According to the prevailing narrative, former Supreme
Commander of the Armed Forces and Minster of Defense Abdel Fattah Al Sisi was
always destined for his landslide election to the Egyptian presidency. The
iconic military leader reportedly won
over 96% of the vote in a landslide election over the past several days.
However, the victory care with an embarrassing
asterisk: the polls, originally supposed
to close after two days of voting, stayed open for a
third day to counter low turnout. The official rationale for this extraordinary
measure was “the strong wave of hot weather” – a phenomenon one would assume
Egyptians are quite familiar with.
However, there was a stick to accompany the carrot as
well: Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb also
threatened to fine
those who chose to abstain from the election despite being eligible. The state
media apparatus too was beside
itself with disdain for the low turnout numbers, with pundits alternating
between pleading with, explaining to, and screaming at their viewers to go out
and vote.
In truth, analysts are suggesting that the likely reason for
the low turnout was either boycott
or widespread
apathy. By the end of the second day, few more than 30%
of Egypt’s 50 million eligible voters had cast their ballots – far less than
the previous election in 2012 that put the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi
in to the presidency.
When the Egyptian military acted to remove Morsi from power
in June 2013, they did so under the guise of popular mandate as represented by widespread
street protests. The low turnout was thus embarrassing because Sisi’s overall
vote total – even with his huge margin of victory – was far too low to
extrapolate a ‘popular mandate’ from Egypt’s over 82 million citizens.
This is especially salient given that, for all his faults in
both policy and messaging, Morsi was democratically elected following the
ouster of the dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Morsi received over 13 million
votes (51.73%) in the June 2012 election that put him in office. At the end of
the second day, where only 30% of 50 million citizens had voted, Sisi would
have less than six million more votes than the man he had removed from power.
Clearly, this was a politically untenable situation for
Sisi’s supporters, as they realized that their president-to-be ‘had no
clothes.’ The supposed reality of unified support for Sisi in fact being the
product of a small but invested and vocal minority was frightening to a state
apparatus used to ignoring the popular will. But what are the implications for
political theory and the nature of democracy?
The driving line of logic behind the Egyptian military’s
return to power has been the faulty notion of a ‘democratic coup,’ or the idea
that protests are the arbitrating tools of democracy and a pure expression of
popular will. However, as the election demonstrates, this is an extremely
problematic and dysfunctional application of popular sovereignty.
First, it is impossible to know who is protesting or backing
protests at any given time. This concern is especially salient in the Middle
East / North Africa region, where autocratic regimes have a long legacy of
using the ‘deep state’ – militaries, intelligence agencies, police, and hired
thugs – to project a façade of endearment from the streets. One needs look no
further than the recent sham election
in Syria to prove this point.
More academically, however, democracy by coup redefines
legitimacy in an extremely subjective way. The idea that a government could be
overthrown for simply falling below a certain threshold of popular approval is
dramatically destabilizing. This notion also automatically assumes that the
interests of the military are aligned perfectly with those of the people. In
Egypt, however, the military is a powerful organization holds massive economic
interests, social ties, and a clear sense of self-preservation.
Ultimately, democracy by coup is a fundamentally flawed
notion because the power of democracy lies not in its elastic capacity to react
to public will, but its institutional guarantees that that will be upheld.
However unpopular the Brotherhood might’ve been, protests in the street were
not the proper way to remove it from power. Moreover, electoral victories and
failures serve as moderating forces on political parties, but now all the
Brotherhood has taken away from its experience was that ‘democracy’ is not to
be trusted.
Critics, however, look to history for an easy rebuttal,
asking that if Mubarak was removed with popular protest, why not Morsi as well?
The answer is simple: elections, rather than protests, are what makes a
democracy sustainable. Mubarak’s regime was a thirty year-long exercise in
curbing any will other than his own; the political system, dominated by the
military and his party, was rigged completely in his favor.
Morsi, by contrast, did not have this support system. His
presidential tenure – most notably his action to bypass
judicial authority – can surely be categorized as troubling to a country
and a people that had just gone through great pains to evict a dictator.
Ultimately, his defense of these efforts to consolidate as measures to protect
against the deep state were unconvincing to his fellow Egyptians and the world.
The fundamental problem, however, is that Morsi, the
Brotherhood, and Egypt as a whole never got to see the true test of democracy:
a willing transfer of power. A willingness and mechanism to peacefully abdicate
power is the defining trait of democracy. The nascent Egyptian democracy was
not given a chance to develop and bloom, but rather ripped out by the roots – all
because the petals were slow to open.
Democracy by coup is a dangerous precedent to set for the
rest of the world. The model’s appeal is particularly acute in developing
countries where military juntas or strongmen are associated with order and
growth as opposed to democracy, the harbinger of chaos and failed expectations.
Put simply, Egypt is a poor example to follow, but the Sisi’s electoral
struggles may not make that case clearly enough.
Fortunately, however, Sisi’s election – successful though it
was – demonstrates how untenable democracy by coup can be. At best, perhaps
this will motivate him to craft policy that will produce real benefits for his
nation. At the bare minimum though, it
should at least encourage the Egyptian military to tread lightly on the rights
and wishes of the Egyptian body politic, which will no doubt continue to keep
struggling towards true popular sovereignty.
