As we finish up the semester, Egypt is undergoing serious tensions in the aftermath of last year's revolt. Drawing on what you have learned this semester, how would you explain the current situation? What would need to happen for the opposition to be successful in pushing back on President Mursi's attempts to consolidate power?
Mohamad Morsi has caused quite a stir within Egyptian civil society by- and this may be oversimplifying a bit- attempting to surpass the reach of the Egyptian Judicial branch. This, in essence, would give the Muslim Brotherhood President near absolute power, an event secular and liberal Egyptians see as a repeat of Hosni Mubarak's reign. Thousands of Egyptians have now taken to the streets in protest, and some Egyptians on both the secular/liberal side and the Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood side have been injured/killed. As some of the reports say, some of the protestors have been yelling the same slogans, like “we will not leave, let him leave,” and the “people want to topple the regime.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-27/egypt-anti-mursi-protesters-test-president-and-opposition-unity.html
Interestingly, most, if not all of civil society will be unified if the country is run by an autocratic leader who has stayed in power for a long time. This was demonstrated during the Arab Spring when Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Secularists and Liberals were largely protesting together against Hosni Mubarak's government. Mubarak's rule, like most other autocrats in the Middle East, hindered each of these groups by imprisonment, censorship, and more, creating an equal dislike of the Mubarak Regime between the two ideological groups. Unification of much of Egyptian civil society against Mubarak was what drastically and somewhat peacefully changed their government's direction/leaders.
However, now that Mubarak is gone and that both Conservative Islamists within and outside of the Muslim Brotherhood have gained control of much of the Egyptian government, a lot of the Egyptian civil society (namely the part seeking to add more traditional Islamic values to the country) will not mobilize protests against the government. In fact, they are currently and will continue do the opposite, countering protests by the secular and/or liberal activists. I don't like to be a pessimist, but a possible scenario could be some sort of physical conflict between the groups, one much worse than the clashes between pro-mubarak protesters and the revolutionaries. This could potentially be due to the fact that both sides have been fighting for their ideology for decades, and would most likely not be willing to give up their fight so quickly. Hopefully they can come to a somewhat satisfying compromise, giving Morsi a little more flexibility, but still allowing checks by judicial review and having more liberals/secularists help draft a constitution (many Liberals left the constitutional drafting out of protest against being outnumbered by Islamists in the Constitutional committee).
In addition, for the Egyptian opposition to push back Morsi's attempts at consolidating more power, the opposition will need, in my opinion, to use more social media and to keep having protests to get more "neutral" Egyptians aware of what is happening. They should try to create a campaign to show Islamists that Morsi's grab for power will not only hurt Liberals, but will indeed hurt them as well- this can be done by comparing Morsi to an equally hated leader, Mubarak. This comparison should be effective knowing that Mubarak equally oppressed both Islamists and Liberals alike. If the Liberals manage to turn even a few of the Islamists against Morsi, this would put immense pressure on Morsi and force him to make a compromise.
