The Morsi "coup": Coup d'etat, coup de grace or coup de theatre?

           

              Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi’s surprised his country and the world by sacking the two top military leaders who had effectively ruled since the resignation of former president Hosny Mubarak in February 2011.  At the same time he announced their replacements, annulled the amended constitutional declaration the same generals had issued less than two months ago to limit his authority, and took for himself the powers they had granted themselves in March 2011.  Morsi, frequently derided during and after the presidential election, as a weak leader is now more frequently described as the leader of a “counter-coup” who has established himself as the undisputed leader of a new Islamist authoritarianism.  There is no doubt that Morsi is now the undisputed ruler of Egypt.  Not since the pharaohs has any Egyptian ruler had so much power.  At least in theory.

            Before addressing the complicated and opaque politics of Morsi’s decision it is worth spending a bit of time on Morsi’s own situation.  Morsi was nominated for the presidency by the Freedom and Justice party when it became clear that its preferred candidate, Khairat Shater, would be ineligible to run.  Morsi had long been in Shater’s shadow and, despite his doctoral degree from the University of Southern California and his appointment at Cal State Northridge, has usually been presented in the media as an unimaginative drudge.  Perhaps he is, but political history is littered with “spare tires” such as Morsi who by a train of accidents came to power and turned out to be surprisingly more effective than the more qualified person whose place they were holding.   Lyndon Johnson accomplished more for social equity and civil rights than John F. Kennedy ever would or could have; Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky at nearly every turn; and Anwar Sadat was widely derided in the days after Nasser’s death as an ineffective place-holder who would be easily managed.

            If it is a mistake to underestimate Morsi’s abilities and equally wrong to overestimate him and the Muslim Brothers, it may be an even larger mistake to underestimate the effect of being president.  I doubt being president magically turns political leaders into pragmatic liberals.  On the contrary I suspect it magnifies whatever sense they have of their own importance.  Days after assuming office Morsi indicated he wanted to pray at the Azhar mosque.  Six months or six years ago he would, at best, have been an inconspicuous figure in the back of the hall, but in June he was whisked with a special presidential security entourage to pray in the front row with senior Azhari shaykhs.  I doubt he would have had the Saudi Embassy’s email address on his computer when he was a professor at Northridge; now he is the guest of King Abdullah at a summit.  No doubt, Professor Morsi remains (in his heart) a good Brother and a devout Muslim, but President Morsi does not seem to have invited either Brother Shater or Supreme Guide Badi’ to the presidential palace for strategy discussions.   From here on out if he disagrees with them or anyone else I’m sure there will be an ample supply of sycophants to tell him exactly how smart he is.  One of them, in fact, appears to have been re-appointed editor of a state-owned newspaper after spending a time in professional purgatory for having been as effusive about Mubarak as he has recently become about Morsi.  None of this is Morsi’s choice, but neither politicians nor professors are known for their modesty.

            At the time of his election Morsi created a website (in English as well as Arabic) called the Morsi Meter.  It’s been ticking since he took the oath of office and it lists 64 promises he planned to keep by the end of his first 100 days in office.  The promises are all good government promises designed to affect ordinary Egyptians’ access to food, fuel, transportation, security, and cleanliness.  As of today, 47 days after his inauguration, he has by his own estimate unambiguously achieved one goal:  raising public awareness about the need for public cleanliness and why it’s sinful to throw garbage in the street. 

            Until last weekend it was easy to make fun of the Morsi Meter and the meager accomplishments his government could claim.   This was doubly so given that the goals he proposed were themselves quite modest in a country experiencing ongoing shortages of diesel fuel, electricity, butane gas and cylinders as well as paid employment.   A recent widely circulated cartoon, for example, showed a donkey hauling Metro cars because the Cairo underground has had trouble operating.  Amusing as that image may be, in a tragic incident last week a young mother was killed when she exited a stalled train underground and was killed while walking to a nearby station. 

           

            In late July Morsi was a weak and beleaguered president.  SCAF had issued a supplementary constitution before he was elected president that severely limited his power.  In addition, SCAF had dismissed the Muslim Brother dominated parliament in the wake of a decision by the Supreme Constitutional Court that it had been elected unconstitutionally.  Morsi had attempted, through a presidential decree, to recall parliament to session but was rebuffed in this attempt by the Supreme Court and SCAF.  A riot in Dahshur, a town to the south and west of Cairo famous for the “Bent Pyramid”, had ended when the terrified Coptic community left en masse.  That the police were unable to prevent the outbreak of violence there (and indeed in most of Egypt’s impoverished communities no matter what the causes or consequences) coupled with Morsi’s belittling of the sectarian dimensions of the conflict provided a sense of a president adrift.  There was a growing sense that the state was increasingly debilitated since the armed forces could not respond to criminal incidents or local unrest and the government lacked the authority or the will to intervene. 

            The August 8 attack on an Egyptian border outpost in the Sinai by militants who killed 16 soldiers and were themselves killed as they attempted to drive commandeered vehicles into Israel did not immediately seem to be the key to unlocking the frozen domestic situation.  Morsi and Field Marshall Tantawi visited the area and Morsi condemned the attack as did the Hamas leaders in Gaza who are ideologically and politically close to the Muslim Brothers.  If the Nile Valley and the Delta have experienced a security deficit since the revolution, Sinai may be said to have slipped largely away from routine government control.  Under Mubarak Northern Sinai was left to its own devices while the south saw a kind of uneven development of tourism which left many local people adrift.  With the withdrawal of troops after the initial days of the revolution and the collapse of the police the north has become unstable as well.  Since the revolution, religious sites have been destroyed, soldiers have been attacked, tourists have been kidnapped and the pipeline carrying natural gas to Israel and Jordan has been blown up dozens of times. 

            Morsi called a meeting of the National Defense Council which he chaired.  We don’t know just what happened at that meeting between Morsi and the members of the SCAF, but one report that Sami Enan would be appointed Minister of Defense appears in hindsight to have been wildly inaccurate.  Morsi must have already had some sense of disagreements between Tantawi, Anan, Roweini on the one hand and Abd al-Fattah Sisi and Sidky Subhi but they may also have emerged more clearly in these meetings.  Morsi later removed the governor of North Sinai and the head of General Intelligence General Murad Muwafi.  Muwafi claimed to have had prior knowledge of the attack but did not move decisively to prevent it. 

            Following Muwafi’s removal, Tantawi planned a funeral for the slain border guards.  Morsi refused, at more or less the last minute to attend the funeral.  At the time he claimed his presence would disrupt it but in the days since his supporters have reported a different version.  They have improbably claimed that SCAF had planned to assassinate Morsi had he attended the funeral so as to overthrow the elected government.  This information they say was passed on to them from sources in military intelligence close to the MB.  Whether that information first passed before the eyes of the present Defense Minister who then headed that service we cannot say.

            What these claims reflect, not unlike similar ones voiced by at least one leader of the MB that Israeli intelligence was behind the raids, is more likely the high level of suspicion the MB leadership had of the military.  Despite having won a remarkable parliamentary victory the MB still see themselves as a beleaguered and threatened minority. Morsi’s peculiar behavior in Tahrir Square at his public inauguration when he opened his jacket to show that he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest is another example.  

            Egyptians sometimes speak of the events of the last week as the end of the 1952 regime, but it might be more accurate to say it is the end of the 1954 regime.  True enough the Free Officers came to power in 1952, but it was not until 1954 that the younger officers ousted General Mohammed Naguib and barred the door to any return to parliamentary government.  Their attack on the MB intensified after an assassination attempt (one in which real bullets were fired) on Nasser. 

            The last week provided an almost perfect narrative complement to the events of 1954.  A rumored assassination attempt against an elected president in the wake of a failure by the military to protect the country’s borders provides the fitting end to the regime brought to power by a failed assassination attempt of a young army officer who came to power in the wake of the failure of the old monarchy to safeguard the country’s international interests. 

