The disqualification of ten candidates from Egypt's presidential
race, including the Muslim Brotherhood nominee, has convinced the Brotherhood
that the military is conspiring against it to win the election. It's now
attempting to grab power from the army and threatening to take to the streets
-- potentially sparking a new round in Egypt's revolution.
By Eric Trager
Khairat al-Shater of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Freedom and Justice Party. (Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Courtesy Reuters)
In
late May, Egypt will ostensibly hold its first open presidential elections in
nearly six decades. But the Muslim Brotherhood suspects treachery. This past
Tuesday’s disqualification of ten presidential candidates, including
Brotherhood leader Khairat al-Shater, has convinced the group that the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has ruled Egypt since Hosni Mubarak resigned
last year, is conspiring against it to ensure the election of a non-Islamist
president who would restore the country’s autocratic order. In response, the
Brotherhood has vowed to “protect the revolution.” It is directing its energies
against the SCAF, running a replacement presidential candidate and calling for
mass demonstrations. This aggressive approach is undermining the legitimacy of
Egypt’s transition.
The
Brotherhood’s animosity toward the SCAF is a relatively recent development. For
the first 12 months following Mubarak’s fall, the Brotherhood appeared to be
working in tandem with the military junta. The SCAF legalized the Brotherhood’s
newly formed political party, Freedom and Justice, and administered
parliamentary elections that the Brotherhood won handily. Meanwhile, the
Islamist organization refrained from criticizing the SCAF, even endorsing the
March 2011 constitutional amendments that legitimized the SCAF’s control of
Egypt’s transition, and, after assuming control over the parliament in January
2012, appointing a retired general to chair the legislative committee that
handles military issues. Cooperation seemed so smooth that many assumed that
the SCAF and Brotherhood had agreed to accommodate each other’s needs and
thereby control Egypt’s political transition jointly.
Despite
this reciprocal relationship, however, the Brotherhood continues to mistrust
the SCAF. To begin with, the group remembers that when it last cooperated with
Egypt’s military rulers during a political transition -- after the 1952 Free
Officers Revolution -- the military soon turned on it, banning it and
imprisoning its leaders en masse. The Brotherhood also fears that the SCAF
intends to retain its grip on Egyptian politics to protect its perquisites,
which include autonomy over its budgets and control over major industries that,
according to various estimates, comprise between 15 and 40 percent of the
Egyptian economy. At times, the SCAF’s actions have validated this concern
about its goals: it has tried to secure its financial equities by influencing
the writing of Egypt’s next constitution, in which it hopes to carve out an autonomous
niche for itself so that it is protected from parliamentary or civilian
scrutiny.
The
Brotherhood’s concerns about the SCAF’s autocratic intentions may be
understandable. But the organization’s recent response is damaging the
credibility of Egypt’s political transition.
The
first of signs of a break between the Brotherhood and the SCAF came in March,
when the Brotherhood-dominated parliament hinted that it might pass a no
confidence vote against the SCAF-appointed government and demanded the right to
pick Egypt’s next prime minister and cabinet. This represented a major overstep
of the parliament’s authority: under Egypt’s provisional constitution, only the
junta can select and remove ministers. And when the SCAF rejected the
Brotherhood’s demand, the Islamist group doubled down on its power grab, using
its parliamentary strength to pack the constitution-writing committee with
Islamists, leaving only 16 out of 100 seats for secularists, five for
Christians, and six for women. When one-quarter of the committee walked out to
protest the Brotherhood’s actions, the Brotherhood became increasingly
paranoid, blaming the backlash on a vicious media campaign and SCAF pressure.
The Brotherhood then intensified its illegal attempt at removing the SCAF-appointed
government, and, seeking executive power, reversed its pledge to stay out of
the presidential race by nominating its own candidate, Khairat al-Shater.
The
group made this decision despite knowing that al-Shater’s candidacy faced a
major legal hurdle. In 2007, al-Shater was convicted of money laundering and
belonging to a banned organization -- the Brotherhood -- and sentenced to five
years imprisonment. Although the case was clearly politicized, Egyptian law
prevents convicts from running for elections irrespective of why they were
convicted. Thus, when the Presidential Elections Committee (PEC), which
determines eligibility for the upcoming elections, disqualified al-Shater, it
did so according to its legal mandate. The PEC, after all, can only apply the
black-letter law, and thus has no authority to reevaluate convictions. Indeed,
the Brotherhood anticipated this outcome: shortly after nominating al-Shater,
it put forth a second candidate, Brotherhood political leader and former
parliamentarian Mohamed Morsi, as a backup in case the PEC deemed al-Shater
ineligible.
