Out with the Brotherhood, back with the Army
Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi is now ex-President Morsi - under house arrest with his family - as the military, under chief of army staff, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has stepped forward to install a new President and interim technocrat government, and is arresting some 300 leading members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt's experiment with a freely-elected, Sunni-dominated government, begun just about a year ago, is over.
This writer has argued in several past blogs that Morsi needed to spend far less time consolidating Brotherhood power in virtually every government institution, in a society, a large segment of which is comprised of not only educated, secular-minded Egyptians, but some Christians (about 10% of the populace) and a small Shia population (about 1%). But it was not just religious differences that led an estimated 14 million protesters into the streets on June 30 and subsequent days and nights, demanding that Morsi be ousted. It was as importantly Morsi's, and his government's, combination of arrogance and incompetence, on a grand scale.
As previously noted, Morsi failed to even begin to mitigate economic pressures, and the economy is now in free-fall. Power outages, in a heat-ravaged Cairo and elsewhere, are frequent, petrol lines grow ever longer, bread and other staples are rationed, as wheat supplies dwindle, or are often not available at all. Youth unemployment exceeds 40%, serious crime is surging, inflation is rapid and accelerating, the central government deficit is some 11% of GDP, foreign-exchange reserves are nearly gone, and so are international investors and tourists. The International Monetary Fund has stood ready to disperse a $4.8 billion stand-by loan, but Morsi's government resisted at every turn the implementation of austerity measures, an essential loan condition.
It is within this context that the Army felt compelled to intervene, and suspend a constitution that was so hastily written and implemented by Morsi's government. (And in this context, America and other countries have closed their embassies in the country and withdrawn their personnel.) The new interim leader, Adly Mahmud Mansour, the top judge of Egypt's constitutional court, is promising new elections and a new, broadly-inclusive constitution. The Army has said it will guarantee the right to peaceful demonstrations. If Mansour, and the Army, hold to their promises over the next few months, the considerable damage done to the cause of democracy, by forcefully removing a freely-elected government, will be much less than that of leaving in power a government whose actions increasingly exacerbated an already polarized society, and whose gross incompetence has pushed the economy to the brink of collapse. There is a chance that this military "coup", unlike so many before it, will be used to encourage a functioning democracy in Egypt. If so, the coup will have been worth it.