            The problem with the perfect storybook ending is that most of the structure of the old regime remains in place and that what has changed most recently is the transformation of the jerry-rigged institutional structure created for the post-Mubarak transition.  As Sherif Younis has reminded us recently in a lengthy study of Nasserism the 1952 regime issued from a military coup accomplished by the Free Officers’ Movement made up of a tiny minority of primarily junior officers acting illegally and unofficially; on taking power they formed the Revolutionary Command Council which did rule; in July 1956 the RCC dissolved itself as Nasser assumed the presidency.  The dictatorship that Nasser established was real and recruitment to its top positions came through the military and well into the Mubarak era the Ministry of Defense and Military Intelligence were the keys to regime stability and survival.  Governance was not, however, in the hands of the army as a hierarchical establishment and succession to the presidency invariably came through nominally civilian mechanisms (both Sadat and Mubarak were incumbent vice-presidents when their predecessor died).    Unlike the last 18 months the formal high command of the army between 1952 and 1956 did not routinely meet, make decisions, and issue communiqués. 

Invoking SCAF to be used as a mechanism through which the army’s general staff could rule the country was an innovative anomaly.  We still have no idea exactly how the decision was made and we have assumed, because it placed authority in the hands of the highest-ranking officers that, it was an instrument of the army hierarchy.  This may well be true.  But the example of 1952 and the conflict between Nasser and Naguib suggests a possibility worth at least considering:  that the most senior officers had significantly less authority than they may have believed.   SCAF nevertheless, unlike the Free Officers Movement issued from and represented the Armed Forces as a hierarchical institution.  We know remarkably little about their thinking, however.

Judging by a widely circulated paper General Sedky Sobhy wrote when he was a student at the US Army War College, his generation may have a more academically inspired vision of the world and one more attuned to the exigencies of the international relations than was the case with either Tantawy or Nasser.  The paper is primarily a recitation of commonplaces since Sobhy is paid to run a large hierarchical military organization not to write sparkling geopolitical commentary for the delectation of elite academics.  What matters is not the absence of original thought but what particular banalities seem to animate Sobhy’s world view.  Recent commentary has focused exclusively on his critique of the US relationship with Israel. What it reveals about Sobhy’s views on democratization are more important: “Although increased democratization of Arab regimes [among which, writing in 2005, he included mentioned Saudi Arabia and Egypt] must be handled carefully so that in and of itself it does result in the undesirable state of political and social instability….the initiation and implementation of democratic processes in the Middle East Arab countries must still be based on the premise of strong central governments [italics in original].”  Sobhy never defines what a democracy (or successful democratic project in the post-modern inflected language of social science he seems to prefer) would look like.  It does not seem much of a stretch, given his examples, to think that it is mainly a question of routine and relatively fair elections through which a powerful governing majority is legitimated. 

Sobhy’s paper reveals the same concerns commonly voiced by SCAF (and occasionally ridiculed) during the last 18 months: the danger that foreign interests, or hidden hands as they were frequently called, would use the transition process to weaken the central state and even fragment the Egyptian territory.  For Sobhy one important measure of the effectiveness of the central state is the presence of radical or violent Islamists operating freely on its territory (rather than, say, the levels of participation in government or the level of economic growth which might be more important for analysts from non-military institutions).

The new defense minister is Abdelfattah Al-Sissi from whom we have no convenient recently written position papers.  Variously described as a “closet” Muslim Brother and a well-known figure in Washington, Al-Sissi evokes much the same response as did Omar Suleiman who he succeeded as head of military intelligence in the early days of the revolution.  He is the man who presumably knows everyone’s secrets.  He may also, as has been true of many intelligence chiefs, have been aware of the promise and danger of democratization as an electoral process set out in Sobhy’s paper: the value of electoral legitimacy set against the danger of a loss of central authority. 

Seen in this context, Morsi’s decisions a week ago may be placed in a somewhat different context.  A significant number of slightly junior officers may have felt that the task of SCAF had largely been completed and that it was time to end the increasingly cumbersome and anomalous situation that had emerged in February 2011.  The events in Sinai could easily be read (as they probably are in Tel Aviv and Washington as well) as symptomatic of the loss of control over the national territory by the central state as the government and the army struggled over the nature of power and political institutions in the Second Republic. 

What I am suggesting is in line with those who see Morsi’s dismissal of Tantawi and Enan as a decision made with (and probably by) SCAF itself or at least a significant set of officers within it.  The ease with which Tantawi and Enan accepted their dismissal, the absence of any significant measures (such as an armed guard) to ensure that they would comply with Morsi’s order, and the orderly nature of the changes in the composition of the general staff all suggest that the Armed Forces not only acquiesced in but largely welcomed this change. 

Two possible solutions were to transform the improvisation we call SCAF into open military rule or to cede power to an elected civilian government.   Tantawi and Anan may have been willing to continue the SCAF process but almost no one else, including evidently a significant fraction of the senior officer corps, wanted to and it was clearly well outside the historical norm of Egyptian experience.  SCAF introduced some remarkable innovations that, at least formally, went well beyond anything in earlier Egyptian practice: placing permanent legislative authority in the hands of the executive as well as giving the executive the power to write extensive constitutional texts.   In the absence of a regularly constituted public authority these powers had to fall to someone and when SCAF let them go they clearly had to go to Morsi. 

Morsi’s presidency has therefore gained its power from what I take to be the decision by the generals to place order and the integrity of the central state over the ephemeral pleasures of continuing to affect the institutional and political make-up of the new republic.  The generals can now be assured that a stable, legitimate and powerful constitutional order is soon to be constitutionally founded.  This was, I argued in early 2011, what the generals saw as their primary task,.  It was the same task that led them, in the midst of massive demonstrations to seize power and it has largely been accomplished, allowing them to give it up.  That it has been accomplished with the MB/FJP assuming political authority and without a liberal democracy being put into place is not likely to be or to have been a major concern of theirs.  What they cannot have failed to notice is that the freely elected Morsi whose legitimacy presumably allowed him to displace two of their senior commanders on his own has also immediately moved to increase the salaries of the soldiers.  Electoral democracy, Sobhi and Sissi have realized during their stay at the US War College in Carlisle, is not necessarily a bad thing at all for military budgets.

What this means for the future is, as everyone realizes, uncertain.  The dominant view seems to be that the MB/FJP will now, through Morsi, consolidate its hold over the government.  I would like to suggest the opposite: Morsi will now, through the MB/FJP consolidate his own power and that of the existing institutions of the state. 

One remarkable thing that Morsi did not do after ousting Tantawi and Enan and issuing a constitutional declaration of his own was to re-convene parliament.  This would be an inexplicable oversight if he were acting as an agent of the MB/FJP with unrestricted powers.  Rather than acquiring legislative power he could have restored the elected legislative authority in which, as is well known, Islamists had an overwhelming majority.   Perhaps, in a bit of concern with legality, he decided to defer to the Supreme Constitutional Court which has ruled the legislature unconstitutionally elected.  Or perhaps, having just taken on the Armed Forces and won he was intimidated by the justices of the SCC who insisted that he take the oath of office before them. 

There is another possibility.  Morsi acquired his legislative powers from SCAF and, if I and others are correct, with the assistance of SCAF.  If SCAF was indeed concerned with the strength of the central government which in Egypt has invariably been associated with the executive (under the monarchy and during the First Republic), they might have preferred not to bring a parliament back into session.  Especially an elected parliament widely seen during its brief tenure as divided, weak, and incompetent. 

