Hazem Kandil

There is no getting around it. What Egypt has become three years after its once inspiring revolt is a police state more vigorous than anything we have seen since Nasser. As in the dark years of the 1960s, the enemy is everywhere, and any effort to expose and eradicate him is given popular assent. Since Egypt’s national security, its very existence as a sovereign state, is said to be at stake, those who refuse to toe the line must be ostracised, and those who persist punished as traitors. The talk of human rights that sustained the original uprising is dismissed as a distraction, the preoccupation of self-righteous amateurs.

This piece was first published, with a different heading, on the LRB blog. You can read it here.

The Egyptian revolt is trapped in a balance of weakness. None of the key actors has the power to consolidate a new regime, or even to resurrect the old one. Alliances are necessary, but nobody knows which will last. Every combination seems equally plausible, but each would lead the country in a very different direction. Egypt’s old regime depended on a ‘power triangle’: an uneasy partnership between the military, the security services (the police and secret police under the control of the Interior Ministry), and the political establishment. The uprising in January 2011 disrupted this delicate balance.