David Rhode writes: The return of protests, tanks and death to the streets of Cairo this week is harrowing. So is the power of the rampant conspiracy theories that cause both Muslim Brotherhood members and their secular opponents to sincerely believe that they are the defenders of Egypt’s revolution.

Criticisms of President Mohamed Morsi’s power grab and rushed constitutional process are legitimate. So are complaints that the country’s secular opposition is poorly organized, lacks majority support and refuses to compromise.

Barring a surprising change in direction, Egypt’s experiment with democracy seems to be headed toward failure. The country’s flawed constitution will likely be ratified in a referendum on Dec. 15. A frustrated and distrustful opposition will boycott subsequent Parliamentary elections. Mr. Morsi will lead a “soft authoritarian” government similar to that of former President Hosni Mubarak. Small opposition parties will exist, but the Muslim Brotherhood’s dominance of the state, politics and society will never be in doubt.

U.S. officials — ever eager for stability in the Middle East — will turn a blind eye and establish a “working relationship” with Mr. Morsi.

“I think the impulse of most American administrations is to show up in an Arab country and say, ‘Take me to your leader,’ ” Nathan J. Brown, a George Washington University professor and leading expert on Egypt, told me in a bleak interview this week. “I don’t think we have many alternatives. The United States is not in the position to back a military coup or the opposition.”

Mr. Brown is correct. Yes, the United States has some economic leverage in Cairo, but in general America remains radioactive in post-Mubarak Egypt. After 40 years of the U.S. backing Egyptian strongmen who made peace with Israel, Washington is hugely mistrusted.

A September 2012 Gallup Poll found that 82 percent of Egyptians opposed the country’s government accepting any economic aid from the United States. By comparison, 42 percent of Egyptians surveyed — roughly half that number — opposed the country’s peace treaty with Israel.

For those who think more “American leadership” is the answer: a U.S.-backed military coup — which it is doubtful the U.S. could engineer — would radicalize Islamists across the region and be an enormous gift to Al Qaeda. Similarly, if Washington openly backs the country’s secular opposition, those opponents will be viewed as American stooges and lose popular support. [Continue reading…]

Jack Shenker writes: The vast majority of Egyptians have been told throughout history that they are little more than interlopers in the closed rooms where decisions over their lives, community and environment are made; this is a nation where the political elite has always viewed the wider population as so many static pieces, devoid of agency and in need of being controlled and pacified through a fluid web of top-down munificence and brutal repression.

That authoritarian conception of the state remained entrenched regardless of the differing ideologies and motivations of those who ruled, from colonial officials to the post-1952 military dictatorship, from Hosni Mubarak’s kleptocrats to the army junta that managed the so-called “transition” to democracy.

And it remains today, under the rule of a Muslim Brotherhood whose critique of Egypt’s problems is moral rather than structural, whose vision of power is exclusionary instead of pluralistic.

All these regimes have variously claimed the mantle of revolutionary legitimacy and attempted to seize a narrative of progressive change. All have deployed crude symbolism – nationalistic and religious – to turn Egyptian against Egyptian in an effort to solidify their power and maintain the status quo. And all have resorted to raw violence when faced with opposition.

It is that authoritarian state that the Egyptian revolution has been ranged against since January 2011. Some well-intentioned commentators have bemoaned how the utopia of the original “18 days” in Tahrir Square has given way to bloodshed, how the unity of so many Egyptians in rejecting Mubarak has sadly dissipated into internecine strife.

But they forget that this has never been and never could be a pacifist revolt: more than 100 police stations were burned to the ground on 28 January 2011 as revolutionaries met state violence with resistance of their own and sought to beat the regime’s security apparatus off the streets. And although the “Islamists v secularists” faultline is not irrelevant, it is also not the primary lens through which to understand the latest scenes.

There never was a golden struggle that came to a glorious conclusion when Mubarak relinquished power, only for civil warfare to subsequently blot the copybook of “New Egypt”. There is one ongoing struggle, against a state that seeks to deny Egyptians any genuine empowerment and a voice in their own futures, and its latest iteration is playing out on the streets of Heliopolis this week.