Morsi is certainly an Islamist and he was long a member of the MB as well as the head of its political wing, the FJP.  It is possible, however, the SCAF speaking for the Armed Forces as an institution was willing to cede power to Morsi and the presidency.  Not to the MB or the FJP and not to the parliamentary system.  But to Morsi himself acting as the elected president.  Morsi, who has chosen to address the public frequently from mosques, is still an Islamist and the Islamist project has nothing to fear from him.  Recruitment to high levels of government has probably gained a new channel and a new social base:  members of Islamist movements from the professional elites as well as through the military.  But, as I will address in my next post, the role of the MB and the FJP as organizations may not be so clear.  The MB/FJP may very hold a larger majority in the next parliament in the last but they will do so as the president’s party not as an independent political organization.  The current MB and FJP leadership may yet some to regret his election and the Salafis whose disdain for hierarchical organization may regret it even more.

Political Conflict and Legal Maneuvering

           

            In the wake of Mohammad Morsi’s assumption of the Egyptian presidency, Egyptian politics suddenly became clear.  It was obvious the Muslim Brothers decisively took charge of Egyptian politics and it was only a matter of time before they gained control over the Army.  Except of course to the people to whom it was equally obvious that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces took control and it’s only a matter of time until Morsi and the Muslim Brothers are out of power and back on the streets.  And the MB and SCAF have made a deal.  Or perhaps not.  But what the events of the last couple of days show is that after a year and a half of tumultuous politics in Egypt nothing is really settled. 

The January 25 uprising brought into the open profound social and economic cleavages and conflicts and the elections since have brought into the open some equally profound conflicts between political organizations.  What the so-called transitional period, and especially the events of the last two months have brought into the open, are the open institutional conflicts which have yet to be resolved.  These institutional conflicts range from conflicts between the different branches of government to conflicts between state organizations and between institutions of governance and those in civil society.  Most of the discussion about Egyptian politics for the last year and a half has been about only the last of those conflicts which encompasses but is not limited to the struggle for power between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brothers. 

            Egypt is, as the sociologist Hania Sholkamy pointed out several weeks ago, a country of institutions.  This is so obviously true that its importance tends, as she argued, to escape most observers.  Unlike Libya where the Qaddafi regime spent 40 years diminishing if not eliminating them or Syria where they are largely subordinate to the leader, Egypt has distinct, active, and in many cases surprisingly effective institutions.  The Egyptian Army is one such institution as commentators pointed out ad nauseam in February 2011 to explain why the Egyptian Armed Forces were supposedly so much friendlier to democratic transition than their Syrian or Yemeni counterparts.  The Egyptian presidency is another such institution.  It is easy to forget that one of the remarkable features of Egyptian governance over the last 60 years was the institutionalization of presidential authoritarianism which long outlasted its founder, Gamal Abdel Nasser who died 40 years ago.  The Azhar is another much older institution as is the state university system, for all its many flaws including enormous size, over-great centralization, and declining quality. 

There is a temptation, plausible if resistible, to call the judiciary the crown jewel of Egyptian institutions.  Certainly the Egyptian judiciary and especially its highest bodies (the SCC, the Supreme Administrative Court and the Court of Cassation) have well trained personnel, command significant respect, and play remarkably independent if occasionally conflicting roles.  The judiciary, like the Azhar and the university system, have had moments of grandeur over the last century and have on occasion been staffed by individuals of real, and even universally acclaimed, brilliance as well as significant competence.   They have also had moments of profound mediocrity and personnel whose corrupt behavior, individual idiosyncrasy, or simple subservience have been embarrassing and destructive.

The two primary contenders for power at the moment, the military and the Muslim Brothers have each begun to legitimate their authority by claiming to uphold the law rather than transform it through revolutionary action.  SCAF, which seized power during the massive demonstrations of February 2011, has long claimed to be merely guiding Egypt toward a democratic order.  That its seizure of power was unconstitutional, that it has written constitutional declarations at will, and that it is a largely unconstrained power is a reality it prefers to soften by claiming merely to protect legally constituted authority.  The MB, a highly disciplined cadre organization, whose leaders more than occasionally evince a devotion to reforming society as the embodiment of the Egyptian conscience expressed through devotion to shariah, have also preferred to deploy the language of respect for law as well as order.  For the MB, however, the source of law is, not surprisingly, popular sovereignty manifested in the electoral process that has brought them to the presidency and the legislature.

             

            The problem with thinking of Egyptian politics as a two-party game is that there are more than two actors.  In the last 18 months, for example, the judiciary has become more institutionally more prominent in politics and the courts and the legal system have increasingly become areas within which and about which intense political conflict occurs.  It may be stretching a point to say that the judiciary have emerged as the real contenders and perhaps also as winners over the last 18 months.  It is certainly no overstatement to say that, for now, the MB, SCAF, and many politically influential individuals and parties seek to clothe themselves in the garments of legality. 

The most recent conflict over legality and the role of the courts began in mid-June when the Supreme Constitutional Court decided that the rules governing the election of individuals to the national parliament last winter violated the constitution.  Individual candidates constituted one-third of the parliament and the court had no evident problem with members elected by proportional representation.  In response to the ruling SCAF, acting in its capacity as the country’s executive authority, dissolved the parliament and took back for itself the legislative power that it had ceded when the legislature took office.   In the 1990s the Mubarak government had dissolved parliament and held new elections in response to similar SCC rulings.   Many jurists and attorneys had expected such a ruling from the moment the electoral law was written in 2011 (including the famous whistle-blowing judge, Noha al-Zeiny, whose revelations about electoral fraud in 2005 in Damanhour were instrumental in court rulings at the time) but the rapidity with which the court reached its decision was a surprise.  The Islamist majority in the parliament and the courts have been on a collision course for months, notably over the issue of judicial review. 

Dissolving the parliament where the MB held effectively a majority of the seats eliminated their institutional political base in government.  It did not eliminate their membership nor their broader electoral base.  The dissolution occurred just as the second round of voting in the presidential election was held.  In the first round, the FJP had seen a marked diminution of the electoral support  that provided its earlier overwhelming parliamentary success.   Morsi narrowly won the presidency with a campaign that promised, in 100 days, to solve 64 of Egypt’s basic problems with food, traffic, energy and security.  The calendar is moving but none of the problems identified on his “Morsi-meter” website have been addressed.  Instead of addressing routine problems of governance, he has chosen to confront SCAF, the SCC, and at least half the country over presidential authority and the distribution of power across government institutions. 

            The judiciary and the executive are engaged at every level from the simplest to the most complex.  When the Freedom and Justice party/MB candidate Muhammad Morsi narrowly won the presidency, Farouq Sultan the SCC chief justice announced his victory.  Sultan was a controversial appointment to the SCC because he had spent much of his career in the military and state security courts.  As head of the SCC he was also head of the Presidential Election Commission.  He reached mandatory retirement last week and received an official farewell from Morsi as president.  Because parliament had been dissolved, Morsi was required to take the oath of office before Sultan and the SCC.  Morsi was extremely unwilling to take the oath before the court and at one point, Justice Tahany El-Gebali, publicly branded refusal an act of treason.   

            Morsi’s powers as president were limited by a revised version of the Constitutional Declaration issued June 18.   The limitations are real but Morsi retains significant authority as president; not least of these is the power to revoke prior presidential decrees as well as the power to appoint government ministers and presumably at some point members of the SCC.  He also has the power to call parliament into session and dissolve it.  It was a combination of these authorities that Morsi invoked last week.  Acting as president he revoked the SCAF decree that had dissolved parliament and acting in a different capacity as president he convened parliament.  Both of these acts are within his authority and neither explicitly contravenes the SCC’s ruling on the parliamentary election.  When performed together, however, the overall effect is a striking challenge to the SCC, SCAF, and the rule of law.  And, as so often in the last 18 months, it is done explicitly when Islamists and others have clashed, the Islamists have plausibly claimed to be acting on behalf of the sovereign authority of the democratic majority.

