Egypt’s structural illiberalism
How a weak party system undermines participatory politics
Strong and robust political parties are key tools for ensuring state political development. In granting a structure to political participation, its organization, and its expansion, political parties help ensure the overall stability of a liberal democratic state.1 Regrettably, however, this is not the case in Egypt, where weak institutions have considerably hampered democratic consolidation. In particular, the Egyptian legislative assembly, as the site for the cultivation of laws regulating political party formation, has proven complicit in outright enfeebling Egyptian political institutions rather than emboldening them. Rather than being an outlet for civilian voices, political parties in Egypt instead remain deeply circumscribed, and ultimately ineffectual. Put another way, despite the key role of a multiparty system in the preservation of a liberal democratic political order, the dysfunctional nature of party politics in Egypt has instead promoted an illiberal political order, enshrined and perpetuated at a systemic level. This chapter thus analyzes the structural illiberalism of Egyptian politics, by paying close attention to the weakness of the Egyptian political party system. In so doing, it will elucidate how the failure of political mobilization in Egypt to make significant gains is largely grounded in the systemic failure of party politics as a mouthpiece for the political aspirations of the Egyptian masses.
Throughout its modern history, Egypt has proven largely incapable of providing a meaningful outlet to political opposition. Since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 by Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) and the Free Officers Movement, the Egyptian state was ushered in as a secular nationalist republic. Yet despite the demands on a bona fide republican government to vest power in the governed through elected representatives, the Egyptian republic from its inception gave rise to a series of structural conditions that both undermined and circumscribed political contestation.
The first such juncture dovetailed with the rise of Nasser, and the subsequent transformation of Egypt from a monarchy to a revolutionary government. To fulfill the ambitions of the revolution he inaugurated, Nasser decided it was necessary to disband all political parties by executive decree, both to undermine the stronghold of the old elites and to eliminate any vestiges of political opposition to his movement.2 Accordingly, in 1957 Nasser established the National Union (Al-Ittihad al-Qawmi, or NU), a political organization tasked with mobilizing the Egyptian masses without allowing for the creation of an opposition. Adopting a Communist party model, Nasser’s NU was a hierarchical organization in which authority and political directives would be administered in a top-down fashion.3 Through the NU, Nasser was able to consolidate both his political and institutional influence, resulting in hegemonic control of the body politic while structurally eliminating potential opposition.
In 1962, Nasser reconstituted the NU, a non-party political organization, into the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), as the country’s sole political party. Established in large part as an attempt to unify the country after Egypt’s short-lived political union with Syria (the United Arab Republic, or UAR) had prematurely collapsed. However, owing to its being a product of Nasser’s top-down model of political hegemony, the ASU proved unable to effectively mobilize the Egyptian masses into party politics. Seeking to control the masses rather than incorporate them in the political process, the ASU could not galvanize Egyptians to meaningfully engage in participatory politics.
The second major political juncture transpired under the administration of President Anwar Sadat (d. 1981). Having been appointed general secretary of the NU under Nasser, Sadat was no doubt well vested in its successor organization the ASU by the time he assumed the presidency. However, in contradistinction to his predecessor, Sadat quickly distanced himself from the staunch socialist roots that had undergirded the ASU, embarking instead on a policy of open-door economic liberalization (al-Infitah).4 To consolidate his own power, Sadat granted the Egyptian parliament stewardship over the organization, which carried the dual benefit of emphasizing his commitment to liberal reform, while simultaneously undermining the effectiveness of the ASU as a putative rival. The ASU subsequently gave rise to three competing political platforms – left, center, and right – which by 1978 were established as bona fide independent political parties, leading to the disbanding of the ASU.5 Only one of these parties, however, maintained significant currency in Egyptian political life. The National Democratic Party (NDP), the party formed of the centrist wing of the ASU, emerged as disproportionately the most powerful of the three newly established political parties. Moreover, under Sadat, the NDP protected the interests of the elites who benefited from his open-door economic policy, to the detriment of the Egyptian masses that had been politically marginalized for a generation. Thus, participatory politics under Sadat remained deeply underdeveloped.
President Sadat’s assassination in 1981, and his succession by President Hosni Mubarak, gave rise to the third major juncture in Egyptian party politics. Upon assuming power, Mubarak took stewardship of the NDP, but quickly removed Sadat loyalists from its apparatus – particularly those connected to rampant corruption associated with Sadat’s open-door economic liberalization policy, which flooded the Egyptian market with foreign goods and opportunities for crony capitalism. Replacing them with his own clients, Mubarak went as far as promoting several Nasserites as a counterbalance against Sadat-era elites. In so doing, he was able to ensure the continuation of the NDP as an “enclave of bourgeois exclusivity.”6 Under this political juncture during the Mubarak administration, moreover, the NDP became a de facto single party in a system that was only multiparty by formality, in which the licensing of new parties became tightly controlled and circumscribed. This stymied environment of party politics continued unabated until the January 25, 2011 revolution.
This brief history of Egyptian political party structures, and their transformation across three different trajectories, demonstrates one consistency: Egyptian party politics have ultimately failed by the system’s very design. From its auspices under Nasser, to its developments under Sadat and then Mubarak, the party system has repeatedly circumscribed genuine democratic participation from the Egyptian masses. Put another way, despite the purported role of political parties in institutionally cementing a liberal political order, in Egypt the party system was structurally predisposed to enshrine an illiberal body politic.
