Notes on the 2013 Egyptian Coup d'etat

Haenni, Patrick. “The Reasons for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Failure in Power”. In Egypt’s Revolutions, edited by Bernard Rougier and Stéphane Lacroix, 19–39. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 

• During its brief time in power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the vested interests of the state bureaucracy and alienated other political parties. In the face of continued public protest and trade union opposition, the Brotherhood adopted a law-and-order line that turned the crowds in the streets against it (19-20).
• Although the US initially supported the Brotherhood as a popular and stable government in Egypt, it was unwilling to challenge the Egyptian military once it became clear that the army had decided to reclaim control (20).
• During its long period in opposition to the Mubarak government, the Brotherhood had maintained alliances with other opposition groups. Earlier in 2011, the Brotherhood had sponsored public forums with other opposition groups to discuss democratic change in Egypt. Their temporary support for Mohamed el-Baradei's presidential bid also demonstrates a willingness to work with the broader opposition (20).
• The Brotherhood attempted to prolong consensus among the opposition during the 2011 revolution and avoid the impression that it would enforce its Islamist agenda. To this end, it created an opposition coalition, called the Democratic Alliance, composed of Wafd, al-Ghad, several Nasserist parties, and a number of former regime allies, in addition to the Brotherhood (20).
• The Democratic Alliance began to fracture and shrink in the month following the revolution, as the Constitutional Reform Commission released their draft constitution on 19 March 2011. It made no major alterations to the existing constitution -- contrary to the wishes of the non-Islamist members of the Alliance -- and did not accede to the popular demand that a constituent assembly be called before elections were held. Within the Alliance, only the Brotherhood supported the Commission's work (21).
• Campaigns by the Brotherhood during the referendum focused on defending Article 2 of the constitution, which proclaimed that all law stemmed from sharia. This turned the conversation away from other elements of the constitution, like the lack of democratic reforms, and towards Islamic identity in Egypt (21).
• Islamists organized a protest against secularism on 29 July, to which the Brotherhood gave tacit support. The protest itself was overrun by extreme Salafists who praised Osama bin-Laden and vowed the destruction of the Democratic Alliance; in the aftermath of these protests, the al-Tagammu Communist Party left the Alliance. On 15 August 2011,  all parties opposed to Islamism organized themselves into the Egyptian Bloc (21-22).
• The Brotherhood defended the constitution and the popular referendum supporting it not on their own merits, as a method of ending military involvement in politics and returning order to Egypt. The Brotherhood's unwillingness to endorse continued revolution was a combination of fear and respect of the military and the desire of its conservative constituents for a return to business as usual (21).
• Parliamentary elections in Fall 2011 further damaged the Democratic Alliance, as both Wafd and Nour, a Salafi party, left the Alliance after failing to come to agreement with the Brotherhood on joint electoral lists (22).
• Tensions between the Brotherhood and all other political parties were exacerbated by President Morsi's decree on 21 November 2012 that the presidency and legislature were immune from prosecution. Fearing the restoration of autocracy, this decision sparked month-long protests (23).
• The Brotherhood responded to these protests by portraying itself as a law-and-order party opposed to the chaos and disorder created by opposition protests. This strategy also received the support of most Salafi parties, despite their fears that the Brotherhood would dominate government. The Brotherhood established a conservative Islamist coalition between themselves, the Salafi parties, and the centrist al-Wasat party (23).
• Nour has a very mixed relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. While they both agree on the necessity of an Islamic state, Nour sees the Brotherhood as overly ambitious and not Islamic enough. This had led to a number of tactical splits between Nour's Salafi base and the Brotherhood, as Nour supported Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh in the 2012 presidential election, and backed both the 2013 anti-Brotherhood protests and the subsequent military coup (22-23).
• The Brotherhood viewing the alliance of regime-affiliated businessmen and organized labor as the basis of opposition to the Brotherhood, and tried to address this challenge by breaking the power of trade unions (24).
•  The Morsi government's behavior towards Egyptian labor unions was marked by arrests, a lack of legal progress, and suspicion of their activities. The Brotherhood's own liberal economic policies, combined with pressure from the IMF, motivated continued crackdowns on organized labor (26).
• During its time in parliament, the Brotherhood voted against the empowerment of trade unions and tried to use its influence to derail strikes and split workers' movements. The general stance of the Brotherhood was that strikes were organized by, "spoiled workers incapable of being patient and recognizing that their situation had improved since the revolution" (24).
• In November 2012, President Morsi took steps against public protests, empowering a special court to punish those who insulted the government, impeded transportation through protests, or destroyed property. He also declared exceptional powers to end opposition to government function (24-25).
• The Brotherhood attempted to establish control over trade unions by declaring, in January 2013, that all members of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation over the age of 60 would be retired and replaced with their junior members; if no junior had been selected in the 2006 elections, then Manpower Minister Khaled al-Azhari would appoint their replacement. This ended with 150 of the 500 Federation executive board seats being filled with Brotherhood supporters (25).
• The new constitution enforced control over the Federation by declaring the all unions had to join the Federation, essentially making the hundreds of independent trade unions formed in 2011 and 2012 illegal (25).
• Egypt had been on an ILO blacklist for failing to meet international labor standards for years, and, after a brief period, was placed back on this list in June 2013 due to continued harassment and beatings of trade unionists and the maintenance of the 1976 law prohibiting independent unions (25-26).