Morsi’s decision to convoke the parliament challenges the SCC for obvious reasons but the challenge to SCAF is not merely the revocation of their prior edict.  It also challenges their claim to have regained legislative authority.  And it implicitly reverses any claim that the acts of the People’s Assembly and the Shoura Council were invalid.  The most important of these acts was the choice of a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.

           

            That Egypt is politically divided and has become more so over the last 18 months is no secret.  More than 75 percent of Egyptians voted to approve the constitutional amendments in March 2011 which led the Muslim Brothers and Salafi political activists to claim the majority of the country was squarely behind them.  Since that referendum the Salafis have gained political clout at the expense of the Muslim Brothers and most recently the presidential candidate, Mohammad Morsi, they jointly backed in a run-off won barely more than 51 percent of the vote against a former air force general and old regime Prime Minister. 

            There have been attempts to diminish the perception that political conflict is widespread by claiming that former general Ahmed Shafiq, had only limited support.  Mapping the electoral outcome, however, shows a very clear geographical core of about a third of the country, extending from Cairo north nearly to the Mediterranean coast, in which Shafiq won consistent majorities.  Morsi’s narrow victory came from the area to the south of Cairo, and a belt of provinces around the Shafiq core.  Looking at the map produced by Eric Schewe linked below it is very clear that the vote for Shafiq was neither geographically nor socially narrow.

           Egypt elections map

                 

            Besides geography, this division of the country implies that the now-dissolved National Democratic party, the governing party from its creation by President Anwar Sadat in the 1970s until 2011, has survived the revolution. Whether its rebirth is solely the result of its own efforts or has been aided by other forces, such as the Wafd party, is hard to tell.  But the results do suggest that just as with the communist parties in Eastern Europe (not to mention the Italian Christian Democrats, the Japanese Liberal Democrats, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico) a party that linked patronage and governance for several generations will not go quietly extinct.  It may take a year or it make take a decade but short of more extreme legal repression against the members they will return to compete for power sooner or later.  Thirty years of political repression obviously did not obliterate the Wafd, the party that dominated Egyptian politics from 1919 until 1952.  A shadow of pre-Nasser self, it was still the largest non-Islamist party in the now-dissolved parliament.

            For the first time in 60 years therefore Egypt has open and persistent political conflict reflected geographically as well as institutionally and socially.   Whether future elections are based on individual candidacies or proportional representation they will continue to be based on local constituencies and will therefore reflect the geographical distribution of political difference.  I will return to this point at the end but its political implications are apparent:  politics will be local. 

            In modern states the legislature is the representative branch in name and in practice.  The legislature reflects more closely than the executive or the judiciary the opinions, prejudices, and even the appearance of the citizens at large.  Legislators rarely enter office with the extensive education or socialization that characterizes the judiciary and they are invariably more connected to the demands and needs of constituents than any president or prime minister.  The head of state may represent the people in foreign affairs but the legislature embodies popular sovereignty.  The MB has relied on the language of democracy, revolution, and popular sovereignty to buttress its claims to authority.  In the process its supporters have claimed that the SCC is a collection of corrupt remnants of the old regime.  There is a heavy irony in this because it was an SCC ruling in the 1980s that forced the Mubarak government to allow individual candidates to run which was one way for the MB to elect parliamentarians before 2011.

The 2011 constitutional referendum and declaration endowed the legislature to be elected with one primary task:  choosing a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.  The language conferring this task placed it simply and absolutely in the authority of the legislature.   Islamist legislators (in this case the MB and the Salafi parties) held an absolute majority and nominated themselves as a majority for the assembly.  The bulk of the non-Islamist members of the Assembly withdrew and there were significant protests.   The assembly majority had deployed its absolute prerogative to dominate the writing of a new constitution to the dissatisfaction of many other political forces and institutions:  the Azhar, the Church, the secular liberals, and ultimately the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. 

The military, of course, had the power to intervene and set aside the constituent assembly and perhaps the generals discussed the possibility.  They could not have relished reversing so obviously their promise to return political authority to an elected government in a document they themselves had written and for which they had gained national approval.  Their earlier attempts to shape the constitution in the socalled “Selmi Document” presented by former Deputy Prime Minister Ali El-Selmi had already been formally rejected by the MB backed up by massive demonstrations in Tahrir Square.  Egypt appeared to be in a classical political confrontation characteristic of revolutionary dual power.  The legislature and its majority in early 2012 had chosen to use its political power to impose its own sovereign vision on the country; others resisted.  In France in 1789 or Russia in 1917 the outcome of a similar confrontation was resolved in the streets by popular mobilization whereas in Chile in 1973 it was resolved by the use of massive force.

In Egypt it was resolved in court. 

In addition to the protests, several suits had been filed challenging the composition of the constituent assembly.   On April 10 the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the constituent assembly had been improperly chosen by the then-sitting parliament and ordered it suspended.  This was a strange, if for many people welcome, intrusion by the judiciary into the work of the legislative branch.   The Supreme Administrative Court, modeled on the European system, differs from the Supreme Constitutional Court.  The SAC is supposed to determine whether government officials abide by the laws that define their authority.  Legislators are not usually considered government officials because they are not appointed.  The choice of the constituent assembly was, in addition, a sovereign act of the legislature and had been unconstrained by the constitution.  It was therefore peculiar that the administrative courts would intervene to overturn the one act the legislature had been elected to perform and to use the argument that it had not followed the appropriate procedure.  Nevertheless, in issuing that decision to SAC defused a possible crisis at least for a while that the actors appeared unable to resolve on their own. The SAC has also issued its own decisions including one in late June about whether the military police could arrest citizens.  The Minister of Justice had decided they could; the SAC decided they could not.  

The SCC has, in the latest iteration of the constitution promulgated by SCAF a special role.  In the event of conflict over any provision of the constitution that troubles SCAF the SCC is empowered to determine whether it should be adopted.  The SCC, in short, has now been given the role of “supra-constitutional” authority about which there was so much conflict in the fall of 2011 and which formed part of the debate over the Selmi document.  Nathan Brown, a scholar at George Washington University has written “Giving the constitutional court a binding veto over any constitutional provision with only the vaguest guidance on the standards to use is simply a constitutional obscenity.”   In effect the SCC is now responsible for writing the constitution although should the parliament return to session it may contest this responsibility.  

Constitutional obscenity or not, the decision by SCAF to give the SCC veto power over an as yet unwritten constitution reveals the degree to which there is as yet no clear victor in the ongoing conflict over power, and especially the power to determine the institutional framework of the Second Republic.  The power of the judiciary is partly a function of the strength of the conflicts they are called to adjudicate.  In periods when the executive—whether the British imperial authorities or the government under Nasser and later Sadat—comfortably dominated politics writing a constitution was straightforward.  Even the highly undemocratic and rapidly repudiated Sidqi constitution of 1930 that stripped away universal male suffrage was written with more certainly than the one presently under negotiation.  Where, as in Tunisia, the constituent assembly itself has legitimacy it can also write a constitution without external interference. 

Unfortunately no Egyptian Dickens has yet come forward to describe the legal system in the detail with which Bleak House describes the British Chancery Court.  It is the SAC that may ultimately be given the task of determining the consequences of the SCC’s ruling on parliament.  The ruling itself will stand but how it is implemented may still be the subject of litigation before the SAC.  As I write this SCAF has issued a vague statement subject to different interpretations.  SCAF continues to present itself as the defender of the rule of law and that President Morsi has positioned himself as a defender of popular sovereignty who has no intention of interfering with the rule of law is telling.

