Egypt’s Judges and Generals Dissolve the Parliament: Is the Revolution Now Truly Over?

The coup d’état that began 18 months in Egypt with the ouster President Hosni Mubarak initially camouflaged in the language of revolution and promises democracy, as it worked to prevent the collapse of the old order and divide and its challengers. But Thursday’s rulings the Supreme Constitutional Court have shed the disguise: Egypt will be effectively ruled by Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) junta and its backers in the bureaucracy and judiciary until notice.

The court, a holdover from the Mubarak , not only slapped down a law by the democratically elected parliament to bar officials of former regime from for office but also effectively dissolved the legislature itself. The first ruling upholds the candidacy of the military’s preferred option, former Mubarak Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik, in Saturday’s presidential-election runoff the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. And given the events of recent weeks, the smart money wouldn’t bet him coming out on top in the race a position whose powers have not been defined, a process over which the military retains a prerogative. Dissolving the parliament the grounds that one-third of its seats were allegedly elected an unconstitutional manner (albeit the supervision of the junta and judiciary) may have even more far-reaching consequences: the Constituent Assembly, a highly contested body appointed the parliament to draft a new constitution, is to survive the dissolution of the legislature that created it.

“Today’s moves by the Constitutional Court on of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces seem difficult to overcome and likely push Egypt onto a dangerous new path,” warns George Washington University analyst Marc Lynch, who was an adviser the Obama Administration during last year’s Arab rebellions. “With Egypt looking ahead to parliament, no constitution and a deeply divisive new President, it’s to say the experiment in military-led transition has come to its disappointing . Weeks before the SCAF’s scheduled handover of power, Egypt now finds with no parliament, no constitution (or even a process for drafting one) and a divisive presidential election with no hope of producing a legitimate, consensus-elected leadership. Its judiciary become a bad joke, with any pretense of political independence the military shattered beyond repair.”

The military has effectively closed chapter of “revolution” and ended hope that the Mubarak regime would followed by a democratic political order. Whereas some Muslim Brotherhood leaders had spoken of Egypt’s following model of today’s prosperous and relatively democratic Turkey (governed by moderate Islamists), the generals and allies followed a different Turkish model: the “deep state” Turkey of the past century, which electoral politics were a sideshow intended to create a veneer of legitimacy the authority of Kemalist generals and judges styling themselves as guardians of secularism. As by way of exclamation point on their latest rulings, the judges Wednesday reimposed facto martial law, restoring the security forces’ blanket authority to make arbitrary arrests until time as a new constitution is force. Currently, there is no timetable tabling a new constitution. And the only institution with any democratic legitimacy has now dissolved, with no clarity on how and when it will be replaced.

The events that Mubarak unceremoniously wheeled off, stage left, in February 2011, and later imprisoned, were more of a palace coup a revolution. A junta of generals responded to the crisis presented by the massive protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere to ease the helmsman in order to save the regime. They weren’t guided by a clear plan or a coherent strategy; the generals and their allies simply improvised their way the political turmoil to emerge in an improbably dominant position.

The Egyptian deep state’s efforts reassert its dominance has been enabled in no small part the rolling chaos that is Egypt’s increasingly ineffectual post-Mubarak politics: the protest in Tahrir Square was bereft of a coherent leadership or strategy, and it was increasingly marginalized as Islamist parties and primarily Muslim Brotherhood used their extensive grassroots organizational reach to emerge the dominant force in the new parliament. leftist candidate Hamdeen Sabahi finished a strong third place, and his share of the combined with that of liberal Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh in fourth place amounted some 40% of the ballots cast, the runoff race Egyptians a choice between the old regime, represented by Shafik, and the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, represented by Morsi. That’s a choice many revolutionaries refuse to , calling instead for a boycott of the poll. But that may simply be a sign that events have left them the sidelines. And the failure of the Brotherhood and the secular opposition parties to agree a common program to ensure democracy and civilian rule may yet prove to be the undoing of camps.


Adapted and abridged from: Time World, June 14, 2012.