Looking back at the events in Egypt over the past eighteen months, we should perhaps not view what has happened this week as any great surprise. A combination of a stagnant economy, deep secular and religious divisions, and the daily panoply of strikes and riots, meant that Egypt had become a tinderbox of civil unrest, inevitably poised to flare up on the anniversary of Morsi’s assumption of presidential power.
It is more than two years since the country ousted Hosni Mubarak from power and Egypt is, if anything, in a worse situation than before. The budget deficit has increased and unemployment remains high. Job prospects are poor, the currency weakened, the price of food and fuel has gone up. Add to this an unequal distribution of wealth, a chronic problem with corruption, a lack of security and the uneasy relationship between Muslims and Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, and suddenly it isn’t difficult to understand why Egyptians are fed up with what they see as minimal social and economic progression since the revolution in 2011. The Egyptian government has known that trouble was brewing on the streets of Cairo for weeks.
But it must also be said that not all Egyptians are critical of the Muslim Brotherhood and its policies. This is part of the problem. Where they were united in the overthrow of Mubarak, the Egyptian population is now deeply polarised between conservative Islamist supporters and a combined opposition of liberals, leftists and secularists. Everyone supports the idea of a democracy but the question lies in what sort of democracy this should be.
It is worth reiterating at this point the meaning of the term “democracy”. Democracy, from the Greek demokratia, meaning “rule of the people” (‘demos’ = people; ‘kratia’ = rule / power) is a form of government in which all citizens eligible to vote are able to participate either directly or through elected representatives, in the legislative management and development of the state. Obviously, this works in principle on the basis of legal structures which ensure that progress can be made with the support of the majority.
But a democracy should work in the interests of its people and it could be argued that desperate times call for desperate measures. The Egyptian government have been very careful not to describe this as what is effectively a military coup. Yet Egyptians face the uncomfortable truth that, as a democratically-elected leader, Morsi’s fall from grace signals a failed attempt to set democracy in motion. For democracy to work in a country as divided as Egypt, it is clear that society is going to have to learn to conform to the rule of those who they do not necessarily like.
Ironically, the riots this week will do little to relieve Egypt’s economic woes in the short term. Part of the solution in solving the country’s economic problems lies in persuading other nations that Egypt has the stable social infrastructure to make it an appealing prospect for foreign investors. No more so is this the case than in tourism. With as many as one in five Egyptians employed in the tourist industry, the country depends heavily on an influx of visitors throughout the year. But the cost of the revolution has been severe. One only needs to look at the sheer drop in the number of Nile cruises operating between Cairo and Aswan, down to just eighteen at the beginning of 2013 compared to two hundred pre-revolution – to get a sense of the devastating impact Egypt’s political turmoil has had on its international image.
I hope that Egypt will recover from this debacle and continue to negotiate the tricky path towards a better economy and fairer system of government. This is a very different situation from two years ago and the mood in Cairo is far from jubilant. Egyptians know that getting rid of Morsi won’t solve their concerns and that the work is barely begun. And with the end goal something of a moving target, the struggle towards a new democratic society drags on.