Unlike his predecessors, Mohamed Morsi was elected democratically at the ballot box, but like his predecessors his notion of government is narrow, conservative and anything but democratic. Despite his rhetoric about the revolutionary martyrs, the security apparatus that killed them remains virtually intact under Brotherhood rule.

In Morsi’s first 100 days as president, rights organisations recorded 88 cases of police torture, resulting in 34 deaths. Opposition, be it official or on the street, is viewed as a conspiratorial enemy to be blitzed, not a legitimate element of political life.

For evidence just look at the draft constitution, not the content (though that is alarming enough) but the process. Written almost exclusively by old, Islamist men, the document is now being rammed through via the ousting of dissenting voices and Morsi’s unilateral constitutional decree that puts a metaphorical gun to the heads of the electorate: vote yes to my constitution, or reaffirm my extra-judicial dictatorship.

Democracy is about more than just a single ballot paper every four years, and Egypt’s revolution is about more than just formal, institutional democracy. Since early 2011, ordinary Egyptians have messily, heroically and relentlessly muscled their way into the arena of political power. Never mind Tahrir – from Nile Delta villages to Bedouin tribal lands and urban slums, communities are tearing down the outdated suffocating contours delineating who gets to have a say, who gets to make a dynamic choice about the world around them.

The old elite game of making decisions at the top and allowing access to state resources only through an extensive patronage network, the flipside of which is violent repression, no longer works; the only problem is that those wedded to a moribund vision of the authoritarian state, including the Brotherhood, don’t seem to have noticed yet. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: At least four people have been killed in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, as supporters and opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed near the presidential palace, the health ministry says.

Fighting continued into the early morning on Thursday with fires burning in the streets where the opposing sides threw stones and petrol bombs at each other.

“No to dictatorship,” Morsi’s opponents chanted, while their rivals chanted: “Defending Morsi is defending Islam.”

Riot police were sent in to break up the violence on Wednesday, in which about 350 people were injured.

A small group of opposition activists had been camped outside the palace since Tuesday night, when tens of thousands rallied against a controversial decree which gives Morsi near-absolute power.

Supporters of the president marched to the palace on Wednesday and tore down the opposition’s tents. Witnesses said they threw stones and used clubs to attack demonstrators. Opposition protesters were driven away from the palace and fled down side streets.

Thirty-two people were arrested, according to a statement from the interior ministry.

Protests spread to other cities, and offices of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia and Suez were torched.

Both sides blamed the other for starting the clashes: Opposition leaders said Morsi was responsible for the bloodshed, while senior Brotherhood officials accused the opposition of “inciting violence”.

Morsi did not make any public appearances on Wednesday, but his prime minister, Hisham Qandil, issued a brief statement calling for calm “to give the opportunity for the efforts being made now to begin a national dialogue”.

Al Ahram reports: Egypt president Mohamed Morsi’s aides Seif Abdel-Fattah and Ayman El-Sayyad have resigned on Wednesday in the wake of the clashes that erupted in front of the presidential palace between supporters and opponents of Morsi.

“We are today announcing the decision that we have made but put on hold for more than a week. We hoped to find a solution, but to no avail,” El-Sayyad said on his Twitter account.

Seif Abdel-Fattah told Al-Jazeera television: “Egypt is bigger than a narrow-minded elite. Egypt will continue its revolution.”

“We can no longer stay silent because they [the Muslim Brotherhood] have harmed the nation and the revolution and we need to rebuild Egypt…the youth are the ones who took to the front lines to serve the revolution…I pray for mercy for the souls of the martyrs.”

Reuters reports: Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood called for a rally backing President Mohamed Mursi outside his palace on Wednesday and leftists planned a counter-demonstration, raising fears of clashes in a crisis over a disputed push for a new constitution.

Mursi returned to work at his compound a day after it came under siege from opposition protesters furious at his drive to ratify a new constitution in a snap referendum set for December 15 after temporarily expanding his powers by decree.

The Islamist president said he acted to prevent courts still full of appointees from the era of autocratic predecessor Hosni Mubarak from derailing the draft constitution meant to complete a political transition in the Arab world’s most populous state.