ELECTIONS IN EGYPT AND WHY THEY MATTER
Democratic theory overwhelmingly maintains that political parties are the primary fulcrum of substantive democracy.7 Strong sustainable democracy, the preponderance of literature finds, is wholly dependent on well-functioning political parties that articulate the diverse interests of a body politic, effectively recruit representative candidates, and develop competing policy proposals that provide the electorate with robust political options.8 In fact, according to democratic theorist Robert Dahl, political parties are central to the cementing of democratization, or democratic consolidation: under a full polyarchy – a term Dahl uses to refer to a political system characterized by rule by a small group of competing elites, themselves elected into their roles by mass participation – democratic consolidation is recognized after two consecutive elections take place.9
At face value, this should bode well for Egypt, which held its first recorded parliamentary elections in November 1866, and its first multiparty elections in 1976.10 Since then, eight parliamentary elections have been held: 1979, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and most recently in 2010. Yet despite the semblance of regular and consecutive elections, Egyptian elections have proven far from truly free, fair, or competitive. And while competing political parties and groups do carry a range of ideological orientations, from secular liberals and leftist socialists to Islamists, ultimate control of the Egyptian parliament has remained firmly in the hands of the ruling NDP. Furthermore, the NDP-controlled parliament has effectively functioned as a rubber stamp to the executive branch, which is able to utilize state bureaucracy and security organs to implement its narrow political agenda.11 Accordingly, while the preponderance of regular elections in Egypt at the surface level portends Egypt’s transformation into a full polyarchy, the superficiality of those elections reveals a considerable deficit in democratic consolidation.
In fact, the deficit of bona fide democratic consolidation in Egypt speaks to an equally pressing phenomenon: democratic decay. As Levine and Crisp point out, “hard-won stability can be put in jeopardy by rapid social change, institutional rigidity, and organizational complacency.”12 And when considering the onerous constraints under which opposition parties in Egypt operate – working against the backdrop of the pendulum swing of democratic consolidation, through formal yet wholly superficial elections and institutions – that potential for democratic decay becomes altogether apparent. For these political institutions do not perform the same function in an authoritarian context as they would under a bona fide democracy. The primary aim of political institutions under an authoritarian regime is to ensure that state–society relations “can be controlled, where demands can be revealed without appearing as acts of resistance, where issues can be hammered out without undue public scrutiny, and where resulting agreements can be addressed in a legitimate forum and publicized as such.”13 Accordingly, the function of such institutions under authoritarian regimes is not to check the authority of the executive, but is rather to control society at large by circumscribing formal avenues of participation.
In this respect, political participation in formal institutions gives rise to greater social control, through a limited space of contentious politics in a controlled environment. By their very design, political institutions are meant to encourage some degree of mass participation, yet paradoxically, such institutions in an authoritarian context aim to coopt dissenting voices by domesticating them into the establishment, by repressing them, or by haphazardly changing institutional arrangements. Why, then, would regime opponents willingly engage the formal political arena?
Typically, regime opponents in authoritarian political systems enter into politics to “inflict costs on their leaders for failing to uphold their...commitments.”14 But in the case of Egypt, there is an additional motivation for oppositional figures to enter the formal political arena: in so doing, not only can oppositional movements demand greater accountability from the regime, but they also can utilize the formal structures of the state to increase their own visibility and legitimacy to the public, and ensure their future institutional access. And in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, as we shall see shortly, this desire for public legitimacy proves especially palpable.
Moreover, much of the literature on institutions under authoritarian regimes is rather dismissive, seeing institutions like the parliament as forums that do little more than distribute rents or as irrelevant in terms of making policy concessions.15 When institutions are seen as insignificant, or little more than rubber stamps of the regime that stewards them, their inner workings are largely elided. However, as the activity of the Muslim Brotherhood within state institutions has shown over the past decade, paying close attention to the inner workings of state institutions under authoritarian regimes is essential to understanding political participation under such regimes. In particular, looking at cooperation, strategies, and compromises made within institutions like the parliament highlights the conditions that may lead to future cooperation within authoritarian regimes. Thus, the parliament can emerge as a site of political contestation. It is to that question that we shall next turn.
THE PARLIAMENT AS A SITE OF CONTESTATION
Parliaments and parliamentary elections are essential not only as perfunctory components of government, as they are “essential for the formulation of national policies,” but also because they constitute the very space through which national policy is ostensibly benchmarked against the national interest.16 Maye Kassem problematizes this assumption by claiming that parliaments serve the regime in power by essentially serving as a mechanism of social control.17 But even then, parliaments are increasingly becoming the preferred site by which political opposition groups seek to launch their challenge to the standing regime. Baaklini, Denoeux, and Springborg identify the characteristics of contentious relations between regime and opposition in Egypt thus: “The first is that access to parliament is the principal point of contention between government and opposition...[and] presidential legitimacy is largely a function of the representation of the opposition within the legislature: the fewer opposition MPs in Parliament, the lower the level of presidential legitimacy.”18
Thus, irrespective of the structural limitations of the formal political channels in an authoritarian context, opposition movements in Egypt continue to have much at stake in the parliament as their preferred site of contestation: doing so allows them to challenge the regime on substantive issues, as well as transform from loosely affiliated protest movements to a bona fide opposition party. Moreover, opposition movements’ entry into parliamentary politics stands to have an impact at an institutional level, forcing structural change.
Until 2015, the Egyptian parliament was bicameral, consisting of the Majlis al-Sha‘b (“People’s Assembly,” a 454-seat lower house)19 and the Majlis al-Shura (“Consultative Council,” a 264-seat upper house).20 The members of each house are elected for a period of five years, the Majlis al-Sha‘b in a central vote and the Majlis al-Shura in three electoral rounds within one term, during each of which roughly one-third is elected.21 Constitutionally, the Majlis al-Sha‘b is by far the more powerful of the two chambers. Founded in 1980, the Shura Council has limited legislative powers in contradistinction to the Majlis al-Sha‘b, which maintains the final decision in passing legislation.
