The President Has No Clothes: What Egypt’s Bizarre Election Teaches About ‘Democracy by Coup’

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.