The Brotherhood, from which Mursi emerged to narrowly win a free election in June, summoned supporters to a demonstration outside the palace in response to what it termed “oppressive abuses” by opposition parties. [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: If a cabal of Egyptian generals had been planning a coup, their moment to strike should be imminent. Tuesday saw new clashes between police and tens of thousands of antigovernment demonstrators outside Cairo’s presidential palace as a constitutional deadlock hardened into a not-yet-violent civil war between Islamists and their rivals — and as political camps brought their supporters onto the streets ahead of a Dec. 15 referendum on a controversial draft constitution. The turmoil plays out against the backdrop of an Egyptian “fiscal cliff” that urgently demands political stability. Still, even if the current scenario includes conditions similar to those that have preceded coups in unstable societies with powerful militaries, a putsch by Egypt’s generals remains unlikely.

“Remember,” says Century Foundation analyst Michael Wahid Hanna, “Egypt’s military didn’t enjoy their time at the head of the government after [President Hosni] Mubarak was ousted.” And while President Mohamed Morsi has antagonized his political opponents with a power grab that has put his decrees beyond judicial restraint, and with an unseemly rush to ram through a constitution critics say opens the way to authoritarian Islamist rule, he has been careful to keep the military onside.

“The military’s core institutional priorities have been well catered to in the draft constitution,” notes Hanna. “Its autonomy from civilian decisionmaking and budgetary oversight has been largely preserved, while the national security establishment has a significant, if not yet clearly defined, role in national-security decisionmaking. The military got a good deal in this constitutional process, and unless their intervention is required to stop Egypt plunging into civil strife, they’re going to stay on the sidelines. This isn’t their fight.” [Continue reading…]

Shadi Hamid writes: In the latest round of Egypt’s current crisis — once again pitting Islamists against non-Islamists — demonstrators gathered at the presidential palace in Cairo to protest President Mohamed Morsi’s stunning decision to claim authoritarian, albeit temporary powers and his subsequent moves to rush through a controversial constitution. In a grim reminder of the country’s precarious state, police clashed with protesters and fired tear gas.

But this isn’t really about Morsi and his surprise decree — though to be sure, parts of the decree employ language straight out of Orwell and seem almost designed to provoke and polarize. However, neither the decree nor the draft constitution are quite as bad as Morsi’s opponents insisted. The opposition’s sometimes bizarre comparisons to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the 1933 Enabling Act, and the French Revolution suggest a legitimate fury (and an intriguing fascination with fascism), but make little sense as historic analogies.

Morsi could have read his Friday shopping list on national television, and it might have made little difference. The decree, after all, was only the latest in what Morsi’s opponents see as a long list of abuses. Egypt’s “original” revolutionaries are one such group that blast the Brotherhood’s compromises small and large with the old state bureaucracy, lamenting how their revolution was sacrificed on the altar of expediency and gradualism. And it is true that the Brotherhood-appointed leaders of the Ministry of the Interior, the military, and the intelligence apparatus include men who were complicit in some of the worst human rights abuses of the Hosni Mubarak era — and have gone unpunished to this day.

But these mostly younger revolutionaries, whose critiques have been admirably consistent, are a small minority. The rest of the opposition is an odd assortment of liberals, socialists, old regime nostalgists, and ordinary, angry Egyptians, each whom have their own disparate grievances and objectives. The liberals and leftists in the equation, led by figures such as Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabbahi, and Amr Moussa, have little in common with each other — besides a fear that their country is being taken over, and taken away, by Islamists. While they may be “liberal,” in the sense of opposing state interference in private morality, their attachment to democracy is mercurial at best. Many of them welcomed the dissolution of Egypt’s first democratically elected parliament, called on the military to intervene and “safeguard” the civil state, and even cast their presidential ballot for Ahmed Shafiq, Morsi’s opponent and Mubarak’s last prime minister. [Continue reading…]

Nathan Brown writes: When the Egyptian military took control of the Egyptian political system in February 2011, its heavy handed conduct and a series of missteps led Egyptians to ask one another: Were the generals incompetent or malevolent? That question can now be answered: They devised a political transition for Egypt that was so bad that it has led to the current crisis. They were far less an evil master sorcerer than they were a very hapless sorcerer’s apprentice.