The Shura Council in particular remained a key site for political cooptation, often having been described as a “retirement haven for burned-out top-level bureaucrats, ministers, and politicians.”22 Consequently, in the 2010 mid-term Shura Council Elections, the ruling party won ninety percent of the seats, with only eight seats going to members of the thirteen competing parties, and none of the fourteen fielded Muslim Brotherhood candidates winning a seat.23 Thus, the Shura Council, while an ineffective political institution, served as a symbolic victory for the regime during its successive electoral victories. Ridden with electoral corruption and cooptation, it was ultimately seen as detrimental to the viability of political parties.
On the other hand, opposition political struggles became deeply concerned with representation in the Majlis al-Sha‘b. This is not altogether surprising, as the fate of political parties is intricately linked with this institution, the more powerful of the two branches of the Egyptian parliament. The Muslim Brotherhood in particular relied on this branch of parliament as its site of contestation, recognizing the potential cachet of electoral victories there – like the victory it attained during the 2005–10 parliamentary session. Even given its institutional limitations, and the difficulty of marshaling meaningful legislation that would ultimately see the light of day, Brotherhood victories in parliament – the Majlis al-Sha‘b in particular – were key symbolic capital. As it developed from a social movement to an overtly political one, the Brotherhood accordingly placed great emphasis on participation in parliamentary elections.
For unlike other opposition groups, the Brotherhood had to contend with a long history of forced repression at the hands of the Egyptian state apparatus, as well as with its reputation as a deeply secretive clandestine organization; thus, public legitimacy was paramount for its future political viability. Through the popular mass support it had historically established through its vast social networks, the Brotherhood was able to utilize the parliament as precisely the site through which it could cultivate this public legitimacy. Following the ouster of Mubarak, moreover, the Brotherhood similarly regarded the parliament as the basis of its political project, but this time it sought more than public legitimacy; in a newly opened political space, the Brotherhood sought tangible political power in the post-revolutionary order.
POLITICAL PARTIES AFTER THE REVOLUTION: A LIBERAL POSSIBILITY
The January 25, 2011 Egyptian revolution, culminating in the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, ushered in a world of new possibilities for competitive politics. For not only did the revolution put an end to Mubarak’s long reign, but it also sought to resuscitate the political contestation and mass participation that had been so thoroughly repressed under Mubarak, through the introduction of robust alternative political voices. Thus, the revolution gave rise not only to institutional changes in the political apparatus, such as the new Law on Political Parties, but also forced traditional political parties – both religious and secular – to reconstitute themselves to articulate alternative political platforms.
All of these overtures to robust contentious politics were previously impossible under Mubarak’s stewardship. In 2007, the Political Parties Court rejected the legalization of twelve parties – eleven of which were considered secular – on the nebulous basis that they all offered similar political platforms, and that they failed to garner the necessary signatories required from each of Egypt’s twenty-nine provinces.24 This excessive bureaucratic burden left secular political parties, whether liberal or socialist in ideological orientation, struggling for meaningful representation in a deeply circumscribed political environment – particularly when pitted against the increasingly hegemonic National Democratic Party, which by the Mubarak years had metastasized into Egypt’s de facto single party.
Furthermore, these arbitrary constraints on political participation posited secular parties against the Muslim Brotherhood, the regime’s single most organized opposition movement, to vie for popular support. Secular parties in Egypt lacked the organizational structure and social support the Brotherhood enjoyed even under political constraints. Consequently, secular parties under Mubarak – which included over a dozen registered political parties in 2006 – faced two distinct challenges: institutional constraints placed by the regime, and organizational limitations. These challenges ultimately made it painstakingly difficult for secular parties to make considerable gains in Egyptian political life: for instance, during the much lauded 2005 multiparty parliamentary elections, which resulted in the Muslim Brotherhood winning twenty percent (eighty-eight) of the contested seats, the registered secular Wafd and al-Ghad parties, and the two leftist parties of Al-Tagammu‘ and the Arab Nasserist parties, collectively could only secure five percent.25
With the 2011 revolution, this all stood to change. On March 28, 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) revealed the new Law on Political Parties. Exponentially more lenient and inclusive – not to mention more bureaucratically tame – than its predecessor legislation, this new law requires parties applying for registration to gather a more modest five thousand signatures, and only ten of Egypt’s twenty-nine provinces need be represented. Moreover, it guaranteed that all applications for party registration will be reviewed within thirty days. This new law was seen as liberating parties from the political limbo in which they were entrenched under Mubarak. In the first few weeks following its passage, dozens of informal political parties and movements submitted applications requesting formal party status recognition – thereby suggesting that Egypt had successfully maintained a latent political vibrancy that now stood to come to full fruition on the national scene. One such party was the newly formed Egyptian Social Democratic Party (SDP), founded in part by the prominent Egyptian liberal human rights activist and political scientist Amr Hamzawy, which was comprised of hundreds of professionals and university professors.26 Hamzawy envisioned the new party garnering the support of the Egyptian masses, both Muslim and Coptic, and being represented by prominent secular figures such as Emad Gad and Fatima Naaot, to help articulate a new vision for a post-revolutionary Egypt.