• The Brotherhood sought to restore relations with the Egyptian business community, in particular reaching out to business interests close to the Mubarak government to reassure them either personally or collectively of the Morsi government's friendly attitude towards business (26).
• Outreach to the Egyptian business community was orchestrated by Hassan Malek, who founded the Egyptian Business Development Association and the Contact Group. This group brought together Islamist businessmen, like Khairat al-Shater and Osama Farid, with Mubarak-linked businessmen, like Mohammed Farid Khamis, Safwat Thabet, and Mansour Amer. It also facilitated the negotiated return of many exiled businessmen (26-27).
• The Brotherhood justified its actions by arguing that the return of Murbarak-aligned businessmen would facilitate economic recovery. These rehabilitated Mubarak allies combined with young business-minded Islamists within the Brotherhood to form a powerful liberal and pro-business lobbying group within the Morsi government (27-28).
• The Brotherhood's stance of reconciliation and rehabilitation of many pro-Mubarak businessmen was lamented by other members of the governing coalition, especially Nour (27).
• The Brotherhood assumed that its friendly and merciful treatment of Mubarak-aligned businessmen would result in a lasting alliance between the business community and the Brotherhood. To the businessmen, this was always a marriage of convenience and they did not feel qualms about jumping ship in 2013 (27).
• The Brotherhood saw the main threat to its goals stemming from a deep state within the Egyptian bureaucracy and tried to destroy this threat by purging state institutions and filling departments with its own members. This approach realized the fears of the liberals and the Salafis that the Brotherhood was aiming to exercise complete control over the state, and they did not join the Brotherhood in its fight against the deep state (28-29). The Brotherhood saw any resistance to its takeover of bureaucracies as tantamount to pro-Mubarak counterrevolution and attacked with greater force, further alienating departments that were often simply conservative and opposed to Islamism (33).
• The success of the Brotherhood's strategy of filling government departments with its own staff varied in different areas. Weak state bodies, like the national media, or those with Islamist sympathies, like the Ministry of Religious Endowments, were quickly taken over by the Brotherhood (29).
• The Morsi government used strategies of control over the media similar to those employed by the Mubarak government, especially dropping salaries to nearly nothing and distributing bonuses to compliant workers, while denying these bonuses to opposition state-employed journalists. It also forcibly retired many older workers and replaced them with Brotherhood supporters (29).
• In the Ministry of Religious Endowments, it excluded Sufis from positions of power -- claiming that they were natural allies of Hosni Mubarak -- and placed prominent Brothers and Salafis in positions of power. Critics of the Brotherhood were dismissed from the Ministry and replaced with loyal Brothers (29-30).
• The Brotherhood's purge of the state bureaucracy did not touch the security services, with members of the Mubarak government remaining in control of the Ministry of Interior, including men who had been prominent in repressing the 2011 revolution (30).
• The amicable relationship maintained between Mubarak-affiliated figures in the security forces and the Brotherhood can be explained through the Brotherhood's desire to use the same extensive security apparatus created by Hosni Mubarak for its own aims (30-31).
• The Brotherhood maintained particularly careful relations with the army, declaring its respect for the Camp David Accords and trying to avoid conflict with the military, whom it saw as a major political force that shared its dedication to societal order (31).
• Although the army originally sided with liberals against the Islamists during the 2011 disputes over the new constitution, the younger generation of military leaders gathered around Abdel Fatah el-Sisi recognized the Brotherhood as a force dedicated to social stability. The alliance between the Brotherhood and the army was based on mutual concern about stability and order, the army's promise to stay out of civilian politics, and the Brotherhood's respect for military privileges in the 2012 Constitution, including the right to manage its own budget outside of parliamentary supervision, and the ability to try civilians in its military court system (31-32).
• The army was also the primary strategic partner of the USA and the West, and Western support for the Morsi government was conditional on its respect for rudimentary democracy, international commitments, a liberal market economy, and good relations with the military (32).
• Tensions did exist between the army and the Brotherhood. Firstly, the army saw President Morsi's plan to open the Suez Canal to international investment as compromising Egyptian sovereignty, as well as his conciliatory position on the border dispute with Sudan. The military's decision to destroy tunnels into Gaza also inflamed tensions, as they blamed the Brotherhood of supporting Hamas despite its attacks on Egyptian soldiers (32).
• The judiciary formed one of the cores of opposition to the Brotherhood, with most judges refusing to oversee referendums organized by the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood interpreted this resistance of evidence of counterrevolution, while the judiciary saw the Brotherhood as ignoring its decisions and stepping on judicial independence and decided to fight back (33-34).
• By the time that it reached a position of power, the goal of the Brotherhood had shifted from broad political and institutional change -- still sought by most other participants in the 2011 Revolution -- to societal stability and economic growth (34).
• The Brotherhood split with other members of the Democratic Alliance over the issue of continuing the revolution and the resultant disruption of everyday life. It ended up siding with a group of other conservative political forces, including the military, the security services, the business community, and other pro-business Islamist and Salafist groups (35).
• The author argues that the essential mistake of the Brotherhood was a belief that stability could be restored through economic growth without accompanying political concord. It focused solely on getting the economy running again and assumed that doing this would allow it to maintain its hold on power despite increased criticism of authoritarianism and opposition from almost all other political parties, with even the Salafis abandoning the Brotherhood in 2013 (35-36).

