Between Theocracy and Democracy: Egypt in Transition*

Most of us would probably prefer to see their elected leaders sit out their term or being ousted in formally correct ways. That was my first reaction to what happened in Egypt last week. We have also, most of us, at times been governed by useless leaders who should never have been elected. But most industrialized governing systems have survived somehow intact, and so have we, their citizens. A seasoned democracy like, say, France, has not succumbed under its many incompetent presidents. Other countries have had their fair share of the same. That experience is part of what democracy is all about, which makes the opposition to the coup in Egypt easy to understand. 

To me, the intervention seemed hasty. At the same time, it must be recognized that Egypt, to say the least, is not a sturdy democracy. Indeed, as democracies go, Egypt is a momentously fragile case. But that is perhaps also another reason why a coup should be a last resort. What keeps Western critique in the aftermath from being more harsh is, I suspect, the fact that the intervention was (evidently) forewarned to the West and actively sought and supported by respected Egyptian leaders like Mohammad El Baradei. One would have liked to see him chosen under more legitimate circumstances.

Furthermore, if the ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi had had a hum of what he was into from the day he was elected, he might have fared better, maybe even still have been in power. While the challenges would perhaps have been too great for any mortal human, this man came to his office without any outstanding record or relevant experience to build on, whether in politics or administration. Morsi's one outstanding advantage was that he had been elected by more than half the electorate. He clung to that single qualification with such tenacity that it apparently kept him from looking squarely at the problems he had in front of him. He seems not to have listened to advice from outside his own narrow Brotherhood circle. He was deeply mistrustful of the remaining officials from Mubarak's days, and they were many in that huge administration of Egypt's governance - not just military and police, but judges and other educated officials who ran the state and kept it from collapsing - sort of. Even at the very low levels of the administration Morsi appears to have had a hard time getting accepted. They later turned out to be dead set against his rule in any case (see below). While several attempts were made by top opposition people during June to get him to make a move to stabilize the situation, apparently he would not take that route. He was the elected president, and he would decide, on his own.

From the start there had been two huge complexities of widely differing character facing Mr. Morsi - on the one hand the enormous problems of Egyptian daily life (bread, water, electricity etc); on the other, the deep political divisions of the population that had elected him. Only by making some headway on solving the first and at the same time bridge-building to overcome the second, could he have avoided the backlash that came with the military coup / intervention which put him out of office after just a year.

Morsi opted for solving his political survival the only way he saw how - by pandering to the islamist party and its ideological allies that had put him into power. That was a dangerous road to take, because it nourished the natural expectations of his religious brethren. For a democratically elected religious movement it is very tempting to make its victory permanent. A minor constitutional change would see to that. Egypt was not yet a theocracy, but the danger was clearly there. That anticipation, in turn, also triggered the military intervention.

Whoever now takes over faces the same challenges as Mr. Morsi did from his entry in 2012 to his exit a year later. The lack of bread, clean water and predictable government for 80 million people must come before the issues of sharia law. The religious concerns of Egyptians (and Tunisians, Libyans, Syrians, ...) must be set aside, simply put. 

Solving practical issues will be the only way to contain the frustrations repeatedly vented in the religious fury of Egyptians upon the Copts and other minority sects. And it will be the only way to make Egypt and the Middle East a governable part of the wider world of the 21st century.

ADDENDUM

The New York Times this morning (July 10) brought the story of the 'miraculous' recovery of the Egyptian system for delivery of gasoline and electricity, just in time for the opening of Ramadan. Police were suddenly patrolling in the streets after months of being nearly invisible. Suddenly the shortages were gone, overnight.

This is more indicative of a conspiracy against Mr. Morsi while he was still in power, than a demonstration of his incompetence, says one of the Egyptians interviewed by the NYT. I agree. The sudden correction of systemic failures makes the military intervention last week even more obviously a coup, indeed, the culmination of a months-long subversive campaign against the elected leadership. The Egyptian system has shown itself open to a degree of manipulation that is instructive to all of us. It also will bring self-criticism to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies for their naive belief in a democratic system. So much the worse for the hopes of some degree of democracy in Egypt.

Egyptian governance, for which democracy was a gamble from the start in 2011, is now on its way to making a more fundamental choice: abandoning the Islamic democracy of 2012 as an experiment which could not deliver on basic needs - and angle instead for a pragmatic kind of limited democracy, which delivers the goods, but doesn't respond to the ideological demands of the Islamist part of the population.

Barring a future descent into chaos and civil war of the Syrian kind, and having gone through the experience of the last two years, Egypt now seems much less likely than before to become anything resembling a Western liberal system. What is needed is not a system of the kind that prioritizes political participation, but one that favors the production of real change.

*(Events in Egypts have obviously moved on later, back to another military dictatorship.)