The chants, the impatient anger and even the symbols were the same — right down to laser-generated messages of “Game Over” that were directed at Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011 and this week turned against the elected president who came to power by way of the Arab Spring.
Where Egypt’s bookend rebellions part company, however, is the psychology of the streets.
The protesters’ latest gambit — embracing a far more fluid definition of democracy than simply a ballot-box victory — raises questions about how soon Egypt’s new military caretakers may be willing to return to elections and restore the constitution. It also suddenly thrusts one of the Arab world’s guiding nations into an uncomfortable quandary over the core goal of the region’s uprisings: Opening political space for all voices and views.
“This is a new revolution,” said 20-year-old college student Islam Ihab, using the phrase widely repeated by President Mohammed Morsi’s opponents who refuse to describe his downfall as a coup — which is exactly what Morsi and his backers say has happened.
The semantics and intellectual parsing on Egypt’s streets are studies in the competing visions of what the Arab Spring means.
Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was hounded for decades by Egypt’s leadership, sees the mutiny against him in uncomplicated terms: The powerful military stepping in to overthrow the country’s first elected president.
His opponents — who surged back into Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Sunday to mark Morsi’s anniversary in office — make a more nuanced case. They argue that Morsi has betrayed the spirit of democracy by favoring only his Islamist backers and ignoring critical problems such as an economy in collapse.
To the protesters, their assault on Morsi’s authority represented a triumph of the true revolutionaries — the liberal and secular opposition that coalesced to drive out Mubarak more than two years ago.
“The protesters have done everything they can to justify this as an act of progress and not one of regression,” said Sami al-Faraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies. “It may not be so easy to sustain this kind of explanation.”
That’s because of the obvious irony of the past few days by putting Egypt back in the hands of the military brass. All sides share the same fears: Allowing the armed forces to step back into control also opens the way for a host of undemocratic forces to reassert influence such as the police and remnants of Mubarak’s regime.
The fire-starters of Egypt’s Arab Spring redux concede that the military is the only path to put the country back on course, but have no idea yet where that route will lead.
“The irony of the Egyptian Arab Spring is that while it brought forth new players, it has not changed the regime or the fundamental architecture of Egyptian politics,” wrote the Texas-based Strategic Forecasting Inc., a political analysis group. “The military remains the dominant force, and while it is prepared to shape Egypt cleverly, what matters is that it will continue to shape Egypt.”
Vali Nasr, a Middle East expert and dean of the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, said that while the military leaders of Egypt’s “soft coup” promise to return to democracy, this was also the open-ended pledges from Pakistan’s generals who most recently held power for three years after a coup in 1999.
“Every time you interrupt the democratic process you deepen the incompetence,” said Pakistani analyst Mosharraf Zaidi. “Every time (a civilian government returns) they’re starting from zero or sub-zero.”
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