 

Létourneau, Jean-François. "Explaining the Muslim Brotherhood’s Rise and Fall in Egypt". Mediterranean Politics, Vol.21, No.2 (2016): 300-307.

• Muslim Brotherhood tried to parlay with security forces in recognition that army was real power in country and Brotherhood could not rule independent of them (303).
• Some cooperation already existed between Brotherhood and the SCAF in early 2012. This would explain the Brotherhood backing SCAF changes to the constitution (303).
• Brotherhood was able to win elections because it was an organized and disciplined group. This meant that even younger Brothers with democratic sympathies obeyed Brotherhood decisions (303).
• The Freedom and Justice Party, representing the Brotherhood in parliament, had very little independence from the Brotherhood’s own structure and had its leadership appointed. Brothers were prohibited, upon threat of expulsion, to vote for other parties (303).
• Whereas traditional support for the Brotherhood came from middle class Egyptians, in the 2012 elections, the demise of the pro-Mubarak National Democratic Party meant that poor Egyptians no longer supported a ‘party of power’ in return for patronage. Driven mainly by economic issues, the Egyptian poor supported the Brotherhood under the belief that it would fix the economy and champion redistribution (303-304).
• Once it became clear that the Brotherhood did not actually support redistribution and would continue neoliberalism, its support among the poor evaporated (306).
• The extensive social networks maintained by the Brotherhood allowed it to spread its vague economic message to larger numbers of voters than leftist parties, who concentrated almost entirely on the small labor movement (304).
• The Brotherhood cadres had very little experience in administration or governance and, as a result, was forced to depend on Mubarak era technocrats to actually do things (305).

