A Lay Guide to Egypt’s Biggest Current Issues: The Genesis of Morsi’s Ouster (#1)

A Lay Guide to Egypt’s Biggest Current Issues

The Genesis of Morsi’s Ouster

Mohammed Morsi, the recently ousted president of Egypt, is the son of a farmer, born in Al-Sharqiya governate in northern Egypt in 1951. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1979 while studying for his doctorate in engineering at the University of Southern California. Morsi returned to Egypt and rose in to the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau in 1995. In 2000 he was elected to the Egyptian Parliament as an independent, as the Brotherhood was banned from participation in official politics under President Hosni Mubarak.

Morsi, though detained for a period in 2006 in the wake of mass protests against the Mubarak regime and also in 2011, has little in the way of alternative social or economic programs to that of Mubarak. In an article for Le Monde Diplomatique titled Extreme capitalism of the Muslim Brothers, scholar Gilbert Achcar quotes a former member of the MB in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “The core of the economic vision of Brotherhood, if we are going to classify it in a classical way, is extreme capitalist.” The MB’s Freedom and Justice Party, established in 2011 following the fall of Mubarak, according to Achcar and others, has been actively emulating the model of the ruling AKP party in Turkey—the party against whose policies hundreds of thousands of Turks have been revolting this summer. The AKP claimed to represent the interests of all capital, big, medium, and small, wedding their interests tightly with the state’s policies. The MB has done this, even including old crony businessmen tied up with the Mubarak regime in its embrace.

As a result, the priorities of the MB government during Morsi’s year in office, after winning the presidential elections in Egypt in May 2012, have been taking on an IMF loan of $4.8 billion, and Morsi “promised a delegation of businessmen on a September 2012 visit to Egypt organized by the US Chamber of Commerce that he will unhesitatingly carry out drastic structural reforms to put the country’s economy back on its feet.”

Anyway, I see how this is sinking into the esoteric minutia that Western media pundits love to indulge in in order to obscure general truths from listeners and viewers. So let me wrap up by asserting that the economic program of the Muslim Brotherhood, it appears to this newly-arrived foreigner, was actually an accelerated version of the neoliberal agenda Mubarak had been imposing on Egypt since the 1980’s if not earlier. This meant continued gutting of public services (already at a serious minimum here: for a global “megacity” like Cairo, I’m amazed by the very limited underground metro service and sparse and unreliable bus networks), severe repression of union organizing activity and workers’ actions like strikes or sit-ins, neglect of infrastructure, appropriation by the state of peasant land for commercial crop harvesting, invitations to foreign capital to invest in the now ultra-low wage industries available in Egypt which offer maximum returns, and taking on IMF loans for “development” which stipulate many of the above policies.

Further, the MB seemed more concerned about working out the nitty-gritty (and in my view, totally needless) religious agenda for Egypt, pushing hard for the committee charged with writing a new constitution for the country to include all kinds of sexist language that did not include rights for women, and only sanctioned the three Abrahamic religions for legal protection, thus actively encouraging the persecution of religious minorities, if I’m not mistaken (which I could be). All the while, inept MB ministers were badly handling the country’s affairs, and wouldn’t you know it? With continued cooperation with the corrupt Mubarak-era ruling elite in policymaking, and further cuts to the Egyptian working class’ social wage, unemployment soared to new heights, as we see in this recent UNICEF graphic:

 

At any rate, it appears that with ballooning unemployment and the weight of conservative Islamist governance bearing down on society (ex: I ride along the jam-packed, flashy Al Haram Street, once the go-to spot for clubs and places for dancing and drinks. I see that most of them were closed down since the Revolution of 2011, the rate of closures, I believe, accelerating during the MB’s time in the presidency: Just one sign that their priorities for getting Egypt back on its feet were oriented around traditionalist social reforms and restrictions), many Egyptians were fed up with the situation. This seems to include a wide swath of Egyptian society, from young middle-class folks in Cairo, to aged Coptic Christians, to farmers in the rural villages of southern Egypt. 

From here, the Tamarrud ("Rebellion") Movement was born. Who birthed it originally is still not clear to me, but I imagine it involved many of the liberal and radical revolutionary youth who were active in the uprisings between January 2011 and December 2012. They would have had the energy and the clearest understanding (generally speaking) of the political situation and that the Muslim Brotherhood were not protectors of the Revolution now Egypt's saviors. And they began their petitioning campaign around the country, asking people for their signature promising that they would demonstrate in the streets on June 30, 2013, demanding the resignation of Morsi from the presidency. By that date, they claimed to have collected 22 million signatures. And on June 30, (actually, protests kicked off at least 2 days before that) the largest protests in Egypt's history shook the nation. After 3 days, and with the intervention of the army, Morsi was toppled.

I just spoke to an Aussi photojournalist who's been in the country for well over 2 years, however. From what he knows, he confirms claims that have become widespread among Egyptian Morsi supporters that the Tamarrud Movement, at least after it gained traction, was funded by third-part elite elements interested in removing the MB from official power. Thus their success.

More on those claims to come.....