In a country whose most recent election showed it to be nearly divided in two, the two primary antagonists seem to be planning on provoking an intemperate but also unsuccessful attack on the rule of law from the other.   So far this has had the appearance of an elaborate nearly ritual performance whose rules may be clear to the protagonists but which are confusing to the rest of us.  It is probably a mistake to confuse what looks like choreography for collusion.  It is also, I think, a mistake to conflate the institutional and ideological conflicts between jurists and the judiciary on the one hand and parliamentarians and politicians on the other with corruption, intolerance, or moral turpitude.  There are sufficient ethical shortcomings and lack of political vision all around, but there are also profound institutional conflicts between counter-majoritarian judiciaries and legislators who soundly believe they represent the best prejudices of society. 

The electorate certainly and probably the larger population as well is both geographically divided and still uncertain of its political allegiances.  A glance at Schewe's map referenced above suggests how sharp has been the turn against the MB in some areas even if the reasons for the turn remain obscure.  The map also has an accidental but real resemblance to claims by SCAF and others earlier in the year that Egypt could be divided into four statelets.  While that idea is absurd on its face, the existence of some very strong tendencies toward regional difference beyond the traditional division into north and south are likely to become more rather than less important.

Constitutional scholars and the judiciary appear to be split over the whether Morsi can re-convene parliament and whether he has now (as some claim) violated his oath of office to uphold the constitution.  The answer will be neither legal nor intellectual but it may yet turn out to be judicial.  Or it may not be.  When the Chilean military moved against President Salvador Allende in 1973, it was ostensibly to defend the rule of law.

           

Round Two: A Quick Look at the Presidential Run-Off

            Just when the pace of events in Egypt appears to be slowing down, it speeds up again.  It’s been four days since the second round of the presidential election but the outcome has not been officially announced and it’s already fading into the distant past.  As things stand it appears that Muhammad Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, won the election with 52 percent of the votes cast.  The official results have not yet been announced by the Presidential Election Commission and there is concern about what its announcement will be.  Some wags have predicted that it will announce that former Prime Minister and Air Force General Ahmad Shafiq won with 90 percent of the vote.

            The Muslim Brothers, among others, have published figures based on the vote tallies at the governorate and district level where they were allowed to see the results.   So has the Ahram newspaper which I have used for writing this entry. The Carter Center has voiced reservations about the political context within which the election occurred but less so about its mechanics:

“These provisions helped to instil confidence in the final results by ensuring that agents had verifiable information regarding electoral results in their jurisdictions. In addition, Carter Center witnesses reported improved access to District General Committees, although domestic witnesses continued to face obstacles to meaningful observation there.  However, given the fact that there is no outside access to the final aggregation of results, it is essential that the PEC publish vote results broken down to the polling station level at the earliest possible instance on their website. In meetings with The Carter Center, the PEC has committed to do so within one week of the election.”

            Without more, lower-level results than we have and adequate complementary demographic statistics it is no more possible to understand what the presidential vote means than it was with the parliamentary vote.  We can guess about the transition from the first to the second round with some level of confidence. Generally speaking it seems plausible that Shafiq picked up Amr Moussa’s voters from the first round and that Morsi picked up some combination of votes from Abu al-Futouh and Hamdeen Sabbahi.  About 10 % more people voted in the run-off than in the first round but Morsi could not have picked up both Abu al-Futouh’s voters and Sabbahi’s or he would have won more decisively than he seems to have.   

For the moment the best I can think of to do is to look at briefly at some of the districts where Shafiq and Morsi won and compare those to the inaccurate impressions one has of the districts.  There were some surprises.  Without time to make an adequate assessment of instant and popular analyses, my sense is that most people think that, in general, Christians, the well-off, touristic areas, and those  who live in particular strongholds of the old regime voted for Shafiq whereas the lower middle class, the poor, and the devout Muslims voted for Mursi.   This is itself a reflection of a set of images long beloved in Egypt (and elsewhere) about the relationship of class to nationalism refracted through voting patterns.  The poor and the working class are most committed to revolution and patriotism the argument goes.  Unfortunately as generations of communists and nationalists painfully discovered, it ain’t necessarily so.

            Shafiq won a majority of the votes in Cairo (the city is the governorate) or 1.89 million out of 3.4 million cast.  As might be expected he did well in Shubra, Madinat Nasr, Ain Shams, and the silk-stocking neighborhood of Qasr al-Nil.  More surprisingly he also strongly carried the poorer neighborhoods of Darb al-Ahmar, El-Zawiya el-Hamra, and Sayyida Zainab.   El-Zawiya Al-Hamra returned parliamentary representatives from the MB as did much of the rest of Cairo.  So Shafiq’s victory in these districts is indicative of some change.  Economic distress is one possibility but another is that other patterns of religious mobilization among the Muslim population are beginning to occur which could include both Sufi orders or simply political choices reflecting a stronger orientation to the world of the Azhar (which did not institutionally support a candidate).

            Morsi did exceptionally well in the province of Fayoum with 593,000 votes out of 762,000 cast (just a note: I’ve rounded all the numbers to the nearest thousand).  Shafiq, on the the other hand, did exceptionally well in Minufia where he gained 947,000 out of 1.32 million votes cast.  Those who savor the irony of fate (a popular Egyptian Facebook meme these days) might notice that the only district in Minufia Morsi won was “Sadat.”  This outcome may be due to some character of the province (or what we might account for in the language of heavier statistical artillery, fixed effects).  It would be easy to make up a story about Minufia as a conservative bulwark of old regime remnants or benighted peasants in which case I suppose Fayoum would be where the revolutionary (or at least Islamist but less plausibly more Muslim) peasants live.  More likely there may be significant sociological or economic differences between these two areas that would be worth investigation.  What is clear is that rurality alone doesn’t seem to explain much.

            Other provinces suggest a very different kind of story, more like that of Cairo.  In Giza the two candidates split the vote, but Shafiq won Imbaba the lower-class district where religious violence flared in May 2011 and which had been an “Islamic emirate” in the 1990s.  The more upscale areas of Doqqi and Agouza went for Shafiq while in the more rural districts of Kerdasa and Hawamdieh Mursi won heavily.  Atfih, another site of violence against Christians, voted very strongly for Mursi.  In Alexandria, Amiriyah’s two districts overwhelmingly supported Morsi which could suggest either that inter-religious strife plays a mobilizing role for electoral politics in Egypt or that areas with a tendency for high levels of Islamist organization are also more likely to experience religious conflict.  Or, if taken in concert with the results of Imbaba, it may suggest that there are some important differences in religious conflict and its impact on various areas.  The conflict in Imbaba may have appeared to local residents to have had its roots in outside issues.  It developed out of a claim by a Muslim man not originally from the area that a church was holding his wife, who converted from Christianity, a virtual prisoner.  In Atfih and Amiriyah the conflicts appear to have originally been rooted in local antagonisms including property disputes.

            Shafiq did exceptionally well in the areas in and around the cities of Mansourah and Mit Ghamr in Daqahliyah, but the most surprising results appear to be in Gharbiya province.  Shafiq crushed Mursi in and around Tanta as well as in and around the famed working-class textile center of Mahallah al-Kubra and in Kafr al-Zayyat.  It is impossible to say how well Shafiq did with working-class voters but he clearly did very well in urban areas historically associated with strikes, Egypt’s left, and the industrial working class.   Comparisons with earlier elections this year cannot be very meaningful because the voting districts differ across elections.  For example, Gharbiya had two districts for the proportional representation contests for the parliament whereas the presidential results are reported on the basis the regular administrative divisions of the province.  It is nevertheless worth noting that Mursi received fewer votes than the combined total of the FJP and Salafi parties (totals are reported for both Nour and Construction and Development) which together received more than 50 percent of the province’s vote.  Together these parties received more than 650,000 votes in the parliamentary election in Gharbiya but Morsi was credited with 583,000 votes in the presidential contest. The provisional (but complete) returns for the presidential election in the province reported by Al-Ahram give Shafiq 993,000 votes out of 1.58 million cast.  These are clearly much larger than the totals for the Wafd and Election Bloc which won seats with something like 100,000 votes across the two districts that made up the province. 