 

Al-Anani, Khalil. “Upended Path: The Rise and Fall of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.” The Middle East Journal, Vol.69, no. 4 (2015): 527–543.

• The Brotherhood maintained a system of hospitals, clinics, and schools throughout Egypt since the 1980s, and provided many social services not provided by the state following neoliberalization in the late 1980s (529).
• Of the coalition that overthrew Mubarak, only the Brotherhood and other Islamists were a strong party organ. Its immediate transition to parliamentary politics gave it an advantage in elections over opposition still focusing on protest and street politics (531).
• The Brotherhood broke from its initial promises to not seek domination and contest only 30% of seats in the first election, when in contested over half of parliamentary seats and the presidency (532).
• The Brotherhood sought this absolute control because they felt that the deep state was constantly pushing back and feared counterrevolution. They thought the only way to prevent this was to gain full control themselves (533).
• The Brotherhood is a conservative movement that believed in gradual change. This outlook and its history of cooperation with the Egyptian state led to its adoption an unpopular strategy of parlay with the Mubarak regime that alienated more revolutionary parties. These strategies turned the old revolutionaries against the Brotherhood (534–535).
• The strict hierarchical organizational structure of the Brotherhood made it more conservative than many of its actual members. The Brotherhood’s domination of decision making in the Morsi administration made it seem very undemocratic (535–538).
• Brothers lacked the basic administrative skills to govern Egypt’s bureaucracy. Their exclusion from prior governments made them totally unable to change or manage Egypt’s complex bureaucracy (539).

 

Brown, Nathan, and Michele Dunne. “Unprecedented Pressures, Uncharted Course for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood”. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 2015. 

• The Brotherhood failed while in power because it was not revolutionary enough and, instead of allying with hardline revolutionaries to destroy the deep state, it sought to use older strategies of working with the regime (10). This lead to claims that they had betrayed the revolution (11).

 

Osman, Tarek. “Islamists: asset and flaw". openDemocracy, 5 July 2011.

• Islamist parties are the best organized in 2011 after the collapse of the regime’s National Democratic Party.

 

Tammam, Husam, and Patrick Haenni, "Egypt: Islam in the insurrection". Religioscope, 22 February 2011.

• The Brotherhood and Salafis did not originally participate in the 2011 protests and only joined as they gained momentum.
• Their rejection of the protests, at least among the leadership, stemmed from an extreme conservatism and fear of chaos and disorder.
• Only by the 3rd day of protest, the 28th, did the Brothers actually mobilize in favor of the revolution and send tens of thousands of supporters into the streets.
• Brotherhood support for the revolution after the 28th did not come so much from ideological commitment to revolutionary goals but a fear that, since Mubarak laid public blame on them for the protests, they would be severely prosecuted if the revolution failed.
• The Brotherhood was ready to negotiate even during the protests, reaching out to make some sort of deal with Omar Suleiman, vice president and former intelligence chief, on 5 February.