Now the same question can be asked of all of Egypt’s leading political actors: are they purposely trying to destroy the country’s democratic hopes or merely doing so by accident? My own evaluation of the actors is that the Brotherhood’s intentions are less questionable than those of their rivals. But its actions are more dangerous: good intentions may help the Islamists in the next life, but what they are doing now may damn their county to either instability or renewed autocracy in this one.

Let us begin by reviewing how the generals put their civilian countrymen in such a difficult position. In 2011, the military oversaw a process that resulted in a set of interim governing procedures that were long on loopholes and short on guarantees. As the euphoria of Tahrir Square gave way to the nitty-gritty of daily politics, political actors on all sides began growing increasingly suspicious. By reserving all authority in its own hands, the military encouraged a system in which each civilian force saw its rivals as acting in an underhanded manner to persuade the military to do its bidding. Many such suspicions were justified. With elections looming, Islamists saw various leftist and liberal forces as seeking to disrupt the process and prolong military rule. And non-Islamists charged that Islamists had struck a deal with the generals to plunge the country into rounds of voting that would reward the types of strong networks that the Muslim Brotherhood, above all, already had.

When a process did emerge for writing a permanent constitution it was poorly organized and weak on guarantees for minority viewpoints. The newly elected parliament was to elect 100 people who would have six months to rush out a draft—and the population would then be granted only fifteen days to discuss it before giving their approval or rejection (in a country where voters are accustomed to being expected to agree). The procedure was not only overly hasty; it was also tilted toward the Islamists, since it was clear from the beginning that religious forces would do well in parliamentary elections (though the extent of their electoral victory at the end of 2011 surprised their adversaries). [Continue reading…]

Joseph Dana writes: Jamel Mubarak leans over the side of his balcony overlooking Tahrir Square and makes a simple observation: Cairo, the city of his birth, is not as pretty as it used to be.

For 40 years, Mubarak has lived in a 10-story building on Cairo’s most prominent public square. In that time, he’s watched it transform from a downtown traffic roundabout and symbol of former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime to become, last year, a ground zero for the overthrow of that same regime.

And now, nearly two years after the first protest of the Egyptian Revolution, the square has again sprung to life as a center of opposition, this time in protest over the drafting of the country’s constitution and sweeping new self-granted powers of its Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, who took power democratically after Mubarak’s fall.

Looking down at the tens of thousands of protesters filling the square below him, waving flags and chanting slogan’s against the country’s ruling party, Jamel Mubarak (no relation to the ousted leader) notes that the once-peaceful square is not likely to quiet down anytime soon.

“People are angry with Morsi and emboldened by the fact that they removed one Egyptian president,” he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the din of chants emanating from the square below. “They might try to do it again and one thing is for sure, the entire process is going to unfold in Tahrir.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Tahrir Square has emerged as a living laboratory for the social shifts sweeping Egypt’s densely populated capital city. [Continue reading…]

Michael Wahid Hanna writes: Reflecting on the lessons of the Arab uprisings in November 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was adamant that traditional U.S. policies in the region were no longer tenable. “[A]s the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt made clear,” she said “the enduring cooperation we seek will be difficult to sustain without democratic legitimacy and public consent.” But such revelations necessitate drastic changes, and in the face of unanticipated events and crises, it’s all too easy for the familiar policies of the past to re-emerge. As Egypt descends again into turmoil over the country’s fraught constitution-writing process, it appears that the United States is once again embracing the past and eschewing the lessons it learned the hard way during the uprising.

In a move that bears the hallmark of U.S. policy in the Mubarak era, the United States has largely reduced its relationship with Egypt to the maintenance of the peace treaty with Israel and withheld serious judgment of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government, even as it actively undermines the country’s already troubled democratic transition.

