2010) plotted against historic
literacy rates in England (English data courtesy of Gregory Clark, UCSB)
12
But one need only observe the durability of democracy in other underdeveloped societies such as India and Indonesia—not to mention the ability of large
the brown journal of world affairs
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 12
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Egyptian Democracy
proportions of voters in even established democracies to indulge demonstrably
false beliefs, such as the idea that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya—to
conclude that the blame for the calamities that have befallen Egyptian democracy
cannot be laid at the feet of the Egyptian people.
If democracy was doomed from the start, it was not because Egyptians
as individuals were not ready for it, but because the political landscape was
incapable of sustaining it. In 1939, Walter Lipmann—the great American
political commentator and advisor to presidents—wrote that the survival of
democracy “depends upon a sufficiently even balance of political power to make
it impracticable for the administration to be arbitrary and for the opposition to
be revolutionary and irreconcilable.”35 This equilibrium clearly did not exist in
Morsi’s Egypt. Instead, one of the sad ironies of Egyptian political life is that it
went from one kind of single-party state under Mubarak to a different type of
one-party state after he left.
Instead of a vibrant political arena composed of multiple parties and interest
groups, Egyptians were faced with one in which well-organized Islamists—who
could mobilize voters and supporters through the country’s myriad mosques
and religious institutions—had no peers. Liberal and non-Islamist parties,
bursting with energy and good intentions, were embryonic, and had only just
13
begun the hard work of building ties to and trust with Egyptians. But they had
a very hard road ahead of them. Egypt is a poor, underdeveloped country, its
civic life dominated by
Instead of a vibrant political arena composed
institutions grounded in
the faith and the family. of multiple parties and interest groups,
The social infrastructure Egyptians were faced with one in which
that has typically served
as the backbone for par- well-organized Islamists had no peers.
ties of the secular left—labor unions and mutual benefit societies—are vastly
underdeveloped in this predominantly rural country.
The only force that could have conceivably provided a counterweight to
the Islamist juggernaut—the former ruling National Democratic Party—was
dissolved by a court order shortly after Mubarak’s overthrow. The businessmen
and local notables who had made up the base of that party were scattered, giving rise to a number of smaller parties that lacked the ability to coordinate a
national campaign capable of challenging the Islamists.
Thus, Egyptian underdevelopment created a political landscape in which
Islamists would dominate under democracy and their opponents would consequently seek military intervention. This simple fact explains all of the mal-
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue 1i
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 13
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Tarek Masoud
14
feasances and mistakes that observers usually cite when trying to explain why
Egypt’s democratic experiment failed. It explains why the Islamists reneged on
their promises to limit their electoral ambitions: no political party in the world,
when faced with a field as bereft of credible electoral opponents as Egypt’s, could
resist the temptation to do what parties are made to do and capture power. It
explains why the courts began to intervene muscularly against the Brotherhood
once it got to power. Without any credible political parties to balance the Islamists, the Court took it upon itself to impose some horizontal accountability
on the Islamists. Finally, and most importantly, it explains why the opposition
resisted the Islamists’ call for parliamentary elections and instead supported
presidential elections. The opposition knew that, though the Muslim Brothers
had grown unpopular, they retained a considerable resource advantage. After
all, the revolution of 2011 had not changed the fundamental alchemy of Egypt’s
politics or its associational life. The non-Islamist opposition remained bereft of
the infrastructure that would allow it to reach the vast majority of voters. It faced
the formidable challenge of identifying non-Islamist candidates in each of the
country’s more than 120 districts who could call on local allegiances to match
those of the Islamists, incorporating them all into a national opposition front,
and waging district-by-district campaigns against Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist candidates who, for all of the flaws of their party or their president, were
deeply embedded in local communities. It was much easier for the opposition
to envision coordinating around a single presidential candidate—a charismatic
figure such as Hamdin Sabahi or a wise man such as Amre Moussa—who could
reap votes simply by serving as the focus of popular anger with Morsi. For their
part, the Islamists knew this, which is why they were just as intransigent. The
resulting chasm was just wide enough for the military to roll their tanks through.
Conclusion
More than 20 years ago, the U.S. diplomat Edward Djerejian voiced an oft-repeated fear regarding Islamists. Speaking after the aborted democratic experiment
in Algeria, in which that country’s military intervened (much like Egypt’s would
21 years later) to reverse a set of Islamist electoral victories, the then-assistant
secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs declared, “We are
suspect of those who would use the democratic process to come to power, only
to destroy that very process in order to retain power and political dominance.
While we believe in the principle of ‘one person, one vote,’ we do not support
‘one person, one vote, one time.’”36 This pithy line has often been invoked by
the brown journal of world affairs
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 14
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Egyptian Democracy
those who argued that Islamist electoral victories would lead invariably to the
abrogation of the very democratic experiments that made them possible.
