Muslim Brotherhood takes Egyptian presidency
2012Andrew Pollack 2012-07Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 12 →
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After massive theft of votes from liberal and radi cal candidates in the first round of Egypt’s presiden tial elections in May, there was widespread fear that the country’s ruling military would rig the results in the run-off between its favored candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) candidate, Mohamed Morsi, a fear exacerbated by the delay in announcing those results. To hedge its bets in case it couldn’t get away with outright theft of the election, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is sued a series of rulings in the days before the results were announced, dissolving parliament and stripping the incoming president of virtually all power.
SCAF’s measures included giving military police and soldiers the ability to arrest and detain civilians. It also overturned legislation passed by the dismissed parliament that had forbidden former Mubarak re gime figures (like Shafiq) from running for president.
To top it all, just a few hours before the polls for the runoff had closed, SCAF announced an “addendum” to the constitutional declaration of March 2011, under which it, and not the now-dissolved parliament, would pick members of the commission to write a new con stitution. It also limited what could be in such a docu ment, reserving control of certain ministries to itself, and establishing its right of veto over constitutional provisions that contravened the “interests of the coun try,” as well as reserving to itself the right to declare war (obviously intended as reassurance to Israel and the United States).
In sum, SCAF was attempting to carry out a “soft coup,” i.e., a usurpation of a variety of powers preserv ing its dictatorial role, as opposed to a “hard coup” in volving violent attacks and mass detentions. No one is under any illusion about the potential for SCAF to switch from the former to the latter. But the Egyp tian masses showed by flocking back to the country’s squares that they would not abide by a theft of the presidential election and would continue mobilizing against SCAF’s new measures.
The Tuesday after its dissolution some parliament members had threatened to convene outside their building, from which SCAF had locked them out. In the end, few from the formerly MB-dominated parliament turned out, which was viewed as yet another indica tion of the MB leadership’s unwillingness to confront the military.
Starting on Tuesday, June 19 (after the second round voting was done), masses of people returned to the squares in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and elsewhere, answering calls by the Brotherhood along with radi cal youth and leftist political organizations to demon strate against the military’s new moves and the threat that Shafiq might be declared president. The squares 12 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2012 Daniel Berehulak / Getty Images (Left) Women supporting the Muslim Brotherhood celebrate at June 19 Cairo election rally when Mohamed Morsi declared victory.
tutional and legal usurpations; a declaration by the president-elect rejecting the same; parties, politi cal movements and trade unions to elect a Constituent Assembly on the basis of consensus in order to block the military’s attempts to intervene in the formation of the assembly; and that the president-elect must issue an immediate order calling on the military to return to its bar racks and cancelling the powers granted to the military police to ar rest civilians.
The groups also demanded that the president-elect issue an imme diate amnesty for all civilians de tained by the military and form a committee to investigate the crimes committed against the revolution aries and to punish the killers of the martyrs. They called for the presi dent-elect to cancel the exceptional measures that restrict the exercise of democratic rights, and especially the criminalization of strikes.
A related statement was issued by the Revolutionary Socialists. They warned the MB youth in particu lar to continue their mobilization and to keep a watchful eye on their party’s leaders, and called for masses to stay in the squares until their demands were met.
In addition to echoing the demands of the alliance (of which it is a part) against the “soft coup” measures, the RS demanded the immediate surrender of power by the army; a popular referendum on the dissolution of parliament; the complete purging of all state insti tutions that have been militarized in recent months; stabilization of prices, an end to privatization, nation alization of the monopolies and the return of the com panies for which sales to private owners have been overturned by the courts.
The RS also pointed again to the need to unite the squares and the workplaces, to link the economic and the political. And in fact the return to the squares in June was matched by an uptick in action at workplac es—and even a combination of the two.
On July 6, six health-care workers’ unions united in calling for a general strike over the state budget just passed by SCAF. The unions called on Morsi to fulfill his promises of increasing the health budget. A leader of the doctors’ union, Abdel Rahman Gamal, told Al Masry Al Youm that the unions denounced SCAF for seizing legislative authority and passing the state bud get, saying the new budget was no different than the last one of Mubarak.
The same paper (available on the web in English as Egypt Independent) reported that on July 3, hundreds of workers at the Alexandria branch of Pirelli, the huge Italian tire manufacturer, had joined environmental monitoring unit workers in front of the presidential palace to meet Morsi to raise their demands over wage and job security issues.
And the same week a group of Metro workers began a sit-in at a Metro stop and threatened to begin a hunger strike if their demands were not met. They demanded that Morsi implement permanent contracts promised by SCAF-appointed Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzouri but never delivered.
This workplace-based militancy is being matched by Cairo slum residents who are resisting eviction by rich real estate developers.
An early indication that the MB hopes to be able to ignore such working-class-based action is seen in the report by revolutionary blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy that top MB officials were claiming that workers pro testing in front of the presidential palace were part of some “counterrevolutionary plot,” and had called them “mercenaries” paid to protest by State Security Police and businessmen affiliated with the dissolved National Democratic Party.
For news of what U.S. activists are doing in solidarity with the Egyptian revolution, see page 8, as well as the website of the Coalition to Defend the Egyptian Revo lution: defendegyptianrevolution.org. n