Other secular, liberal, and leftist currents in Egyptian politics followed suit. On March 31, 2011, the secular Wafd Party hosted a symposium for all Egyptian secular parties, both old and new, to join forces and establish a broad coalition in order to command greater political representation in the upcoming parliamentary elections, slated to occur in September of that year.27 Similarly, on March 19, 2011, seventy-three members of Egypt’s oldest leftist party, Al-Tagammu‘, walked out of the party’s conference in protest, accusing its leadership of being too closely tied to Mubarak-era remnants, and calling for the formation of a new party. They in turn joined the Popular Alliance, a new coalition attempting to bring Egypt’s fragmented leftist parties under a single umbrella organization independent of past political allegiances, with economic freedom and social justice as their new platform for social democracy.
Thus, in the month following the ouster of Mubarak, it appeared that for the first time since President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s overthrow of the Egyptian Monarchy in 1952 that Egypt’s secular parties and groups were emerging as alternative voices in the Egyptian political landscape. And while Egypt’s party formation remained a work in progress and had yet to be finalized in the aftermath of revolutionary upheaval, it genuinely seemed that the newly resuscitated Egyptian leftist and secular political forces were embracing a new era of political contestation, which would come to fruition in the forthcoming September parliamentary elections.
Furthermore, just as the revolution ushered in a new era for leftist and secularist parties, it similarly caused a fundamental shift in Islamist political activism. More specifically, the revolution ended the reign of the Muslim Brotherhood as the sole opposition party vying for political power and representation in Egypt, and replaced it with a series of alternative voices articulating competing interpretations of a Muslim democratic platform – the political ideological position of the Brotherhood since 2005. In fact, the very first political party to gain judicial recognition in post-revolutionary Egypt was precisely modeled on such auspices. The Al-Wasat (Center) Party, founded by Abul Ela Madi and several other former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, was previously criminalized under Mubarak, only to gain formal recognition on February 19, 2011 in the early phase of the post-Mubarak era.28 The Al-Wasat Party’s political vision, moreover, was motivated as an ideological alternative to the Brotherhood, hence its emphasis on inclusion of Copts and women among its leadership. Al-Wasat Party membership proved integral to the 2004 popular uprising that led to the establishment of the Egyptian Movement for Change, or Kifaya.29
In the aftermath of revolutionary upheaval, the Brotherhood was caught between the dual commitments it had been vacillating between over the past decade, whether to remain engaged in politics, or to return to its roots in da‘wa (religious outreach).30 The latter approach involves a movement informed less by political activism than by being driven by the social sphere, aiming to foster a more pious Muslim community through preaching, social services, and integrity by example. This tension in the Brotherhood’s vision had been culminating for some time, but now in the post-revolutionary context was leading the organization to rethink outright the project’s broader meaning.
Divisions within the Brotherhood, moreover, were further exacerbated by the organization’s youth, whose direct participation in the January 2011 protests not only was essential to the revolution’s success, but also gave them a hitherto unimagined political legitimacy. As a result, the Brotherhood found itself attempting to hold on for dear life to its rebellious activist youth, who after having earned their battle scars during the revolution began to see their elders in Brotherhood leadership as increasingly out of touch with Egypt’s social and political realities. As younger Islamists began to distance themselves from the Brotherhood’s overtly Islamist political identity, moving instead toward a pluralistic framework wherein the movement’s past signifies a moment in the strategic evolution of Islamism that is now over, the Brotherhood found itself in a key predicament – it was no longer the single voice of political Islam in Egypt.
The movement thus had to respond accordingly. On February 23, 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau (Maktab al-Irshad) announced that it would establish a political party wholly distinct from the movement, called the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). The new party would be led, moreover, by Saad Al-Katatni, former head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc from 2005 to 2010.31 While initially the party remained banned, due to its articulation of religion as its source of guidance – a disqualifier for a political party from the perspective of Egyptian constitutional law – on March 29, 2011, the party invited Coptic Christians to join its membership. In emphasizing exclusivity, it was in turn emphasizing that it was not, in fact, a party rooted in religion – and, more specifically, that it was not an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood as such. Accordingly, the FJP was then able to successfully register as a political party, gaining legal status on June 6, 2011.32
Moreover, even within the Brotherhood, there emerged competing articulations of its Islamist project, which went on to manifest themselves into bona fide political parties. On March 26, 2011, high-ranking Brotherhood Guidance Bureau member Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh announced to a gathering of Brotherhood youth that he would be forming a more liberal Islamic party.33 This party would still reflect the core ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood, namely piety and social justice, but it would move ideologically beyond the Muslim Brotherhood and embrace “liberal Islamism” as reflected in Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Another high-ranking Muslim Brotherhood member, Ibrahim al-Zafaarani, who is widely respected by the Brotherhood’s youth, announced the establishment of the Nahda Party (“Revival Party”) that aims to become a party rooted in Islam, with political pluralism and democracy as its main goals. Much like secular political forces, political Islam now gained a multitude of overlapping and competing articulations in the Egyptian political marketplace.
In the six weeks after the January 2011 revolution, then, new political ideas and values emerged, which coalesced in the establishment of new and different forms of political party articulation. In this milieu, ordinary Egyptian citizens finally gained nascent faith in the political process, and in the parliament as the primary site for political contestation and representation. Absent the structural conditions that limited such possibilities and aspirations under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, participatory politics finally seemed possible, a fulfillment of the demands of the revolution. Authoritarian rule, it seemed, had finally been replaced by a nascent political landscape whose finer details were yet to be established, but was well on its way to liberal political pluralism. Regrettably, though, this would not last.
