How the Muslim Brotherhood lost Egypt
By Edmund Blair, Paul Taylor and Tom Perry
CAIRO |
CAIRO (Reuters) - When Egyptians poured onto the streets in their millions to demand the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, few thought they would return two years later demonstrating for the overthrow of the man they elected to replace him.The stunning fall from power of President Mohamed Mursi, and the Muslim Brotherhood which backed him, has upended politics in the volatile Middle East for a second time after the Arab Spring uprisings toppled veteran autocrats.
Some of the principal causes were highlighted a month before the army intervened to remove Mursi, when two of Egypt's most senior power brokers met for a private dinner at the home of liberal politician Ayman Nour on the island of Zamalek, a lush bourgeois oasis in the midst of Cairo's seething megalopolis. It was seen by some as a last attempt to avert a showdown.
The two power brokers were Amr Moussa, 76, a long-time foreign minister under Mubarak and now a secular nationalist politician, and Khairat El-Shater, 63, the Brotherhood's deputy leader and most influential strategist and financier. Moussa suggested that to avoid confrontation, Mursi should heed opposition demands, including a change of government.
"He (Shater) acknowledged what I said about the bad management of Egyptian affairs under their government and that there is a problem," Moussa told Reuters. "He was talking carefully and listening attentively."
Shater, a thick-set grizzly bear of a man who is now in detention and cannot tell his side of events, replied that the government's problems were due to the "non-cooperation of the ‘deep state'" - the entrenched interests in the army, the security services, some of the judiciary and the bureaucracy, according to Moussa's account.
"The message that I got after one hour was that OK, he would discuss with me, agree with some of my arguments, disagree with the rest, but they were not in the mood of changing," Moussa said. Nour gave a similar account, saying Shater did not budge. But he added that the talks might have started a process of political compromise had they not been exposed in the media.
"(Shater) is a normal person and his appearance does not do him justice. His appearance gives the impression of mysteriousness and ruthlessness, but he is well-mannered and gentle," Nour said.
The dinner on a terrace around the swimming pool of Nour's 8th-floor duplex apartment was cut short when journalists got wind of the meeting. Moussa left convinced that the Brotherhood were over-confident, incompetent in government and had poor intelligence on what was brewing in the streets and the barracks.
Yet many Egyptian and foreign observers still expected the tightly knit Islamist movement, hardened by decades of repression, to dominate Egypt and the region for a prolonged period, after 60 years of rule by army-backed strongmen. Instead, Mursi was bundled out of office and into military detention on July 3 amid huge anti-government protests, barely a year after he became the first democratically elected leader of the Arab world's most populous nation.
Mursi's failure sends a powerful message: winning an election is not sufficient to govern. Post-Mubarak rulers need the acquiescence of the security establishment and of the population at large. Upset either and your position is not secure.
Egypt's Islamists may draw the bitter lesson that the "deep state" will not let them wield real power, even with a democratic mandate. This report, compiled from interviews with senior Muslim Brotherhood and secular politicians, youth activists, military officers and diplomats, examines four turning points on Egypt's revolutionary road: the Brotherhood's decision to seek the presidency; the way Mursi pushed through the constitution; the failures of the secular opposition; and the military's decision to step in.
Mursi and some senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders, who have been held incommunicado since the coup, could not be reached for comment.
With the Brotherhood angrily resisting its eviction from power, the prospects of Egypt's second transition to democracy being smoother than the first look slight. This time, the army says it does not wish to exercise power directly as it did in 2011-12 after Mubarak's fall. But few doubt that armed forces commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who planned Mursi's overthrow and has since been promoted to deputy prime minister as well as minister of defense, is the man now in control.
TO RUN OR NOT TO RUN?
In the immediate aftermath of Mubarak's overthrow, the Brotherhood had no intention of ruling. It reassured secular Egyptians and the army by promising publicly not to seek the presidency or an outright parliamentary majority. The rest of the article can be found here
