Out of the frying into the fire and back into the frying pan

‘Be careful what you wish for’ is a classic cliché ending in a preposition but it is apt in Egypt at the moment.  All the protestors demanding the intervention of the army to remove President Mohammed Morsi are forgetting that the army they are calling their friend is the same way one that abused their rights when ruling as the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF, but in reality a SCAB) post-Hosni Mubarak.  It also undermines the idea that the army is under civilian control.

Yet Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood have only themselves to blame for failing to understand compromise is an essential part of democracy.  They were as gauche politically as they were economically.  They saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decisively change Egypt into their own image and, while being decisive will always be divisive, it was seen too much as a creeping civilian coup.  They forced early elections before the passing of a constitution to maximise their own advantages of organisation to the weaknesses of a nascent opposition, even though it only benefited them and the ancien régime.  They reneged on their pledge not to run for the presidency after winning the parliamentary elections.  They pushed through a constitution with basic human right flaws.  And in the showdown, when the army set a 48-hour deadline for them to reach an accommodation with the protestors, instead of peeling off the moderates from the radicals they held firm to their course. 

A belief in the legitimacy of elections would have found favour Joseph Schumpeter, but, as Barack Obama warned, democracy is about more than just elections (especially ad hoc plebiscites that were skewed to exclude many voices).  After all, Vladimir Putin is democratically elected.  The Muslim Brotherhood failed to understand that and thought that they would be seen as a firewall between the secularists and the Salafists.  They instead fell between two stools.

Now that the hardline Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi has been pensioned off in one of the few positive moves made by Morsi, it remains to be seen how committed the army is to restoring democratic procedure, given that Morsi was overthrown by his own defence chief.  The mood in the West is ambivalent, glad that the destabilising, increasingly authoritarian president has been removed but unhappy about the means and unsure about the end.  One can only hope that rule by decree is only temporary.