PARTICIPATORY POLITICS UNDER SCAF AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
Pending the establishment of a new civilian government, state authority post-revolution remained in the hands of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF). With the military in power, Egyptians seemed divided over the timing of future elections. The secularists and revolutionary coalitions wanted to postpone elections, giving them time to organize and campaign, but the Muslim Brotherhood, under the newly formed FJP, wanted elections held as quickly as possible. While the Brotherhood purported to be pushing for early elections in order to quickly remove SCAF from power and return to civilian rule, many Egyptians perceived this move as an act of collusion between the Brotherhood and SCAF, whereby the Brotherhood as the largest organized political group in the country would surely win a majority of parliamentary seats – with SCAF approval. Secularist political forces, moreover, also sought to postpone parliamentary elections under the drafting of a new constitution, fearing that an Islamist-dominated parliament would give rise to an Islamist-dominated constitutional assembly responsible for drafting Egypt’s post-revolutionary constitution – thus raising fears of the constitutionally mandated Islamization of Egyptian society. SCAF ultimately chose to hold the constitutional drafting period between the parliamentary and presidential elections.
Egyptian parliamentary elections are unique in that they are directly supervised by the judiciary. And given the vastness of the country on one hand, and the limited number of judges on the other, SCAF opted to hold elections over a period of four months. During that period, several smaller parties joined the Brotherhood-affiliated FJP to form the Democratic Alliance; after two rounds of elections, it became clear that the Democratic Alliance would be in the majority, winning over fifty percent of parliamentary seats.34 In this respect, the Brotherhood made a major strategic mistake, in openly presenting itself as the largest, most organized, and most publicly visible group during the parliamentary campaigning period – followed only by the religiously conservative and hard-line Salafi Nur Party.
But why would being electorally ambitious be a strategic mistake? The reason is that this posturing is directly at odds with the Brotherhood’s historical record of maintaining modest electoral objectives, contesting no more than a third of parliamentary seats. According to former Secretary General of the Brotherhood and the current interim General Guide, Mahmoud Izzat, “we are not after power, rather we want to have influence in parliament, to reflect the will of the people that elect us to those positions.”35 These more modest parliamentary gains would allow the Brotherhood to meet the minimum threshold necessary to veto any constitutional changes, while at the same time prevent it from appearing hegemonic in its political ambitions to the Egyptian public. As Carrie Wickham explains, the Brotherhood’s strategy during several decades in which it was officially barred from political participation “can be likened to the swing of a pendulum, seesawing between moments of self-assertion and moments of self-restraint,” in which “its leaders continually recalibrate[ed] the terms of their engagement in an effort to expand their influence without jeopardizing the group’s survival.”36 In the post-revolutionary context, though, it seemed that the Brotherhood had started to pivot more significantly toward self-assertion, to the detriment of self-restraint.
Accordingly, the post-revolutionary public perception of the Brotherhood was an organization committed to political dominance. This perception no doubt intensified after the formal declaration of the FJP as a separate political party, after which it began a protracted campaign of self-promotion. Prior to parliamentary elections, polls were placing Brotherhood FJP support at twenty to thirty percent. However, after a few short weeks of heavy campaigning, through extensive reliance on the Brotherhood’s vast social networks, the country was plastered with images of candidates campaigning under the FJP banner.37 Attempting to make sense of this barrage of FJP images – which, interestingly enough, bore little religious symbolism as such– the Egyptian public nonetheless felt it was receiving mixed messages as to who was ultimately in charge of this new political party.38 Although the FJP had established itself as a political entity wholly separate from the Muslim Brotherhood, and maintained a separate headquarters in Cairo’s Muqqatam district, its statements issued relating to the parliamentary elections were released from the Office of the Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Bureau, in the Minyal district. Thus, it was clear to the public that the FJP and the Muslim Brotherhood were part of the same entity, and that the Brotherhood Guidance Bureau was running the FJP as a political wing of its own organization.
Moreover, the Brotherhood further undermined its historical legacy of electoral minimalism, of not contesting more than thirty to forty percent of parliamentary seats – which had allowed it to successfully secure a place in Egyptian politics without being perceived by the public as a usurping power – in the run-up to parliamentary elections. The Brotherhood Guidance Bureau attempted to assuage popular concerns with announcements assuring that the Brotherhood sought participation rather than domination, with Brotherhood General Guide Muhammad al-Badie going so far as to announce both on the Brotherhood’s website and in speeches during April 2011 that the Brotherhood “was from the people, with the people, and for the people,” and wanted to affect change in the parliament rather than dominate it.39 But those announcements did little to appease the public – particularly given the Brotherhood’s subsequent power plays in the election process through its FJP conduit. For instance, on April 30, the FJP announced it would not contest more than forty-five to fifty percent of seats – a departure from its historical legacy of restraint, in contesting no more than thirty to forty percent of seats.40 This announcement, particularly when coupled with the entry of the Salafi Nur Party into the competition, was perceived as threatening to undermine the loosely allied liberal coalitions.
And the Brotherhood did not stop there. Insisting that liberals were not willing to fill party lists and cooperate with them, lest they risk appearing complicit in Islamist-led coalitions,41 the FJP by mid-October 2011 announced that it would address the deficit of sufficient candidates on certain lists by increasing the proportion of seats they were contesting to sixty percent.42 A few days later, the FJP announced that it would field candidates in every race, contesting 100% of seats in the parliament.43 Ultimately, the FJP won 47.2% of the seats, and 24.7% went to the Salafi Nur Party, resulting in Islamist control of 72% of the parliament.44 Suffice to say, the Brotherhood’s historical policy of self-restraint in years past now gave rise to a more firm articulation of self-assertion.