This story was somewhat lightly repeated in one other area with similar associations, Shubra al-Khayma in Qalyubiya province on the northern outskirts of Cairo.  The equally strong textile center and old leftist stronghold of Kafr al-Dawar, on the other hand, gave 71,000 votes out of 106,000 to Mursi and the markaz Kafr al-Dawar also voted heavily for Mursi (103,000 votes out of 145,000 cast).  

            Much of the meaning of the vote remains hidden from our view given the paucity of information.   But it is, I think, apparent that the Egyptian electorate continues to change as it is presented with different challenges rather than being a monolithic bloc as may have appeared during the March 2011 referendum.  It also suggests that the use of the term “felool” (“remnants” of the old regime) will remain a powerful political tool.  But it may not be a good idea to base analysis of Egypt’s ongoing politics on the idea that the electoral base of politicians such as Shafiq, obviously himself a remnant of the old regime, is itself a stable, uniform, and minor feature of Egyptian political life. 

           

The Egyptian Military On the Offensive

   
    Egyptians have expressed anger, dismay and disdain for Field Marshall Muhammad Hussein Tantawi the former infantry commander who now heads the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.  But one thing he may learned during the Battle of the Chinese Farm between October 15 and October 17 1973 was the importance of exploiting even the smallest gaps between enemy lines and then mercilessly pursuing a defeated foe even at the risk of massive losses.  That was, after all, what happened to the Sixteenth Infantry Brigade when Tantawi was a Lieutenant-Colonel facing Ariel Sharon’s assault against the Egyptian Third Army.  In the last two weeks the Supreme Council of the publication of an amended version of the Constitutional Declaration, SCAF has completed the rout of its opposition.  Those who were convinced there was no revolution in Egypt might be well advised to consider that SCAF, at any rate, was not in agreement. 
    During the first six months of 2011 SCAF moved tentatively as popular mobilization spilled into the streets and many of the institutions of governance ceased to function.  By the end of the summer of 2011, however, the generals appear to have felt more sure of their position and in the months since late last summer they have responded more forcefully to challenges to their authority—whether in street fighting, massive demonstrations, or assertions of legislative sovereignty.  In the last month they have moved quickly and decisively whenever opportunities presented themselves.   Whether they will be able to transform tactical success into strategically successful government authority is less clear.
    Many observers, from Muhammad el-Baradei to Hossam Bahgat, have noted that Egypt is now a military dictatorship in which the president’s powers are sharply diminished, parliament has been dissolved, and SCAF has been written solidly into the constitution.  There are several peculiar features of the new constitution.  One is the prominent role accorded to the Supreme Constitutional Court both as representative of the nation and as an institution of influence.  Another is the care to preserve the existing formal structure of the government even as the relative powers of the state are radically transformed.  And the third is the peculiar role the Supreme Constitutional Court is to play in the months ahead.
    This is not the place for a critique of the political choices of the Muslim Brothers over the last year and a half, although such critiques are being made in Egypt.  But already in early May the former judge and Islamist intellectual, Tariq al-Bishri, pointed out in a article for the daily Shorouq what he called two of their crucial mistakes.    Al-Bishri, historically an ally of the MB, chided them for an unwillingness to recognize the need to move rapidly ahead with the primary task the old constitutional declaration entrusted to them:  establishing a constitutional commission.  They did not, he wrote, recognize the need to broaden their support rather than to gain control of the commission for themselves.  He also noted that the MB had antagonized the Supreme Constitutional Court by allowing a deputy to propose a law that would have changed the composition of the court and also stripped legislation passed by a super-majority from its jurisdiction for review.   Given the response by several prominent members of the Egyptian legal community, it is clear that the SCC saw this as the opening salvo in an attempt to destroy the court, its independence, and the rule of law.  Withdrawing the bill is unlikely to have appeased the court.  It is more likely to have convinced its members (if they needed further convincing) that the MB-dominated legislature was a continuing threat to the institution, its members, and the values they professed.
    When the Supreme Court was asked to rule on the constitutionality of the law governing the parliamentary elections, they overturned the portion governing the third elected as individuals while leaving the two-thirds elected on party lists intact.  They also dissolved parliament, a step they had taken in other electoral challenges during the Mubarak era, but which was certainly easier now. Under SCAF’s constitutional declaration the Egyptian parliament no longer can decide on the seating of its own members.   With stunning speed, Marshall Tantawi had the parliamentary chambers locked and posted military guards outside the building to physically prevent parliamentarians from assembling.  The legislature which, alone of the three branches of government,  could claim to represent the public both by function and by election had ceased to exist.  The Supreme Constitutional Court, with the backing of SCAF, had in effect offered itself as the embodiment of the rule of law and had staked its claim that the rule of law trumped the erratic claims of representative democracy. 
    Egypt hardly had time to adjust to the dissolution of parliament before the run-off presidential election began in which MB leader Muhammad Morsi faced former prime minister and air force general Ahmad Shafiq.  Participation in the second round was not much higher than in the first round and revealed a country still deeply split.  Given the resounding victory of the Islamist parties in the parliament elections and their claim to have been the winners in the March 2011 parliamentary referendum which passed with 77% of the vote, the outcome of the presidential election is extremely close.
    While the eyes of most Egyptians were fixed on the election, SCAF took the opportunity to issue amendments and additions to the constitutional declaration of 2011.  SCAF obviously intended to allow the presidential election to proceed freely because they stripped the office of much of the power it had held under the 1971 constitution and the earlier constitutional declaration.  They transferred legislative power to their own hands until a new parliament is elected which includes the power to name a committee to write the constitution.  They have effectively eliminated the president’s authority over the military, including the decision to declare war.  Having already decreed that the military police can act with civil authority, they have added to the constitution the possibility of making the military directly responsible for public order.
These elements provide the constitutional basis for a military dictatorship in which, at least for the time being, the military authority remains wholly separate from (but by no means subordinate to) civilian authority.  SCAF has, in the past two weeks, moved very rapidly to consolidate a new form of government even as the primary organized opposition, the MB, appears to be confused and uncertain about what steps to take next.   They have issued statements contesting the dissolution of parliament, demanding that the constitutional committee chosen by the dissolved parliament meet, and they have continued to contest the election.  The problem, however, as both Amnon Reshef and Hussein Tantawi will tell them from the experience at the Chinese Farm, is that declarations do not win battles.  And at this point, with their narrow victory at the polls over the candidate of the old order bolstered by a significant number of voters who actively dislike them, the MB do not have the troops or the audacity to press forward.
One peculiar feature of the constitutional declaration is the role it accords to the Supreme Constitutional Court.  The president was to have taken the oath of office before parliament which is, in most democratic republics, the representative of the nation.  The newly elected Egyptian president will, in the absence of a parliament, be sworn in before the SCC which therefore becomes a kind of symbol of the nation although not its actual representative.  In addition the new declaration empowers a select group of Egyptians (the president of the republic, the president of SCAF, the Prime Minister, a high judicial official, or 20 percent of the constitutional committee) to object to portions of the constitution as it is being written.  These objections will be brought to the SCC which will make a final decision about whether they accord with the objectives of the revolution.  This is a remarkable grant of constitution-making (and not just interpretive) authority to the SCC.  It is, in a sense, a reversal  and repudiation of the approach taken by the MB and their Salafi allies in the legislature when they claimed that the power of democratic majority gave them the unrestricted power to write a constitution.
Europe’s liberal autocracies of the late 19th century were premised on the supremacy of a written constitution and primarily organized through administrative law.  Often referred to as a Rechtsstaat in which both democracy and substantive notions of justice were subordinated to the application of a civil code through a bureaucratic state it was widely perceived as the basis for economic growth and ultimate political participation.  The SCC and SCAF have, for the moment, not only vanquished the Islamist movements which had opened themselves up to assault but they have positioned themselves jointly at the heart of whatever political regime governs Egypt in the immediate future.   They have also vanquished the institution, the legislature, which posed the most dangerous challenge to the idea of social order they prefer and they have transformed the presidency into a modest position.
For the short-term this is a profound check on popular participation in Egyptian political life.  What is ironic, however, is that the military has now accomplished what the MB could not have imagined: limiting the power of the presidency.   Whether by then, the Supreme Constitutional Court which is clearly a junior partner in the emerging system of government in Egypt, retains the popular respect so necessary for the judicial branch to function is anybody’s guess.