What the events in Egypt have demonstrated is that the U.S. diplomat
was right, but not for the reasons he offered. Egyptian democracy did not fail
because Islamists were insufficiently committed to democratic procedures—after
all, Morsi went down calling for an election. Instead, it failed because Islamist
victories occasioned military intervention to undo what non-Islamists feared
could not be undone at the ballot box. It failed because Egypt lacked the balance of political forces necessary in order for democracy anywhere to work. The
Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists were bound to dominate early elections,
and this was bound to cause the secular opposition to become understandably
“revolutionary and irreconcilable” with the consequences observed on 3 July
2013.
It is worth contrasting the Egyptian situation with that of Tunisia. As in
Egypt, Islamists emerged as the largest bloc in Tunisia’s legislature. But Tunisia
is more economically developed than Egypt. It is more urbanized than Egypt
and has a more diverse civil society. Whereas labor—the backbone of the left—
was weak in agrarian Egypt, it was relatively strong in Tunis. In particular, the
organizational capacity and long history of militancy of the General Tunisian
Union for Labor meant that Islamists and their opponents alike understood that
the Islamists were not invincible, and that no one could, in Lipmann’s words,
“wholly dominate.” As a result, though Islamists and their opponents in Tunisia
have been engaged in a struggle every bit as heated as the one experienced by their
Egyptian counterparts, the country’s fledgling democratic institutions have held.
There are two implications of this argument. The first is analytical. Structures matter. As Jason Brownlee, Andrew Reynolds, and I have argued elsewhere,
accounts of the Arab Spring—both in how it came about and in how it has come
to fail in places like Egypt—place excessive emphasis on agency.37 The settled
narratives of the Arab Spring depict clever protesters seeking dignity, malevolent
militaries seeking dominance, arrogant Islamists seeking supremacy, and hapless
secularists seeking rescue. What this article argues is that all of these actors were
heavily constrained in what they could and could not do. In a very real sense,
the Brotherhood, the military, and the non-Islamists were players in a drama
whose ending was written well before 25 January 2011, inscribed in the very
structure of an Egyptian political and social landscape that endowed Islamists
with far more electoral resources than their competitors.
The second implication of this argument is that, despite the predictions of
the American president, the future of Egypt is likely to look a lot like its past, for
15
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue 1i
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 15
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Tarek Masoud
a long time to come. This news will be disheartening for many supporters of the
July 2013 coup, for whom that event was not a cancellation of the democratic
experiment, but a reset. In 2014, as the country prepares to crown yet another
military man as its leader and a wave of violence from Morsi’s supporters continues, such expectations seem remarkably optimistic, even Panglossian. The
underdevelopment of Egypt’s social and political landscape, itself a function
of economic underdevelopment, will not change overnight. Egypt retains the
capacity to surprise, of course, but as long as its civil society remains weak and
its population bereft of the capacity for self-organization, the smart money is
on the military coup being less a political reset than a natural regression to a
remarkably durable authoritarian mean. WA
Notes
16
1. The author thanks Alex Keyssar and Daniel Ziblatt for many helpful discussions about the weight
of history in the Egyptian transition. Parts of this essay are adapted from the author’s forthcoming book.
See: Tarek Masoud, Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
2. Mark Landler, “Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World,” New York Times, May 11, 2011. To the president’s
credit, he also said, “What I think is that this is going to be long and hard.”
3. Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on Egypt,” The White House, February
11, 2011.
4. “Death toll from Egypt violence rises to 638: Health Ministry,” al-Ahram Online, August 15, 2013.
In response to the so-called massacre, supporters of the ousted president appear to have thrown themselves
headlong into an all-out war with the state, bombing government facilities and setting fire to police stations
and—most egregiously—churches on the twisted reasoning that Christians, and not Morsi’s ineptitude or
the army’s machinations, are to blame for the calamity that befell the Brotherhood.
5. Magued Osman, “Baseera Poll Results on Egyptians’ Participation in the Upcoming Presidential
Elections,” Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research (Baseera), March 17, 2014.
6. Timothy Power, “Theorizing a Moving Target: O’Donnell’s Changing Views of Postauthoritarian
Regimes” (unpublished working paper, University of Oxford, March 19, 2012).
7. Jeffrey Kopstein, “1989 as a Lens for the Communist Past and Post-communist Future,” Contemporary
European History 18, no. 3 (2009): 289–302.
8. Joshua Stacher, “Blame the SCAF for Egypt’s Problems,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011.
9. An unofficial English-language translation of the 2012 Egyptian Constitution (in draft form) is available at the Atlantic Council’s website. See: “Unofficial English Translation of Egypt’s Draft Constitution,”
Atlantic Council, October 30, 2012.
10. Tarek Masoud, discussions with senior generals of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, Egypt,
July 2011.
11. “Kelima al-Fariq al-Sisi…Al-Jaish law Nazala al-Shāria’ Atakalam ‘an Maşr Kemān 30…40 Sana,
2013-5-12” [From General Sisi’s speech: If the army came down to the street they would talk about Egypt
for another 30–40 years, 2013-5-12] YouTube, May 13, 2013.