The most severe political crisis to strike Egypt since the fall of Mubarak was sparked by President Mohamed Morsy’s Nov. 22 constitutional decree, which granted the executive absolute authority and immunized his decisions from judicial review for the remainder of the transitional period. Morsy defended the move as an attempt to protect the constituent assembly — tasked with drafting Egypt’s new constitution — from potential judicial dissolution, but his unilateral steps provoked outrage among opposition forces who again took to the streets.

The crisis deepened when the president directed the assembly to ram through a governing document in a chaotic, all-night session that made a mockery of deliberative constitutional process and design. If approved in a hastily called referendum, that slipshod document will bound Egypt’s political future and institutionalize its crisis. With a significant portion of the country’s judges declaring a strike in response to Morsy’s declaration and dueling protesters mobilizing on opposing sides, Egypt’s flawed transition now risks tipping into outright civil strife and prolonged instability. [Continue reading…]

Sarah Carr writes: The crude binary (Islamist/pro-Morsi vs. “secular”/anti-Morsi) that was produced by last year’s referendum is now at its most pronounced – as is inevitable in a context of long suppressed (political and religious) identities and fear mongering about The Other.

Campaigning between the two camps has been reduced to who can mobilise the most bodies in one place. On Tuesday the seculars organised a huge show of force in their old stomping ground Tahrir Square. Islamists responded by holding an equally impressive rally outside Cairo University.

The two rallies couldn’t have been more different. Now that the opposition movement is going after Morsi it has attracted the Ahmed Shafiq/Omar Suleiman/Amr Moussa crowd, people like some members of my family who aren’t necessarily felool (pro or affiliated with the Mubarak regime) but who have a morbid terror of the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam generally. I have a pro-revolution aunt who supported Hamdeen Sabahy in the first round of the presidential elections and then switched to Shafiq in the run-offs when Sabahy lost.

Not all of this group are affluent or from chichi neighbourhoods, but the ones that are were prominent on Tuesday, furiously marching from Zamalek in their velour tracksuits and ugg boots and manicured nails, holding forth in Arabic, English and French about the outrage of it all.

Their appearance has added a new dimension to the binary, with the pro-Morsi camp accusing the opposition of being dominated by felool and atheists who engage in lewd acts in Tahrir, while some members of the anti-Morsi crowd respond with equally vile slurs, calling Islamists uneducated peasants, or sheep unable to think for themselves.

As usual El-Baradei is a convenient shorthand for Islamist criticism of their enemies, especially given his recent visibility, actually in Egypt and actually in public. He popped up in Tahrir on Friday, bustled on to a stage looking uncomfortable as usual where he gave a barely audible speech through the evening’s murk. I’m still undecided about whether he played a shrewd game by being absent, and above, all of 2011’s political yuckiness and base shenanigans. Supporters laud him for not compromising on his principles and for his consistency, but it is easy to do that from the nosebleed seats.

ElBaradei’s name was bandied around at the Islamist rally, too, protesters reminding him and Sabahy that Morsi was elected president and not them.

My friend Adam and I got talking to a man, Mahmoud, at the Morsi rally who said that the president’s political opposition are necessarily against any decision he takes, no matter how prudent, because they reject his Islamic project. Mahmoud was dressed in a neat plaid shirt and casual weekend jacket with the telltale just too short trousers, his chin adorned with a wispy candy floss-like beard. He held a sign above his head demanding the implementation of Sharia, and on the subject of Sharia said that it has never been implemented in the modern age but that the Taliban came the closest to doing so. He added that the media misrepresented the Taliban. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Egypt’s top court said it was suspending its work indefinitely to protest “psychological and physical pressures” after supporters of the country’s Islamist president prevented judges from entering the courthouse Sunday to rule on the legitimacy of a disputed constitutional assembly.

The court’s decision is the latest turn in a worsening political crisis pitting President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist allies against the mostly secular opposition. The standoff began when Morsi issued a package of decrees on Nov. 22 that gave him sweeping powers and extended immunity from the courts to a panel tasked with drafting a new constitution.

The Islamist-dominated panel then raced in a marathon session last week to vote on the new charter’s 230 clauses without the participation of liberal and Christian members. The fast-track hearing preempted a decision expected from the court on Sunday on whether to dissolve the committee — a ruling the judges postponed on Sunday.

