Why the Muslim Brotherhood Will Not Go Away (I)
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/angry-corner/why-muslim-brotherhood-will-not-go-away-i
Mohamed Mursi and his Guide tried to bend the rules and punish enemies here and there, but in reality Egypt enjoyed one of its freest moments in his history. There is no precedent in the region of a head of state (outside of Lebanon) being mocked and ridiculed as Mursi was mocked and ridiculed during his own era. Mocking Mursi became an Egyptian genre of comedy. But the Brotherhood made a fatal mistake: They struck to the American condition that the military-intelligence apparatus be left alone and that its budget and its management stay outside any democratic control. Well, that same apparatus later struck at the regime and engineered a coup that canceled democracy altogether.
But the Brotherhood were on their way to natural extinction, for the first time in their lives. They could no more play the role of the victim which they perfected as an art form. They were in power and they were expected to clearly and unambiguously define their long-touted “Islamic solution.” They had to present their solution to socioeconomic problems, and they had to show the extent to which they deviated – or did not deviate, as was the case – from the path of Sadat-Mubarak on foreign policy. Public opinion surveys were already documenting a dramatic decline in the standing of the Ikhwan. If the democratic game was left to its own devices, the Ikhwan would have been evicted in the next election, or the one after at most.
But Mursi struck and reversed the fortunes of the Ikhwan. They are now undergoing a crisis, the likes of which they have not experienced since the Nasserist era. But this time, they may reach the logical conclusion that domestic, regional, and international forces would not let them rule democratically no matter what. They may now start resorting to the Baathist model of building support within the army in order to engineer a future coup. Change through a coup is now more popular in Egypt than change through the ballot box.