12. Thanks to Hisham Hellyer for sharing this data with me.
13. Magued Osman, “The Egyptian Street’s Sympathy Towards Demonstrations in Support of Former
President Mohammed Morsi,” Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research (Baseera), July 22, 2013.
14. Magued Osman, “Baseera Public Opinion Poll on Egyptians’ Sentiments Towards the Muslim
Brotherhood,” Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research (Baseera), August 27, 2013.
the brown journal of world affairs
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 16
4/21/15 11:43 AM
Egyptian Democracy
15. Wael Nawara, “It’s the Egyptian Identity, Stupid,” Al-Monitor, July 2, 2013.
16. For information about the widespread practice of female circumcision in Egypt, see: “Female genital
mutilation and other harmful practices,” World Health Organization.
17. Bassām Ramadān, “Sabāhī: Ghayritnā ‘alā al-sharī‘a mithl al-tayyār al-Islāmī wa akthar” [Our keenness on the sharī‘a is like the Islamists’ and more], al-Mişrī al-Yawm, August 28, 2013.
18. For example, see: Bobby Ghosh, “What’s So Scary About the Muslim Brotherhood?” Time, June
23, 2011.
19. Muhammad Gamāl ‘Arafa, “Al-Bayūmī: Shabābunā Hamā al-Thawra” [Our youth protected the
revolution], Al-Wafd, February 17, 2011; “Al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn: Lan nurashah ahad minnā lil-ri’āsa
wa nas‘ā li-’isti‘āda al-sha‘b lisiādatahu wahuritahu [The Muslim Brothers: We will not nominate one of
our won for the presidency and we strive to restore the people’s sovereignty and freedom],” Nafidhat Misr
[Egypt Window], February 5, 2011.
20. “Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt,” August 15, 2013.
21. Alaa Al Aswany, “Egypt’s Two-Front War for Democracy,” New York Times, November 10, 2013.
22. Mohamad Elmasry, “Anti-democracy: A Response to Elbaradei,” Al Jazeera, June 30, 2013.
23. “Who’s Who? Egypt’s New Ministers,” Ahram, May 7, 2013.
24. Jason Brownlee, “Morsi was no role model for Islamic democrats,” Middle East Institute, July 17, 2013.
25. I put the words “liberal” and “secular” in distancing quotation marks because I wish to refrain from
passing judgment on the extent to which these actors can be thought “truly” liberal or secular. Others have
avoided this dilemma by referring to the Brotherhood’s opponents as “non-Islamists,” which I follow here.
Thanks to Samuel Tadros for helpful discussions on this point.
26. Amīn Sālih and Īmān ‘Alī, “al-Barād‘ī li-CNN: Mursī ‘atal al-dimuqrātiyya” [ElBaradei to CNN:
Morsi has stalled democracy], al-Yawm al-Sābi‘ (Cairo), July 5, 2013.
27. “Radan ‘alā shā’i‘āt tazwīr al-intikhābāt al-muqbila” [In response to rumors that coming elections
will be rigged], Freedom and Justice Party, June 1, 2013.
28. Samāh al-Gamāl, “al-Kharabāwī: Akhshā min tazwīr al-intikhābāt (al-Kharabāwī: I fear the rigging
of elections),” al-Ahrām (Cairo), March 16, 2013.
29. Wahīd ‘Abd al-Majīd, “Ijtihādāt Hishām Qandīl: Shukran?” [The judgements of Hishām Qandīl:
Thank you?], al-Ahrām (Cairo), July 30, 2013.
30. Adam Przeworski, Michuel Alvarez, Jose Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World 1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000).
31. Cynthia Haven, “What should America do in Egypt? Try nothing, says Stanford expert,” Stanford
University News Service, February 9, 2011.
32. For example, see: “Egypt,” CIA World Factbook, 2012. This pegs adult literacy at 73.9 percent.
33. English literacy data are courtesy of Professor Gregory Clark of the University of California, Santa
Barbara. Literacy rates were inferred from the percentage of men and women who were able to sign their
marriage certificates. See: Gregory Clark, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1200–2000:
Magna Carta to Tony Blair” (working paper, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis,
2004).
34. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and
Political Legitimacy,” The American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 69–105.
35. Walter Lippmann, “The Indispensable Opposition,” Atlantic Monthly 164 (1939). Reprinted in
Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, eds., The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 232–34.
36. Edward P. Djerejian, “The U.S. and the Middle East in a Changing World” (address at Meridian
House International, Washington D.C., June 2, 1992).
37. Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud, and Andrew Reynolds, “Tracking the Arab Spring: Why the Modest
Harvest?” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 4 (October 2013): 29–44.
17
Spring/Summer 2014 • volume xx, issue 1i
Masoud_GALLEY.indd 17
4/21/15 11:43 AM