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.

In Nuclear Talks with Iran, Hardliners – Not Centrifuges– Remain Key Challenge

Last week, representatives of the P5+1 and Iran began a new round of negotiations in Geneva aimed at achieving a final nuclear agreement by the July 20 deadline. This session was the most ambitious to date as the parties begin drafting an actual agreement to replace last November’s Joint Plan of Action.

Optimism ruled the day heading into this most recent round of talks given the relative smooth sailing of the previous four, but a significant obstacle remains: the two sides must come to an agreement about the scope of the Iranian nuclear enrichment capability, defined by the number of centrifuges.

However, this issue is less critical than the dominant media narrative might suggest. Instead, domestic opposition – fervently opposed to the leadership within their respective countries on the basis of blind principle –remains the truly greatest threat to a nuclear deal.

Many commentators are quick to declare that the number of centrifuges a state possesses directly correlates to its ability to build a nuclear weapon. The concern is that Tehran would have a stronger “breakout capability,” or shorter time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon, with ample centrifuges running.

Centrifuges spin rapidly in order to separate out the ‘good’ useful isotope of uranium, which occurs very rarely in nature. Arguably, the more centrifuges are running, the quicker a country can collect enough of the desirable uranium to form the ‘critical mass’ required for a weapon. Iran currently has around 19,000 centrifuges, though some 8,000 of those are not yet operable. Tehran has expressed a desire to expand to up to 50,000 centrifuges in the future – a number in stark contrast to the “few thousand” U.S. negotiators would prefer. 

However, a number as low as 3,000 centrifuges would be sufficient to produce a critical mass of enriched uranium in about a year. The numbers game becomes more complex when considering that civilian power plants require many more centrifuge cascades than would be necessary for a weapon. This is because power plants require a much smaller ratio of good to bad uranium but a much higher volume of both to use as fuel in a reactor.

It should be noted that many other factors besides a number of centrifuges impact a country’s breakout capability. Any nuclear deal with Iran will hinge on nuclear monitoring by international agencies; regardless of how many centrifuges Iran has, its compliance with monitoring (which has so far been forthright) will be the key to preventing cheating.

Moreover, hardware limits are not a surefire means to stop proliferation. North Korea has circumvented export controls on the materials used to construct centrifuges by developing indigenous manufacturing. Clearly, rogue states excluded from the international community can always find a way to build weapons. From that perspective, making centrifuges a sticking point seems unwise; constructive diplomatic relations are the best security solution for the long run.

For this litany of reasons, commentators should be less concerned centrifuge numbers. Instead, the chief challenge to reaching a deal will those who cannot see the forest for the trees; political groups within both countries resistant to any sort of peaceful resolution are actively working to disrupt the talks even as progress is being made.

The U.S. Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, continues to be a hotbed of opposition to the Obama administration’s outreach. The markup of National Defense Authorization Act in the Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee resulted in an amendment that would prohibit any deal with Iran that did not involve Tehran renouncing support for terror groups and ceasing its ballistic missile program. More daunting still is the fact that President Obama’s ability to lift sanctions without an act of Congress would require executive waivers issued every four-to-six months.

Hardliners in Iran are also working to disrupt the deal. A conference under the slogan “We’re Worried” convened at the beginning of May, uniting conservative elected legislators, members of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration, and other conservative nationalists.  Moreover, 75 hardliners in the majlis attempted to discredit Foreign Minister and lead negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif with a censure vote early this month simply because he publicly acknowledged the Holocaust as a “horrifying tragedy.”

Thankfully, the hardliners are in the minority in both countries. Poll numbers in the United States show that around 60% of Americans approve of the interim deal. Likewise, a similar majority of Iranians are either ‘very hopeful’ or ‘somewhat hopeful’ that the talks will end with a permanent deal, while less than half of them would support a military nuclear capability.

It is clear that the governments of Iran and the United States, as well as the peaceful majorities in each country, will have work against naysayers for a deal to succeed. There is hope for resolving technical questions, including the number of centrifuges, in negotiations so long as diplomats continue their work. Ultimately, it is the outdated attitudes of those who remain principally opposed to both fresh engagement and their own domestic rivals that remain the most significant danger to a normalization of relations between Iran and the West.