Egypt: An Opening
I arrived yesterday in Egypt, where I’ll be (thanks to a international reporting fellowship from Columbia University) for the next two months, studying Arabic several days a week and reporting on others.
While I’m here, I’ll do my best to post to this website frequent round-ups of news from the Egyptian and regional press; analysis of political and social issues; interviews with Egypt scholars, artists, and activists; and some dispatches from my excursions around Cairo and, hopefully, other parts of the country.
One of the stories I will be following is growing disagreement over the chronology of Egypt’s political reforms.
Since taking power in February, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has proposed holding parliamentary elections in September, followed by a presidential vote in November. Then a constituent assembly would be convened to draft a new constitution that would be put to voters in a referendum.
Yet, just this morning, Egypt’s interim Prime Minister Essam Sharaf voiced his support for delaying the parliamentary elections. He joins a growing — and increasingly vocal — segment of the Mubarak-opposition-come-political-mainstream calling for a delay in the parliamentary vote and instead write a constitution.
By front-loading the parliamentary elections, so the argument goes, SCAF has underestimated the obstacles that stand in the way of forming political parties after three decades of censorship and repression. The protest forces that coalesced around toppling Mubarak have not been able to ramp up their party apparatuses: develop coherent election platforms, communicate with potential voters, and build mechanisms for getting them to the polls.
Some liberal-secularists further point out that holding parliamentary elections sooner rather than later benefits the Muslim Brotherhood, which was able to field candidates in previous elections despite being banned by the Mubarak regime and has built strong political support through its robust network of religious, health care, and community centers. September elections could also benefit remnants of the National Democratic Party that might re-enter politics in the post-Mubarak era.
Yet given the extent to which Egypt’s economy has ground to a halt and the high expectations for political change that remain in the country, delaying the vote could backfire.
Before leaving the U.S. I spoke with Fadhel Kaboub, an economics professor at Denison College, who focuses on the Middle East and North Africa. He called this a classic chicken and egg problem: Does one support the drafting of a constitution, then the election of a parliament and a president or, conversely, the selection of representatives who then preside over constitutional reforms?
He pointed to Tunisia for comparison. Elections for an assembly that will re-write the country’s constitution were recently pushed back to October. In the meantime, officials on the local and provincial levels are often unwilling to carry out any reforms without go-ahead from the interim government on the national level. “Tunisia is paralyzed,” Kaboub says.
This might be a warning to Egypt’s political movements. Perhaps a more deliberate reflection on political reform, though, might allow space for them to consider the issue that seems to be the third rail of Egyptian politics — that is, shifting the country’s economic model away form the neo-liberal policies that spanned the Sadat and Mubarak regimes and towards one that addresses the country’s massive poverty and economic inequality.
Kaboub warns that Egypt might get a new constitution, “but if the old economic model remains in place then little will change.”