  

Dalacoura, Katerina. “Islamism and Neoliberalism in the Aftermath of the 2011 Arab Uprisings: The Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt and Nahda in Tunisia”. In Neoliberal Governmentality and the Future of the State in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Emel Akcali, 61–83. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

• Islamism in Egypt did not challenge neoliberalism, but sought to work within neoliberalism while still addressing issues of ‘social justice’ (61–62). This is because larger trends of Islamism had largely reconciled with neoliberalism (67).
• Islamists had long infiltrated Egyptian labor movements since 1987, and Islamist labor leaders were criticized by their leftist counterparts for their reticence to strike (68).
• The Brotherhood and other Islamists won the 2012 elections because they promised better governance, on the basis of Islamic credentials, and the poor thought that they would redistribute wealth (69).
• Although it generally supported business interests, the Brotherhood still held to some populist economic policies, like fuel and food subsidies. It refused to cut these subsidies in 2012, allowing an IMF deal negotiated by the SCAF to fall through and alienating many business interests as well as the army (71–72).
• The IMF continued to withhold aid throughout 2012, but was adamant about certain reforms, like tax increases and cutting subsidies, that the Morsi government would not make (72).
• The Egyptian economy was mismanaged under the Brotherhood, with recovery faint and the Egyptian Pound falling against other currencies. Public expenditure increased as civil servant salaries increased, but without other reforms it just contributed to higher deficits (72–73).
• In the aftermath of the 2013 coup, aid came in from the Gulf, contributing to a market boom (73).
• The Broherhood’s economic policies failed so hard because they tried to reconcile the conflicting interests of their poor and middle–class constituents. It mainly sided with business interests, included those linked to Mubarak, but was concerned enough with lower class support that it did not provide unconditional support for neoliberalism (73–74).

 

Roy, Olivier. “There Will Be No Islamist Revolution”. Journal of Democracy, Vol.24, No.1 (2013): 14-19.

• The Brotherhood has always been very conservative and conciliatory towards the government, giving it the ire of other Salafi and Jihadi Islamist groups. The Brotherhood did not plan for nor was it prepared for revolution (15).
• This lack of preparation for revolution mirrored a lack of planning for government. Beyond its vague statements on surface qualities of Islam, the Brotherhood lacked an alternative vision of society, economy, or the state (15-16).

 

Trager, Eric, Nancy Youssef, and Michele Dunne. “The Rise and Fall of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood”. The Washington Institute, 8 November 2016.

• The Brotherhood was the only organization able to quickly mobilize after the 2011 revolution. It has a rigid organizational structure staffed by loyal cadres, trained for 5 to 8 years before full membership, that were able to mobilize voters more effectively than anyone else.
• The Brotherhood had no real policy proposals, meaning that its Islamist project failed because it did not have any substance.
• Initially, the Brotherhood was concerned about an American backlash to its participation in protests, but when the US didn’t object to Brotherhood participation, it felt emboldened enough to seek political power.
• The 2012 presidential election saw Morsi supported by many non-Islamists because his competitor, Ahmed Shafiq, was seen as a tool of the deep state.
• This explains why public opinion turned against him so quickly, because actual support for Morsi had always been fairly low, people just thought he was less shit that his opponents.

  

Pargeter, Alison. “The Muslim Brotherhood: From Opposition to Power”, Revised edition. London: Saqi Books, 2013.

• The Brotherhood was surprised by the initial protest movement and Brothers were not the initial participants in the 2011 revolution. They had statements after the revolution in Tunisia but had not planned for anything similar in Egypt (212-213).
• This non-participation was driven by a fear that if the protests failed, the Brotherhood would bear the brunt of repression, the conservatism of the movement, and the worry that their participation would lead to the revolution being delegitimized as Islamic (214-215).
• Despite rhetoric to the contrary, Brotherhood sought to make a deal with regime as soon as possible, opening up talks with VP Omar Suleiman on 5 February (218). This immediately created splits within the revolutionary camp (219-220).
• The Brotherhood saw total allegiance to the revolution as dangerous, because it might prompt intervention by the army. It sought to steer a course between SCAF and the revolutionaries, putting itself in the prime negotiating position (222-223).
• Other revolutionaries saw this, and the constitutional referendum, as a power grab by the Brotherhood and a betrayal of the revolution (224).
• During the leadup to elections in late 2011, the Brotherhood sponsored mass protests against the SCAF for interference in the constitutional committee. This was to demonstrate its political power and intimidate the military (230).
• Tensions between the Brotherhood and the military were high in the run-up to elections, causing the Brotherhood to become increasingly focused on dominating political institutions in order to outmaneuver the SCAF (233-235).
• Opposition to Brotherhood dominance, especially over the constitutional convention, was written off as a conspiracy by the military – demonstrating the paranoia of Brotherhood leaders (234).

