authoritarianism in MENA

the thesis of a threat from the old deep state does have credence, according to Chatham House fellow and North Africa specialist Jon Marks. Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment think tank also shares this view; she argues that there are still significant remnants of the old regime in Egypt and Tunisia.

Youssef Cherif, a prominent Tunisian political commentator, points out that it is common among the elite to talk about having a less authoritarian version of Ben Ali. That Tunisians should think about compromising their hard-won democracy for dictatorship is not strange, as Kenneth J. Perkins, author of A History of Modern Tunisia, points out: “Countless Tunisians who preferred protecting their personal privileges to safeguarding the rule of law looked the other way as the repression of the Islamists [under Ben Ali] proceeded . .  . their tacit acceptance of the suspension of some citizens’ civil and human rights bound them to the regime.”

“The Tunisian revolution was largely peaceful, but it also meant that we inherited the whole administration intact and many of these civil servants are trying to hold on to the past and the privileges that they received.” These administrators have valuable skills, which the new transitional state cannot just purge.

Through the din and confusion of Monday morning, he could hear both soldiers and protesters calling for calm. “But the atmosphere has been charged between the two sides for several days.”

“I told the soldiers to behave nicely, and with some people they were nice, but some protesters were calling them infidels and traitors. One of the soldiers responded angrily, ‘Did they really tell you that we are infidels? I don’t care who Morsi is, but right now you’re telling me I am an atheist and a traitor!”

What mistakes are being repeated? Start with a constitutional declaration written in secret and dropped on a population that, still basking in post-revolutionary goodwill, is not reading the fine print. Then add a considerable measure of vagueness, an extremely rushed timetable, critical gaps and loopholes, and a promise that everyone gets a seat at a table but not much of a guarantee that anybody listens to what is said at that table: The generals are clearly calling the shots for the short term, but there's just enough opacity, and a dose of influence for civilian officials and politicians, that it's not clear where the real responsibility lies. Reward those who cut deals with the military or security apparatus, but also allow those who missed out on cutting a deal to decry the very idea of such deals. Add in measures of repression, xenophobia, media restrictions and harassment, and the postponement of all reform questions. Use state media in a blatantly partisan way. And subject Egyptians to a rapid series of elections so that, as soon as they're done with one round of balloting, they are called to vote on the next.

Egypt’s politics probably will not improve as long as political rivals are mortal enemies. At this point, the only thing Egyptians have to blame is blame itself.

When 55 people protesting against the military overthrow of Egypt's first freely elected president were killed after the army opened fire on Monday, you might have expected the country to unite in condemnation.A surprisingly subdued public reaction, and the independent media's outright vilification of protesters, reflects in part the depth of political opponents' distrust of Mohamed Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood.But it also represents a triumph for the military's public relations machine which, aware of its fumbled handling of the turbulent aftermath of Hosni Mubarak's overthrow in 2011, has moved decisively, and successfully, to gain the upper hand.

Independent newspapers, many of which were fiercely opposed to Mursi when he was in power, have been, if anything, more partisan. Daily Al-Masry Al-Youm wrote the bloodletting was "the Brotherhood's responsibility." Al-Watan decried a "conspiracy by the 'Armed Brotherhood' against the army."

With television stations sympathetic to the Brotherhood shut down, senior leaders arrested and its newspaper appearing only intermittently, Mursi's supporters have struggled to convey their view of the killings - that security forces, unprovoked, fired on them while they conducted dawn prayers."The military coup has showed its hideous face after just six days," said a flyer handed out by young men at the main pro-Mursi sit-in at a mosque in northeastern Cairo."Were these people firing bullets while they bowed upon their mats in prayer?"

It is true that this president did not win by a vast margin, but there is no requirement in a liberal democracy that that be a condition of electoral success. And even if, as the protesters have also insisted, he has been acting largely on behalf of his Freedom and Justice Party rather than the country as a whole, that by and large is how politics works in liberal democracies. There is much rhetoric about “the nation” and “the people,” but electoral democracies work not in favor of all citizens but rather of special interests represented by the party that wins in the elections. 

The trouble, as I see it, is that the pro-democracy movement has not thought critically enough about how the grand alliance against Morsi has come about and how the aims of that alliance conflict with their own aims. They seem to take it for granted that, having been on the winning side in the conflict with the Morsi government, they can now successfully confront the army and its civilian allies (i.e., big business, the media, the judiciary, etc.).

there are so many forces already arrayed against them that there was not much scope for the Morsi government for independent action. Morsi could have tried military officers for crimes? You must be joking. He could have restored a bankrupt economy in a world where powerful institutions and governments, who have their own political agendas, control the flow of capital? He should have reduced poverty in a country dominated by a powerful neoliberal elite? This is not where the real evidence of their incompetence lies–especially considering the short period of one year in which he was president. In my view, their total incompetence, their total stupidity, lies in not anticipating, to begin with, that they would be demonized if they acquired governmental authority. And demonized they were, with a vengeance. Part of this can be related to the crude secularist ideas that dominate most Cairene intellectuals. They were also highly incompetent in their inability, or unwillingness, to reach out to parts of the opposition. In any case, in my view they should never have aspired to the presidency–first of all as a matter of principle, and secondly because the uprising had created colossal practical problems which would be extremely difficult to address by any government. Winning an election does not mean that you are strong, as the Muslim Brotherhood thought it was. It means you are responsible for failures of the state and economy. And, despite their electoral win, the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party are and were always weak. One of the things of which they were often accused was that they wanted totalitarian control of society, that they were on the verge of getting what they wanted, which is absolute nonsense, of course. They did not have such control, they could not acquire such control, and there is no real evidence that they wanted such control. This is one part of their stupidity: To be seen to behave as though they had real control of the state.

The way Al-Sisi is being glorified and celebrated at the moment points to a much dangerous possibility; the re-personalization of the state and of the regime in Egypt. The legacy of Nasser started this political and psychological mechanism. Nasser himself was the symbol of what happened in 1952, and a few years later he became the symbol of Egyptian Nationalism. It was the model of Nasser that started this confusion between the individual and the institution, which we clearly still suffer from today.

the strength of political institutions remains insufficient

the armed forces remain the only national institution in Egypt