The Missing Ikhwan and An Electorate Split in Three

    The first round of the Egyptian presidential election, like every other election over the past year and a half and unlike those over the previous 60 years, brought its own surprises.  The usually unreliable polls were again wrong as were most of the pundits (both Egyptian and foreign).  In first place was Muhammad Morsy, the second-choice candidate of the Muslim Brother’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice party. Close by in second place was deposed President Hosny Mubarak’s last prime minister, the former air force general Ahmad Shafiq.  The two candidates who had widely been presumed frontrunners, the liberal Islamist Abd al-Munim Abu al-Futouh and Mubarak’s former foreign minister and head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, took fourth and distant fifth places respectively.  The surprisingly strong third place candidate, Hamdeen Sabbahi, had been written off by most observers and many activists as too secular, too nationalist, and too Nasserist to be anything but a has-been.  A shift of a tad more than 3% of the vote would have put him in the final round with Morsy. 

    Most Egyptians probably consider the contest between Morsy and Shafiq an apocalyptic scenario although for very different reasons.  The MB see events since January 2011 as a successful revolution that has brought them, for the first time in their history, to the power that their popular support warrants.  They fear that President Shafiq would restore the old order, not only stripping the MB of its newfound power and influence, but hunting down its leaders for trial and jail. For them this is a moment in which their existential fears and hopes are on the line.  So too for many of Shafiq’s supporters who saw the revolution as an overly zealous assault on a stable and increasingly wealthy society that has long since exceeded any reasonable bounds.  They fear that a Morsy presidency would allow the Muslim Brothers to combine their control of parliament with the power of the executive to dominate the country as did the old regime but with the additional, revolutionary intent of enforcing their particular version of Islamic law and politics.  Supporters of the losing candidates in large measure see the revolutionary events of 2011 as an incomplete and failing endeavor to change Egyptian politics profoundly. For them no matter which candidate wins, the hope of a more open, socially just, and truly pluralist order will be lost in a renewed dictatorship. The perceived stakes of this election are, therefore, exceptionally high.

    While it often has appeared that Egypt was divided into revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps, this election indicates there are at least three major groups in the country:  the Islamists centered in the MB, partisans of law and the old order, and supporters of a populist social-welfare state broadly construed.  Each seems to be able to regularly command about a third of the electorate and there is no reason to believe that any of them will be leaving the scene any time soon.

    After a year in which the Islamist movements and especially the Muslim Brothers, appeared to have dominated politics, the presidential election revealed a very different political landscape to the complete dismay of many Egyptians.  The election campaign and even more the pre-campaign were, as most of the last 18 months have been, an emotional roller coaster.  The first-choice candidate of the Muslim Brothers, the deputy general guide Khairat Shater, was disqualified because he had been convicted (on trumped-up charges) of a felony fewer than 5 years before the election.  A week after the first round of the presidential election the MB-dominated parliament finally proposed a law granting political amnesty to those convicted of political crimes under the Mubarak era.  Had they moved more expeditiously Shater could have run as could Ayman Nour, who had challenged Mubarak in 2005 and served four years in prison for his temerity.  The presidential commission also disqualified the Salafi candidate, Hazem Salah Abou-Ismail who violated a constitutional requirement that no candidate for president have parents with non-Egyptian citizenship.   Abou-Ismail himself had supported a yes vote in the constitutional referendum which made that a binding condition despite knowing that  his mother had become an American.  He knew then, as when he proposed running for the presidency, that he was in complete violation of the constitutional provision which, unlike the abrogation of the political rights of felons, could not be changed by an act of parliament.

    It is no small irony that Abou-Ismail was disqualified for having a parent who became an American at the end of her life.  So, too, would any Egyptian married to a foreigner whereas Morsy can be president despite having children who are US citizens because they were born here while he attended graduate school and worked as a professor in the California State university system. The somewhat xenophobic idea that the presidency must be an office reserved for pure Egyptians, untainted by intimate connections with foreign countries in their childhood or their marital bed, runs headlong into the reality that many professional and middle-class Egyptians have a variety of relationships with the United States, European countries, or the rest of the Arab world. 

    Many polls were conducted in the weeks before the election and the invariably showed Morsy winning less than 10% of the vote while bestowing the leading positions on Moussa and Abou al-Futouh.  The two conducted the first open debate between presidential candidates in Arab history during which they traded barbed comments and directly insulting questions.  Morsy and Shafiq, meanwhile, the two least charismatic figures in the race, were ignored or (when remembered) mocked.  By the end of the campaign, even English speakers knew that Morsy was the Brotherhood’s “spare tire” without having to reflect much on the level of preparation and discipline required thereby.  The MB’s decision to field a presidential candidate after months of denying that they would remains something of a mystery but one obvious reality is that they had come to realize that almost any president other than one of their own would rapidly move to restrict their power.  Another irony of contemporary Egyptian politics, frequently noted by Abou al-Futouh (himself a former member of their inner leadership) is that the MB does not, strictly speaking, have legal status.  Rather like the foreign NGOs whose staff were charged with criminal behavior in the winter, the MB is not a registered organization and neither its finances, elections, nor internal organization are subject to public review or government regulation.  Unlike the NGOs, however, the MB is a powerful political and social force but, in the wake of the revolution, it could be transformed by a president bent on making it at once legal and weakened.  This Abou al-Futouh explicitly promised to do.

    Believing, as did most observers (including me had I been asked), that the second round would be a battle between Abou al-Futouh, representing the hopes of the revolution, and Moussa, representing the fears of the feloul (the conservatives and remnants of the old regime), many activists and members of the political elite spent weeks debating whether it made more strategic sense to back Abu al-Futouh from the beginning or wait.  The best strategic thinking was that Moussa would come in first, that Sabbahi would pull votes away from Abou al-Futouh leaving Morsy to sneak into the second round.  The scenarios widely (and at times wildly) considered were many but usually included a run-off between Abou al-Futouh and Morsy which would insure some form of Islamist domination of the presidency or between Abou al-Futouh and Moussa in which Egyptians would have to decide whether to back the most liberal of the Islamists or the most conservative of the liberals.  The country, everybody knew, was dividing into two camps: the revolution and the counter-revolution of the generals.

    Although the second and final round of the election will necessarily require a division of Egypt into two camps, the arithmetic of the first suggests that some surprising governing coalitions are possible.  The top five candidates received about 98% of the vote so we can ignore the remaining eight.  The first two, obvious coalitions, represent the hopes of the MB and the old regime respectively.  Morsy hopes he can combine Abu al-Futouh’s 17.5% of the vote with his own 25% of the vote and half of Sabbahi’s vote and govern through what he and his supporters will deem a revolutionary Islamic coalition.  This assumes, of course, that all or almost all of Abu al-Futouh’s supporters prefer an Islamic candidate and that many of Sabbahi’s voters will not cast ballots for a former Mubarak official.  Shafiq, on the contrary, assumes that he can combine his 23% of the vote with Moussa’s 11% and win a significant portion of Sabbahi’s voters who have already demonstrated that they will not vote for the MB.  There is also every reason to believe that Shafiq will benefit more from abstentions than the MB because abstainers are more likely to be found among dismayed supporters of Abu al-Futouh and Sabbahi than among supporters of Moussa and Shafiq for whom this election poses an existential challenge.  No longer available but tantalizing was a different coalition that earlier seemed impossible.  Had, for example, Sabbahi and Abu al-Futouh run as a presidential/vice presidential ticket together there is every reason now to believe that Sabbahi would have gained some 30% of the vote and entered the run-off with Morsy with the near certainty that supporters of Moussa and Shafiq (a combined 35% of the vote)  would vote for any opponent of the MB. 