Non-Islamist parties, by contrast, won 114 seats in the parliament (23.3% in total). The largest non-Islamist entity was the Wafd Party, with forty-one seats, followed by the SDP, with sixteen seats, and the Free Egyptians Party (FEP) – a new secular liberal party founded in part by Egyptian business tycoon Naguib Sawiris on April 3, 2011 – with fifteen. The SDP and the FEP, moreover, both campaigned with the leftist Al-Tagammu‘ as part of the Egyptian Bloc, an electoral alliance formed in August 2011 specifically as a bulwark against electoral gains by the Brotherhood. The FEP in particular was seen as the coalition’s primary liberal contingent, close in content and platform to the Wafd Party, itself a remnant of Mubarak-era politics that has an extensive history in early Egyptian liberal nationalism. The SDP, by contrast, under the stewardship of gynecology professor and social justice activist Mohammad Abol Ghar, attempted to represent a new voice in the Egyptian political landscape, basing its platform on European-style social democratic principles. However, barring the Wafd Party, which still had strong institutional ties to the Delta, these new secular, liberal, and leftist parties were reluctant to participate in coalitions, and ultimately remained deeply weak and unorganized.
Islamists’ success in the parliamentary elections was quickly met with a direct response from the ruling SCAF, which appointed a new Advisory Council populated with liberals and secularists, and heads of political parties who had not fared well in the elections. Moreover, SCAF selected Dr. Kamal al-Ganzouri, a prime minister from 1996 to 1999 under Mubarak. After initially joining the Advisory Council, the FJP withdrew its participation, seeing it as an appointed body created specifically as a counterbalance to the parliament – the truly representative body of the Egyptian people. Thus, the Brotherhood and the FJP found themselves caught between two tensions: on the one hand, they faced animus from the masses who grew increasingly suspicious at their full-throttle domination of the parliamentary elections, despite decades of electoral minimalism. And on the other hand, they faced equal pressure from a transitional authority seeking to systematically undermine any perceived political gains it stood to make as a new dominant opposition.
SCAF did not take the Brotherhood’s electoral gains lightly, particularly given that it controlled both the upper and lower houses of parliament, and was now after the presidency. Accordingly, SCAF threatened to dissolve Parliament in order to check the ambitions of an increasingly powerful Brotherhood. Revolutionary groups, moreover, themselves feeling ever more insecure in the face of Brotherhood control over two branches of government, increasingly echoed this sentiment. The High Constitutional Court ultimately concurred and dissolved parliament on June 14, 2012, two days before the presidential election.45 It was becoming clear that transition to civilian rule was simply not part of SCAF’s strategic agenda.
According to Amr Hamzawy, speaking in his capacity as a former member of the upper house, “dissolving the parliament was the first real attack on democracy.”46 But in the run-up to the presidential elections, SCAF demonstrated that it was only the first of several attacks on the democratic process. On June 14, the military occupied the parliamentary building, claiming all legislative powers for itself.47 The Ministry of Justice then reinstituted the emergency laws that had been lifted after Mubarak’s fall. And on June 17, during the final round of presidential elections, SCAF issued a constitutional declaration transferring much of the powers vested in the presidency to itself, stripping the president of his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and placing it instead in the hands of SCAF leader Field Marshal Mohammad Hussein Tantawi. It similarly dissolved the 100-member constitutional writing committee recently appointed by parliament, granted itself veto power over any presidential decree, and appointed one of Tantawi’s assistants, another military general, as Chief of Staff to the President.48 Ultimately, SCAF methodically neutered the office of the presidency, such that, upon taking up the role on June 30, 2013, newly elected Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammad Morsi took on an office that had become a surrogate to the powers of the military apparatus.
And throughout SCAF’s systematic attempts to undermine the Egyptian political process, liberal and leftist parties largely stood by and refused to intervene – despite purporting to speak on behalf of liberal values eschewing excessive government intervention, the primacy of the rule of law, and a transparent electoral process. Their complicity in the SCAF-led denuding of a liberal parliament, then, evokes serious questions of how committed liberal forces in Egypt ultimately were to liberal politics; would these groups and parties only endorse participatory politics if it conformed precisely to their vision and platform, to the detriment of all others? With tacit approval from liberals, secularists, revolutionaries, and Mubarak-era loyalists alike, the parliament remained dissolved during the entirety of Morsi’s presidency, thus derailing party politics in Egypt during that entire period. The parliament would return only after those same figures returned to the streets to facilitate the military ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected civilian president on July 3, 2013.
THE 2015 PARLIAMENT: THE POLITICAL CONSOLIDATION OF AUTHORITARIAN RULE
Under General and now President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian parliament was finally reinstated, convening for the first time in three years on January 2016. However, this new parliament was summarily stripped of its dynamism. Gains made in the immediate aftermath of the January 2011 revolution had been radically scaled back, to the point that the current parliament, far from being the site of political participation, contestation, and government oversight, had degenerated into an even weaker system than under Nasser. Sisi’s administration effectively neutered the political potential of the parliament through constitutional fiat. Granted, the referendum-endorsed January 2014 constitution does ensure a degree of legislative power and legislative oversight. Nonetheless, it also states that the parliament can be dissolved if it rejects the contingent of parliamentary candidates reserved by presidential appointment – a process I will explicate in more detail shortly. Similarly, it grants the President the authority to declare a state of emergency without parliamentary approval, and strips the Egyptian parliament of the authority to review appointments or budgets of key government ministries, including the Ministries of Defense, Interior, and Justice.49
On the electoral level, moreover, the 2014 constitution eliminated the upper house of parliament altogether, replacing it with a unicameral legislature under the stewardship of a new House of Representatives. It increased the full roster of parliament by 20% to 596 seats, and mandated that 75% of those seats be reserved for candidates without party affiliation – thereby ensuring that no single party can have a significant parliamentary majority. It further mandated that only twenty percent of parliamentary seats (120 seats) be assigned to party lists – thus assuring the marginalization of small parties.50 Moreover, it mandated that the remaining five percent of seats (twenty-eight members) be appointed by the president himself. Ultimately, then, the post-2014 parliament by constitutional design would serve as little more than a rubber stamp of executive authority, having been systematically stripped of its functional powers.
