dna edit: Morsi's ouster

As world leaders and Egyptians themselves debate the semantics of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster by the military and dance around the ‘c’ word, the substantive heart of the issue remain this: a precedent has been set for the military acting as the enabler and enforcer of popular will. It has been welcomed by many of the same people who had protested against its rule of the country after the Hosni Mubarak regime’s fall in 2011. This grants its intervention in democratic politics legitimacy — and sets up a tension with core democratic principles that will have to be negotiated carefully if the interrupted promise of the Arab Spring is to be fulfilled.

There are fundamental questions about the nature of the Egyptian state that will emerge from this. Adly Mansour, head of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court — appointed interim head of state by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) — has a year to guide Egypt to fresh elections. But it would be naive to think that he can act independently without SCAF approval. Nor is it certain the military will indeed return to the barracks at the right time.

Besides, the opposition to Morsi was a disparate bunch  — ranging from socialists to pro-west liberals and entrenched remnants of the Mubarak regime — united by its distaste for his Muslim Brotherhood administration. Now that he has been removed and the presidency is up for grabs, their alliance may well break up. Given the resultant splintering of the vote and the fact that the Brotherhood’s substantial base is likely to play spoiler, there is a danger that any presidential candidate will have too fractured a mandate to be a credible leader. And that raises the spectre of the SCAF again playing arbiter.

If these pitfalls are to be avoided, all the players involved must learn from the missteps of the past two years. The SCAF, hopefully, will recall how low its stock had plummeted the last time it ran the country, and play a limited role this time around. The Brotherhood should realise that electoral victory alone does not make for democratic legitimacy. Morsi laid the ground for his own downfall by ramming through unpopular Islamist measures when the public’s primary concerns were economic in nature.

If it is chastened as a result and its influence decreases, that is all to the good; it is a dangerous presence in the region. And the opposition must understand that preaching revolution is not enough; it has to build the organisational abilities the Brotherhood did. It must also learn the skills of political negotiation and compromise. The next president must represent all the people of Egypt, not just those who voted for him — something Morsi forgot.