Ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi denounces his removal from power in a video which appeared briefly on a social media website.
President Mohammed Morsi’s fiercest detractors may be dancing in the streets of Cairo but Egyptians have little cause to celebrate. After a year of chaotic democracy the Arab world’s largest nation is back under military control, its first freely elected president roughly deposed, its Arab Spring gains sadly wasted.
Make no mistake. This was a military coup, if one backed by popular demand, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government should treat it as such. This is the second time in 2 1/2 years that the army has deposed a president and it casts a dark shadow over the nation of 80 million. It is a betrayal of the revolution.
The best that can be hoped for is that Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s seizure of power to ensure “confidence and stability” is a brief one. Egyptians did not shake off Hosni Mubarak and six decades of corrupt military-backed rule for this. The generals have no legitimacy dictating Egypt’s future.
They have named Chief Justice Adli Mansour, head of the Supreme Constitutional Court, to replace Morsi as interim president, and will appoint a new government that will be less Islamist and more liberal and secular than the electorate wanted. They have suspended the popularly ratified constitution. And they promise early presidential and parliamentary elections. They claim to want to reboot Egypt’s revolution, after a false start. Democrats can only hope.
Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood are the architects of this calamity, of course, and the massive protests in Cairo and other cities clamouring for his resignation reflect the degree of popular frustration with Islamist cronyism and ineptness. His brief and poisonously divisive tenure has been a train wreck.
After narrowly winning the presidency on the Brotherhood ticket he failed utterly to reach out to Egypt’s millions of liberals and secularists, now loosely grouped under Mohamed ElBaradei’s National Salvation Front banner. Rather than rise to the challenge of serving as president for all Egyptians, championing pluralism and minority rights, Morsi sought to maximize his own powers, tried to put himself above the law, placed Brotherhood cronies in the top jobs, and let fellow Islamists craft the new constitution.
Critics also fault him, with reason, for trying to consolidate Brotherhood power while investment and tourism fled, costing Egypt $20 billion in lost foreign exchange. On his watch joblessness and hunger soared, and food and fuel shortages and crime ravaged the nation. It has been a bad year.
Tragically for Egyptian democracy, Morsi’s final desperate offers — to name a new prime minister acceptable to the opposition, fresh elections, constitutional changes — came too late to save his presidency, so corroded was the public faith in his stewardship.
Ultimately, Gen. el-Sissi deposed him for failing to “meet the demands of the people” that he abandon the presidency three years early and hold new elections.
But for all his ruinous flaws Morsi was Egypt’s democratically elected leader, and his sidelining by the military and elevation of those who lost the election is nothing to cheer about. It sets a ghastly precedent. It subverts the Arab Spring’s most important gain: rule by the people. It makes a mockery of Egypt’s historic election just a year ago. It will radicalize some Islamists into concluding that democracy doesn’t work. Far from healing Egypt’s religious, ideological and social divisions, this coup risks exacerbating them.
Egypt’s liberals, moderate Islamists and secularists would have been truer to the Arab Spring revolution had they used Morsi’s tenure to forge themselves into a genuine political opposition, and given the Brotherhood more of a run in the next elections. Instead they whistled in the generals to rid them of a troublesome president. Once the euphoria dies down they may come to rue the day.