Within this new parliamentary milieu, party politics became exponentially more circumscribed. Of the 120 seats available to party lists, Sisi himself called for the creation of a unified electoral list – which would in effect undermine the competitive nature of the electoral process.51 In response to that call emerged the “For the Love of Egypt” coalition, a political alliance that, while denying any formal ties to Sisi or the state security apparatus, was decidedly pro-Sisi. The For the Love of Egypt bloc went on to win all 120 seats, which effectively allowed for the swift transition of Sisi’s rule to now usurp full legislative power in addition to his already expansive executive powers. In the parliament currently serving in Egypt, political opposition has all but disappeared from the electoral process.
The three most significant political parties to compromise the For the Love of Egypt alliance, moreover, are especially telling: a weakened Wafd Party, the country’s oldest secular liberal party and a mainstay of Mubarak-era politics; the new Nation’s Future Party, founded by twenty-four-year-old anti-Brotherhood former student activist and coup supporter Mohamed Badran;52 and the FEP, a party that, despite its aspirations as a new secular liberal voice in Egyptian politics, had at this point been largely constituted by Mubarak-era NDP loyalists. For the Love of Egypt, then, was comprised largely of the very forces that purported to offer a liberal alternative to both Mubarak-era politics on the one hand, and the Brotherhood on the other. And much as those liberal and leftist forces largely rejected participation in Brotherhood-led coalitions and party lists during the SCAF-led parliamentary period, and as much as they largely acquiesced to the SCAF-led dismantling of the parliament, the same forces ultimately became enthusiastic Sisi loyalists, thus helping give rise in the country’s swift return to authoritarianism.
Since the start of electoral rule in Egypt in 1952, structural and institutional constraints have fundamentally compromised the development of a strong body politic. Liberals, leftists, and Islamists alike have been forced to carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly tenuous environment, first under the outright elimination of party politics under Nasser, then under single-party rule under Sadat, limited party contestation under Mubarak, and the ostensible return to party elimination under Sisi. And for whatever gains made by opposition groups in Egypt under deeply circumscribed circumstances, strong and sustainable democracy remains wholly dependent on well-functioning political parties, which in turn have several functions: articulating the diverse interests of the representative population, recruiting representative candidates for direct leadership, and developing compelling policy proposals that provide the body politic with an array of choices for their political future.
In the immediate aftermath of the January 2011 revolution, it seemed that such an environment of robust party politics was finally on its way to being established. But following the dismantling of that process, first by SCAF and then by President Sisi, a healthy system of party politics is not merely absent, but has been rendered constitutionally impossible. Rather than the parliament being a site of contestation, it has degenerated into a site for an authoritarian regime to manipulate in order to consolidate its rule, thus rendering political contestation impossible. The demands of the January 2011 revolution can never be actualized without being grounded in strong and robust liberal political institutions. Political parties are paramount in this respect. Thus, a return to the democratic opening witnessed in 2011 will necessitate a resuscitation of party politics, and the return of parliament as a genuine site for political contestation.
1 Samuel Huntington, Political Order and Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 401.
2 Tamir Moustafa, “Law versus the state: The judicialization of politics in Egypt,” Law & Social Inquiry 28, no. 4 (2003): 888.
3 Ninette Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 57.
4 Hamied Ansari, Egypt, the Stalled Society (New York: State University Press of New York Press, 1986), 85.
5 Fahmy, The Politics of Egypt, 61.
6 Hamied Ansari, “Mubarak’s Egypt,” Current History (January 1985): 23, 24.
7 Raymond Wolfinger and Steven Rosenstone, Who Votes? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); and Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
8 Guillermo O’Donnell, “Illusions about consolidation,” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 2 (1996): 42–51; and Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Consolidation: Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
9 For more on polyarchy, see Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
10 Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
11 For more on the instrumental use of such state institutions, see Mona Makram-Ebeid, “Egypt’s 2000 Parliamentary Elections,” Middle East Policy 8, no. 2 (2001): 32–43.
12 Daniel H. Levine and Brian F. Crisp, “Venezuela: The character, crisis, and possible future of democracy,” in Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America, 2nd ed., ed. Larry Diamond et al. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 369.
13 Jennifer Gandhi and Adam Przeworski, “Cooperation, cooptation and rebellion under dictatorships,” Economics and Politics 18, no. 1 (2006): 14.
14 Jason Layall, “Pocket protests: Rhetorical coercion and the micro politics of collective action in semi-authoritarian regimes,” World Politics 58, no. 3 (2006): 383.
15 Leonard Binder, Iran: Political Development in a Changing Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); Ruth Berins Collier, Regimes in Tropical Africa: Changing Forms of Supremacy, 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Aristide R. Zolberg, One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, “Opposition To and Under an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain,” in Regimes and Oppositions, ed. Robert Dahl (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); and Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1979).
16 For more on the role of such legislative bodies, see Barrington Moore, Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 260–7.
17 Maye Kassem, Egyptian Politics: The Dynamics of Authoritarian Rule (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004).