Al-Shater,
of course, was one of only ten candidates disqualified by the PEC. But in all
cases, the PEC appears to have acted on solid legal ground. Former Egyptian
intelligence director Omar Suleiman, the presumed SCAF candidate, was
disqualified for failing to accumulate the requisite number of authorizations
to appear on the ballot. The PEC’s ejection of Salafist presidential candidate
Hazem Abu Ismail was similarly sound: Abu Ismail’s mother was a dual
Egyptian-American citizen and, under Article 26 of Egypt’s constitutional
declaration, the Egyptian president must be “born of two Egyptian parents who
have never held another citizenship.” Still other candidates were disqualified
for outstanding criminal convictions, disputed party leaderships, lack of
parliamentary support, evasion of military service, and foreign citizenship.
Yet
the notion that the PEC essentially did its duty seems to have few adherents in
Cairo. And a variety of conspiracy theories regarding the disqualifications are
taking hold. According to the most popular of these notions, the SCAF ran Omar
Suleiman only to boot him from the race, thereby making the disqualification of
Abu Ismail and al-Shater appear unbiased. Another theory contends that the
United States, fearing the prospect of a Salafist Egyptian president, forged
the documents that demonstrate Abu Ismail’s mother’s American citizenship. To
some extent, these conspiracy theories are not surprising: they are the product
of an Egyptian society long accustomed to behind-the-scenes political
manipulations during 60 years of autocratic rule. Moreover, Egyptian
administrative bodies, especially ones as powerful as the PEC, rarely stick to
their limited purviews, so it is understandable that Egyptians would doubt that
the PEC acted within its authority.
However
incredible the theories, they will certainly undermine the legitimacy of the
elections. The Brotherhood is contributing to this problem: rather than simply
encouraging its supporters to vote for Morsi, it has harshly attacked the PEC’s
integrity and used al-Shater’s exclusion from the race to intensify its assault
on the SCAF. Al-Shater, immediately following his disqualification, said,
“there are attempts to abort the revolution by remnants of the Mubarak regime
in all state institutions,” and later accused PEC chairman Farouk Sultan of
being “loyal to Mubarak.” (It is worth noting the disingenuous nature of this
accusation: although Mubarak did appoint Sultan president of Egypt’s Supreme
Constitutional Court, his chairmanship of the PEC is enshrined in the very
constitutional declaration that the Brotherhood helped draft, and for which the
Brotherhood aggressively campaigned during the March 2011 constitutional
referendum.) Meanwhile, after largely avoiding demonstrations in Tahrir Square
since last year’s revolt, according to a statement that the Brotherhood
released on Wednesday, it is suddenly using mass protests to “protect the
revolution” from the SCAF’s “attempts at a coup” against it. The Brotherhood
will participate in today’s mass demonstration, which is expected to draw tens
of thousands of protesters, and has hinted that the protests could extend
indefinitely, in the words of al-Shater, “until the revolution is completed.”
Moreover,
by running Morsi, a much weaker candidate than al-Shater, the Brotherhood is
preparing to blame its likely election loss on the SCAF. To address Morsi’s
unpopularity, the Brotherhood has sought to downplay his importance by tweeting
that the group is “tied to is project, and not to an individual.” The organization’s
sudden participation in anti-SCAF demonstrations is an insurance policy: if
Morsi cannot win, it will claim that the elections were rigged by a SCAF that,
as al-Shater charged on Tuesday, “wants a president who is loyal to it.”
The
Brotherhood will no doubt make this claim if Ahmed Shafiq, a presidential
candidate and a former Egyptian Air Force commander who served as Mubarak’s
final prime minister, is elected. As Murad Mohamed Aly, a Morsi campaign
official, told me, “The Egyptians did not revolt to get rid of Mubarak … to get
another Mubarak -- Shafiq or someone.” And this same logic could apply to Amr
Moussa, Mubarak’s former foreign minister who currently leads most national
polls. “We have strong doubts that Egyptians will elect someone who is connected
to the previous regime,” said Aly. “If [Moussa is elected] through
interference, we will protest.”
The
Muslim Brotherhood’s recent behavior suggests that whenever possible, it will
embrace conspiracy theories to justify its aggressive approach towards Egypt’s
transition. So unless Morsi, or perhaps another Islamist, wins the presidency,
the Brotherhood’s fight for Egypt’s future -- and its attempts to delegitimize
those institutions that it does not control -- will likely continue well beyond
the elections this May.
-This commentary was published in Foreign Affairs on 19/04/2012
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