After only one year in office, Egypt’s first ever elected President, Mohamed Morsi, was bundled out by the military on Wednesday in a carefully choreographed move that appeared little different from a coup, whether or not the military busies itself ruling the country directly. The controversial Islamic Constitution framed under the ousted President has been jettisoned.
For tactical reasons, there is every likelihood that the armed forces will call the shots from behind the scenes even as the head of Egypt’s constitutional court has been named interim President, and empowered by the military’s fiat to proclaim laws, forge a new Constitution, and hold fresh elections. No time frame of any kind has been adumbrated. This could mean that efforts will be made by the military leadership to politically bludgeon the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr Morsi’s party.
If the military did not bring to bear the full weight of its armed authority, the new arrangement probably wouldn’t last a day, given that the cadre-based Brotherhood, the Arab world’s premier ideological current of political Islam, is Egypt’s most powerful political institution after the Army and may not be above using bloody methods to gain its objective. It has a long history of remaining underground and playing cat and mouse with Egypt’s military for half a century.
An outfit like the Brotherhood doesn’t believe in democracy. But whatever one may feel about its lethal, religious Right ideology, it cannot be overlooked that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood had come to power through a transparent, internationally supervised, election, riding on a massive wave of support. Mr Morsi’s ejection from office, although it has been wildly greeted across the spectrum in the country, does send out the message that winning elections fair and square may not amount to much in Egypt’s smoky politics in these troubled times.
In light of the extraordinary recent events, the military’s assurance that it will work towards bringing about political reconciliation in the country hardly appears credible. The idea of forcing an elected government from power by the military, no matter how poor its record, does not augur well for democracy in developing societies.
Will the winners of the next election, whenever it may be held, be safe from the military if the latter is not in accord with them? This is the question that ideologues of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 must now ask.
Mr Morsi’s economic policies badly hurt the country, especially the poor. But it is his politics that alienated a wide swathe of opinion. There is a lesson there. Egyptian developments are likely to reverberate around West Asia, and cause grave uncertainties internationally.