Egypt: Al-Sisi’s run for President: Bonapartism and Gulf Oil Money

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/sisis-president-bonapartism.html

Egypt: Al-Sisi’s run for President: Bonapartism and Gulf Oil Money
By Juan Cole | Mar. 27, 2014

Egypt’s Brig. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, 59, on Wednesday resigned his military commission and announced that he will run for president. He was given a long spot on Egyptian television to make the announcement, still wearing his uniform (he said it was the last time he would be seen in it after a career of some 36 years).

Al-Sisi’s announcement was more Jimmy Carter than Ronald Reagan. He was brutally frank about the weakness of the Egyptian economy. He admitted that there is high unemployment among the youth in particular. He admitted that most Egyptians don’t have proper medical care. He lamented that Egypt is dependent on foreign aid from others. He said the country has a terrorism problem. He acknowledged that after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, no one can dream of being president of Egypt without the support of the Egyptian people. I.e., he was promising to run a clean election and abide by the vote tallies (Mubarak used to get 98% of the vote via ballot-stuffing).

Al-Sisi seems to be genuinely popular. In polling, a majority of Egyptians already says that it will vote for him. The downside is that the youth did not come out to vote for his constitution, peeved that he put some of their prominent organizers in jail for protesting. And most youth say they have no intention of voting for president. Al-Sisi’s movement of last summer had been a coalition of youth movements, labor movements, and the army and the civil servants. The youth wing has abandoned him. Public sector labor is also very unhappy and has been striking. The postal workers struck when I was in Egypt a couple of weeks ago. So al-Sisi just has the older established voters who are opposed to Muslim fundamentalism and tired of the disruptions after the 2011 revolution.

The al-Sisi run for president mixes together two motifs. First, it is a sort of Bonapartism, a restoration of the presidency to a military man, which had been the case with Egypt’s four post-1952 presidents. The tradition was briefly interrupted in 2012-2013 when there was a civilian, Muslim Brotherhood president, Muhammad Morsi. The military in turn is a steward of the enormous public sector, both of state business elites and of public sector workers.