Trager, Eric. “Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days”. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016.

• The internal organization of the Brotherhood is opaque and suspicious of outsiders because of its belief that it alone is the representative of Islam. This means that it is not good at cooperation with others and tends towards autocracy (4).
• They were ousted largely because they fought with everyone, from the SCAF to the judiciary to the opposition, refused to compromise, interpreted criticism as conspiracy, and continually demanded additional power (234).
• The greatest weakness of the Brotherhood was its utter incompetence. It had no plans of what to do when in power nor any idea of how implementing sharia would change society or the economy (6).
• The Obama administration’s friendly policy towards Morsi government shocked the Brotherhood and convinced it that it need not fear Western intervention. Without this anxiety, the Brotherhood sought to consolidate additional power (7-8).
• The Brotherhood horribly mismanaged the economy, failing to solve any of the critical economic policies and was forced to cut gas subsidies in 2013. It also faced a critical electricity shortage in Summer 2013 (203-204).

Arafat, Alaa Al-Din. “Egypt in Crisis: The Fall of Islamism and Prospects of Democratization”. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2018.

• The Morsi administration immediately became unpopular because it ruled without consensus or regard for other parties, alienating the opposition, and horribly mismanaged the economy, causing all the manifold economic issues of the Mubarak regime to worsen (33,50).
• It passed legislation to increase its own power to the detrimental of all political organizations. This pursuit of power cost it its last remaining Salafi allies (34). This was particularly important because the loss of its Salafist allies reduced the existing legitimacy the Morsi government among Islamists since there was now an Islamist opposition (60).
• The Brotherhood did not change Mubarak’s neoliberal policies, so the same economic problems persisted (50). If anything, the economy got worst with no signs of improving (138).
• The Brotherhood pursued such an exclusionary and unilateral governance strategy because the high-level Brothers did not trust anyone else and often considered others to be infidels. These negative impressions of the remaining opposition inspired the Brotherhood to use violence and state coercion against their opponents (34).
• The Brotherhood viewed the labor movement and the media as major enemies threatening to restore Mubarak. So they attacked these institutions; against the journalists this campaign was an utter failure since the Brotherhood lacked qualified journalists to replace or challenge its opponents in the press (59-60).
• The Morsi government has so antagonistic against so many other groups that it ended up turning the bureaucracy, judiciary, police, military, old Mubarak allies, secularists, liberals, and opposition parties into a common front against the Brotherhood (79, 138-139).
• This situation, and the resultant chaos from mass disaffection even among the security forces, allowed the military to reestablish itself as a pole of Egyptian politics promising order and strong opposition to Morsi (79).
• The Brotherhood’s split from the rest of the revolutionary coalition after the 2011 revolution was responsible for the eventual collapse of the Morsi government, as Morsi rejected the popular principles and general consensus of the revolution in favor of a Brotherhood-dominated Islamist vision (135).
• This was most visible in the Brotherhood’s unwillingness to let other parties into positions of importance in government. This alienated all other parties (135-136).
• The Brotherhood terribly mismanaged governance because it lacked competent administrators, refused to let others be in power, and did not attempt to reform the actual system to make it more democratic (137).
• In certain areas, like the Interior Ministry, the Morsi government knowingly availed itself of authoritarian methods and allowed police brutality for political ends. This led to questions about how much better Morsi was than Mubarak (138).