Al-Masry Al-Youm: After long hours of article-by-article voting on the Egyptian constitution by the Constituent Assembly, the draft was passed on early Friday.

The current draft has been submitted to President Mohamed Morsy, who in turn will put it up for a referendum, the conditions of which remain unknown in the wake of a recent crisis between the president and the judiciary.

However, the draft follows a tumultuous and unresolved writing process, with many non-Islamist members of the assembly quitting in objection to the non-representative nature of the document. More than 22 members of the 100-strong assembly withdrew, including church representatives, liberal and left-leaning party figures and others.

Several of the articles passed have been a matter of contention. Egypt Independent attempts to identify articles that raised concerns amongst experts in the corresponding fields. On aggregate, the current draft is criticized for not bearing enough safeguards to uphold freedoms, bestows too many authorities upon the president in a way that disrupts the division of powers and generally relies on legal arrangements in critical unresolved matters to evade the lack of consensus over the current draft. [Continue reading…]

Here is a translation of the draft constitution.

Mohamed El-Baaly writes: In essence, President Mohamed Morsy’s constitutional declaration is an attack on the judicial institution to force it out of the political realm. This is good in and of itself, because the judiciary is a corrupt institution that sympathizes with the Interior Ministry and the army, and derides the people and opposes their choices.

Therefore, a democratic alternative necessitates the radical restructuring of the judiciary and calls for public monitoring on its operation, in a fashion similar to the jury system in the US.

But the Muslim Brotherhood is not doing that; it is keeping the old web of interests, and only keeping it from interfering in the group’s work. It is giving the judiciary a free hand, so long as that does not interfere with the Brotherhood’s work.

The Brotherhood also got the army out of the political field by reassuring it that its interests would be kept intact, including its confidential budget entitlements, land and the immunity it has against accountability. That way, the army’s “feudalism” will be managed by unmonitored, failing generals.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood is bearing the responsibility for the failure of the army in Sinai, while psychos devise conspiracy theories about the handover of Sinai to the Palestinians, even though Gaza has more money and better services and education than Sinai.

It is also clear that the Brotherhood has agreed with senior Interior Ministry leaders that corruption will only be eliminated within the tightest limits. It also seems the Brothers have agreed that torture should be no problem, so long as the victims are not Islamists. [Continue reading…]

Hazem Kandil writes: The barrage of international criticism against President Mohamed Morsi’s latest constitutional declaration, which places him above the law, oversimplifies Egypt’s situation and largely comes down to one sentiment: “I told you so.” The dark forces of Islamism have reneged on their commitment to democracy (as everyone expected), and are being fought tooth and nail by the gallant supporters of liberty and legality. How much simpler can it get?

Just a scratch beneath the surface reveals that this newest wave in the two-year turmoil is yet another byproduct of the paradox that has haunted the revolt from the start: how can a regime be overthrown using the very same crooked laws and legal agencies it had set up for its own protection? And how can a democratic regime emerge through the ballot box, if Egyptians simply insist on voting for whoever or whatever the Islamists endorse? Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president, actually presents a convincing case.

Voters demand revolutionary changes and retribution against former president Hosni Mubarak’s cronies, yet judges still loyal to their old political masters overrule the reforms he proposes and trials are still carried out by Mubarak’s handpicked general prosecutor, a man who served the ruling party for over a decade. Little wonder that most cases brought against Mubarak’s associates flop in court.

Worse still, the country’s first elected parliament was dissolved over a legal technicality, and the committee voted to draft a new constitution functions daily under a similar threat.

At the same time, those who weep over the sanctity of the legal system include some of the old regime’s most sinister figures, now reinventing themselves as friends of freedom. And the same people who censure the president over legal violations have until recently been preaching that revolutionary justice trumps the law. [Continue reading…]

The Economist: Bareley a week ago Muhammad Morsi, Egypt’s president, was basking in praise for helping forge a truce in neighbouring Gaza. Today he rules, shakily, over a bitterly polarised nation. On November 27th a gathering as vast as any since the heady days of Egypt’s January 2011 revolution choked the centre of Cairo in a cacophony of protest against a man they now condemn as a new dictator. Not only has the uncowed president vowed to raise still bigger rival crowds. His embattled camp is rushing out a controversial, hastily concocted and Islamist-hued draft constitution for approval in a general referendum.