18 Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux, and Robert Springborg, eds., Legislative Politics in the Arab World: The Resurgence of Democratic Institutions (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 229.
19 The People’s Assembly has 444 elected members plus an additional 10 appointed by the President.
20 Maye Kassem, The Guise of Democracy: Governance in Contemporary Egypt (Ithaca: Ithaca Press, 1999), 35–9.
21 The total number of members in the Shura Council is 264, where the president appoints a third of them. The other two-thirds are elected every three years.
22 Robert Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 137.
23 Ethar Shalaby, “Egypt’s Shura Council Elections start off amid violations,” The Egyptian Dialogue Institute, http://dedi.org.eg/index.php/top-news/420-egypts-shura-council-elections-start-off-amid-violations
24 Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy, “Fighting Two Fronts: Secular Parties in the Arab World,” in Getting to Pluralism: Political Actors in the Arab World, ed. Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009).
25 Hossam Tammam, “The Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian regime: The test of parliamentary elections as a condition for political transition,” Arab Reform Bulletin, 38 (April 2010).
26 Hamzawy later resigned from the Egyptian Social Democratic Party in April 2011, in order to form the Freedom Egypt Party on May 18, 2011. For more on Amr Hamzawy, please see his contribution to this volume in Chapter 12, titled “Egyptian Liberals and their Anti-democratic Deceptions: A Contemporary Sad Narrative.”
27 Hill Evan, “Explainer: Egypt’s crowded political arena,” Al Jazeera, November 17, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/egypt/2011/11/2011111510295463645.html
28 “Wasat Party,” Jadaliyya, November 18, 2011, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3152/al-wasat-party
29 Virginie Collombier, “Politics without parties. Political change and democracy building in Egypt before and after the revolution,” EUI Working Papers, European University Institute, 2013, http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/29040/MWP_2013_35_Collombier.pdf
30 See Abdullah Al-Arian, Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
31 “Egypt’s El-Katatni becomes new head of Muslim Brotherhood’s FJP,” Al-Ahram Online, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/56019/Egypt/Politics-/BREAKING-Egypts-ElKatatni-becomes-new-head-of-Musl.aspx
32 Said Shehata, “Profile: Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party,” BBC News, November 25, 2011, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-15899548
33 Shadi Hamid, “Brother President: The Islamist agenda for governing Egypt,” Brookings Institute, August 26, 2012, http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2012/08/26-brother-president-hamid
34 “Elections Summary,” Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, December 21, 2015, http://timep.org/pem/elections-summary/elections-summary/
35 Personal interview with Mahmoud Izzat, Secretary General of the Ikhwan, July 11, 2008.
36 Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 96.
37 Amr Darrag, “Politics or piety? Why the Muslim Brotherhood engages in social service provision,” in Islamists on Islamism Today, a series within Brookings’s Rethinking Political Islam project, Brookings Institution, April 2016, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2016/04/muslim-brotherhood-social-service-darrag
38 Dalia Fahmy, “The rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood: Between opposition and power,” in Through Egyptian Eyes: The Egyptian Revolution and the Struggle for Democracy Under Three Regimes, ed. Bessma Momani and Eid Mohamed (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
39 “MB Chairman: We seek to participate, not dominate elections,” Ikhwanweb, April 20, 2011, http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=28432
40 “Jama‘atu-l-ikhwan tunafis ‘ala 50 percent min maqa‘id al-barlaman wa ‘an taqdim al-hizb murashahh li-ri’asati-l-jumhuriyya amrun mahhalu-niqash,” http://elmokhalestv.com/index/details/id/3124
41 Personal interview with Abdel-Mowgoud Dardery, New York, March 11, 2016.
42 “Al-ikhwan tunafis ‘ala akthar min 60 percent min maqa‘id al-barlaman,” http://www.nmisr.com/vb/showthread.php?t=360601
43 “Qawa’im al-ikhwan tunafis ‘ala jami‘ al-maqa‘id al-barlamaniyyah,” http://www.alqabas.com.kw/node/23510
44 Historically, the Brotherhood controlled 15.8% in 2000, and 22% in 2005.
45 David Hearst and Abdel-Rahman Hussein, “Egypt’s supreme court dissolves parliament and outrages Islamists,” Guardian, June 14, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/14/egypt-parliament-dissolved-supreme-court
46 Public interview with Amr Hamzawy by Sarah Leah Whitson (Human Rights Watch), New York City, March 10, 2016.
47 Matthew Weaver and Brian Whitaker, “Egypt reels from ‘judicial coup,’” Guardian, June 15, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/middle-east-live/2012/jun/15/egypt-reels-judicial-coup-live
48 “Arab Uprisings; Morsi’s Egypt,” POMEPS Briefings, August 20, 2012, http://pomeps.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/POMEPS_BriefBooklet13_Egypt_Web.pdf
49 Beesan Kassab, “Why is Sisi afraid of the constitution and parliament,” Mada Masr, September 15, 2015, http://www.madamasr.com/sections/politics/why-sisi-afraid-constitution-and-parliament
50 Rania Al-Malky, “In Egypt a house of (un)representatives?” Middle East Eye, July 30, 2015, http://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/node/45512
51 “Parties consider Sisi’s call for a unified electoral list unfeasible,” Mada Masr, January 14, 2015, http://www.madamasr.com/news/politics/parties-consider-sisi%E2%80%99s-call-unified-electoral-list-unfeasible
52 Sarah El Sirgany, “The 24 year old party leader who seeks to rule Egypt,” Atlantic Council, October 19, 2015, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-24-year-old-party-leader-who-seeks-to-rule-egypt