    A last coalition of sorts that nobody talks about but obviously exists at least in theory is a “coalition of order” between the MB, Shafiq and Moussa supporters.  If the assumption that guides the “Islamic revolutionary” coalition is that the MB were part of the revolution, there is also the possibility that they now speak for a large group of Egyptians for whom the revolution has gone far enough and who want a return to “normalcy.”  Between Shafiq who believes the revolution has gone too far and the MB who believe they have brought it just far enough there is more room for political compromise than there would have been between either of these camps and Sabbahi.  A Shafiq presidency with significant MB participation in the government could easily claim to represent some 60% of Egyptians.  Shafiq would be unlikely to give the MB the socalled ministries of sovereignty but he might be quite willing to entrust them with several of the social ministries. 

    While any dreams of a Sabbahy-Abu al-Futouh ticket are now spilt milk they do suggest a profound problem with the Egypt’s oppositional political leadership:  a seeming inability to put personal or partisan advantage aside which ultimately cripples their ability to accomplish their own goals.  Given that there was no prior electoral experience to suggest that Sabbahy had significant support that outweighed that of Abu al-Futouh their difficulty in reaching a common candidacy is understandable. It will nevertheless weigh heavily on the country’s future and it will weigh even more heavily if they and their followers cannot establish any ongoing institutional presence.

    Going forward the question is which coalition—particularly the revolutionary Islamic one or the stability one—will be victorious in the presidential race.  Both have significant support among the Egyptian population but neither has sufficient support to win alone.  The votes of the third (I prefer not to think of it as centrist or moderate, two words that have bedeviled and confused discussions of Egyptian politics for more than a decade) coalition will decide the outcome.  Supporters of Sabbahy and Abu al-Futouh comprise nearly 40% of Egypt’s voters in the first round (or about 16% of all voters since 60% of Egypt’s voters did not come to the polls.  We know very little about who they are or where they are physically other than at the almost useless level of the governorate.

    The result is sufficiently surprising that many people suspect fraud but no one can quite say how it occurred.  Claims of fraud and the occasional mention that turnout was much lighter than in the parliamentary rounds masks one of the most important features of the first presidential round:  the collapse of the MB/FJP vote due both to abstentions and shifts.

    One of the surprising and so far unasked questions in the election is what happened to the significant number of MB and Salafi (primarily Nour) voters who cast ballots in the parliamentary elections but were AWOL last week.  Clearly millions of supporters of the MB in local elections did not cast votes for the presidency.  The Freedom and Justice party, headed by Morsy, collected more than 10 million votes (37.5%) in the parliamentary elections but Morsy himself won about 5.5 million (25 %).  Some 7.5 million Egyptians (28%) voted for the Salafi Nour party in the fall, but even if you make the absurd assumption that all of Abu al-Futouh’s vote came from them why did he get only 4 million votes (18 %)?  Clearly some of the MB and Salafi voters (who are of course not themselves members of the MB or necessarily Salafis) voted for Sabbahi or Moussa but many must have not cast ballots.  Had Morsy received the same votes that went to the FJP (which he heads) and half the votes cast for the Nour party, he would nearly have won the presidency on the first round.  He would have won nearly 13 million votes out of 29 million (45 %) cast instead of 5.5 million out of 22 million.  There was significant shock about the 586,000 votes (56 % of the those) cast for General Shafiq in the province of Minoufia, but Minoufia looks like an example of something else entirely.  Nearly 1.2 million voters there went to the polls for the FJP alone in the two proportional list constituencies that made up the province for the parliamentary elections. This is more than the total number of votes cast in the province's presidential election.  Morsy got about 200,000 votes; so if half the remaining million who voted FJP in the winter had gone back to the polls for the party’s leader in the spring he would have handily defeated Shafiq. 

Not quite as puzzling but far from obvious is where exactly Shafiq’s and Moussa’s 7.5 million votes (35 %) came from.   The vote for former NDP parties in the parliament election was just under 2 million (about 7 %).  If you make the assumption that the combined five million parliamentary New Wafd and Egyptian Bloc (18 %)  voters went for either Moussa or Shafiq then you’re in the ballpark.  This is in essence the claim that many supporters and members of the MB and the Salafi movements make:  the electoral base of these parties was Christian and those voters cast their presidential ballots for Shafiq.  Plausible as it may appear this assumption is not realistic.

    The claim that Shafiq’s victory was due to Christians is not borne out by the numbers.  As political commentators  and activists have pointed out, Shafiq’s vote came primarily from overwhelmingly Muslim governorates such as Minufiya where he won nearly 600,000 votes (about 11% of his total) and Sharqiya where he won more than 625,000 votes (about 12 %).   News accounts also suggest that in wide sections of the Delta voters turned on the MB, but again the crucial issue here is the absent vote for the FJP rather than the vote for Shafiq.  Had Shafiq won 5.5 million votes out of nearly 30 million (about 19%) his second-place showing would be less remarkable.

    It is nevertheless certain that few if any Christians voted for (or will vote for) Morsy.  Because Morsy has been reported as saying Christians who voted for Shafiq are not really Egyptians the claim that they are the base of the old regimes attempt to regain power is troubling for many reasons.  It is incendiary and suggests that the MB/FJP will use sectarian language to motivate supporters to the polls as they did during the March 2011 referendum and the parliamentary votes.  It also reveals the profound difficulty the MB and the Islamist trend more generally have with understanding why Christians and many Muslims as well distrust them.  That the Christians, as a minority facing discrimination and prejudice, might have their own legitimate interests in a truly plural and secular (in the American not the French meaning of the term) polity is clearly foreign to the MB.  It is this unwillingness to recognize the limits on its power as a majority that makes so many Egyptians—Christian and Muslims—fearful of the MB. 

    The electoral campaign is important because it will bring to the executive office a candidate committed to the elimination of the losing side from public life (though not necessarily to their physical liquidation).  The campaign also looks to be important because it will, almost necessarily, be a campaign that exacerbates the country’s already deep divisions over the revolution, its meaning, and the long-term value of the changes it has already wrought. 

    What applies to the MB applies as well to Shafiq who is campaigning on a promise to end, if not reverse, the revolutionary events of the last year.  Both candidates appear unable to recognize that the Egyptian public is profoundly divided.  The revolutionary solution to wipe out the counter-revolution (or feloul) broadly defined and the counter-revolutionary solution to eliminate the revolution broadly defined will thwart any possibility of creating a democratic state in a plural society.  It appears, moreover, that at least a third of the country understands this all too well and voted accordingly.  Continued calls, especially by the losing candidates in the presidential race, for a presidential council are a recognition of this reality.  Unfortunately this proposal to solve deep political divisions through an administrative improvisation, are too late, too little, and unrealistic.  So, too, are attempts to resolve the dilemma through demands for guarantees from the two candidates and their respective supporters.  The renewal of demonstrations in the public squares of Egypt as I write this, however, suggests that the Egyptian people have not yet said their last word to those political elites who refuse to recognize that a return to authoritarianism, whether of the minority or a presumed electoral majority, is no longer a solution.