Five months into his term, seeking to capitalise on his Gaza success and to break a festering deadlock with secular opponents, Mr Morsi issued a shock, six-part decree that granted sweeping new powers to his office. The move has pitched Egypt into its gravest crisis since the uprising that ended six decades of military-backed dictatorship. It has united the hitherto bickering secular opposition, which plans to protest until he revokes his decree. It has sparked a slide of nearly 12% in an already battered local stockmarket. And it has prompted a strike by Egypt’s judges, who would normally be responsible for overseeing a constitutional referendum.

From the perspective of the president and those who have fallen in line with him, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood and fundamentalist Salafist groups, his action was understandable. Mr Morsi won office in June with a slim 51.7% of votes. Yet the Islamists, who together had gained a more convincing majority in earlier parliamentary polls, have been frustrated in converting a win into tangible change. Worse, Mr Morsi’s government has soaked up blame for unimproved government services and a feeble economy. Strapped for cash, it may soon have to resort to harsh austerity measures even as a next round of elections looms.

The Islamists sensed a narrowing window of opportunity. As they see it, an array of malevolent forces have combined to thwart them. These include not just secularists and Egypt’s large Christian minority, but also foreign powers, an irreverent and often hostile press and stubbornly obstructionist chunks of Egypt’s colossal state bureaucracy. Bolstering all these is the moneyed elite that built its wealth under the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Islamists have approved a draft constitution for Egypt without the participation of liberal and Christian members, seeking to pre-empt a court ruling that could dissolve their panel with a rushed, marathon vote that further inflamed the conflict between the opposition and the president, Mohamed Morsi.

The vote by the constituent assembly advanced a charter with an Islamist bent that rights experts say could give Muslim clerics oversight over legislation and bring restrictions on freedom of speech, women’s rights and other liberties.

The draft, which the assembly plans to deliver to the president on Saturday, must be put to a nationwide referendum within 30 days. Morsi said on Thursday it would be held “soon”.

The Islamist-dominated assembly, which has been working on the constitution for months, raced to pass it, voting one by one on more than 230 articles for more than 16 hours. The lack of inclusion was on display in the nationally televised gathering: of the 85 members in attendance, there was not a single Christian and only four women, all Islamists.

Rami G Khouri writes: The dramatic events in Egypt over the past few days following President Mohammad Morsi’s unilateral decree giving him unchallenged political authority should not surprise or frighten anyone. In fact, the continuing developments can be seen as a positive stage in the country’s historic political transition from autocracy to democracy. We are witnessing now the first serious move by several important sectors of governance and political society to affirm their influence, and start to shape a checks-and-balances foundation for the democratic transition that remains to be completed.

Egypt’s democratic political development is less tidy than Canada’s or Sweden’s. It has been clear since the first parliamentary elections last year that five branches of government now prevail in Egypt, and they need time to shape their relationships: the presidency, judiciary, parliament, military (SCAF) and citizens in the street (Tahrir Square). Slowly but surely, the powers of each of these five parties are being defined and exercised. Historically, the military and presidency held the most power. Today, a shift is underway that sees the presidency and Tahrir Square being the most powerful in the short run, but with a clear mandate for the judiciary to safeguard civilian authority and oversee the whole process of change. This will evolve again when the constitution is promulgated and parliament elected in the coming months.

So the most important aspects of this week’s developments, to my mind, are the assertion of the role of the judiciary, and the first serious move by secular liberal and opposition forces to come together into an alliance that could challenge the dominance of the Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafist colleagues. The rapid establishment of a protest tent camp in Tahrir Square by assorted populist forces and demonstrations against Morsi’s decree across the country are an important reminder of the single most significant development that happened during the overthrow of the former Mubarak regime and the assumption of presidential powers by Morsi: The political legitimacy of the ruling civil powers in Egypt is now grounded in populist consent, now represented by demonstrators in Tahrir Square. [Continue reading…]