If the opposition leaders in Egypt had any strategic vision, they would not have launched the mass protests that caused the army to oust President Mohammed Morsi on July 4. They would have bided their time and waited for the next election because there will still be a next election in Egypt, despite the coup, and now the Muslim Brotherhood might actually win it.
Morsi is now under arrest and the passionate demonstrations and sporadic violence in the streets of Egypt’s cities — close to 100 people have been killed since the coup — make it hard to imagine that any compromise is possible. But Egypt is not Syria: the population is relatively homogeneous, and there is little risk of a civil war.
What is happening is a no-holds-barred struggle for power between rival political movements, in a system where the political rules are newly written, hotly disputed, and poorly understood. And all the players have made some serious mistakes.
President Morsi got a narrow (51.7 per cent) majority in last year’s presidential election. The Muslim Brotherhood therefore assumed its core project of forcing its own version of Islamic values on Egyptian society had the support of half the population but this was probably not true.
Many people voted for Morsi because the only alternative in the second round of the election was a leftover from the Mubarak regime or because they were grateful for the Brotherhood’s unfailing support for the poor. Even if they had all supported the Islamization project, trying to impose fundamental changes on a country with the support of only half the population was unwise.
The constitutional changes Morsi imposed — and his ruthless tactics for pushing them through — convinced many people in the secular opposition parties that he was an extremist. He was actually trying to walk a fine line between public opinion and the demands of extremists in his own party but the secular parties responded with extra-constitutional tactics of their own.
The mass demonstrations that began on June 30 were explicitly intended to trigger a military takeover that would sideline Morsi and the Brotherhood. They have succeeded, but the army knows it cannot stay in power. It immediately appointed Adly Mansour, the head of the Constitutional Supreme Court, as interim president.
The schedule Mansour announced for constitutional revisions, a referendum, and new parliamentary and presidential elections has already been rejected by both the Brotherhood and the secular parties. Once the histrionics have died down, there will be new elections some time next year, and the Brotherhood cannot be excluded from them without turning the whole process into a farce.
By then the Brotherhood will doubtless have seen some leadership changes that bring a younger generation of leaders to power, and it will benefit from a sympathy vote from those who see the military intervention as illegitimate. It might even win the next election, despite all Morsi’s mistakes this time round.
That’s the real irony here. If the opposition parties had only left Morsi in power, his unilateral actions and his inability to halt Egypt’s drastic economic decline would have guaranteed an opposition victory at the next election. Now it’s all up in the air again.
Democratic politics is far from over in Egypt. Foolish things have been done, but the Arab Spring is not dead.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.