On the heels of revolution in Egypt, existential questions in the struggle for democracy
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, December 6, 2012 - 0 Comments
Mahmoud Khaled/AFP/Getty
Well, that didn’t take long.
Less than six months since Mohamed Morsi became Egypt’s first genuinely democratically elected president, it’s becoming clear he’s not all that interested in governing as a democrat.
Late last month, Morsi, a longtime member of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, granted himself sweeping new power preventing any authority, including the judiciary, from revoking his decisions. He said he will give these up after a new constitution is ratified following a referendum on Dec. 15.
But Morsi’s opponents fear the constitution, drafted by Islamists, will irrevocably change Egyptian society and politics, subverting democracy to sharia, or Islamic law. Opposition that had been bubbling for months has exploded.
Clashes between Morsi’s supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood and his opponents — who include secular liberal and leftist revolutionaries, as well as supporters of former president Hosni Mubarak — have resulted in at least five deaths and hundreds injured. The man who came to power on the heels of a democratic revolution now governs from a presidential palace fronted by barbed wire and guarded by tanks. Continue…
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Taking on Mubarak
By Jane Switzer - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments
Mohamed ElBaradei has lit a fire under President Hosni Mubarak’s stagnant rubber-stamp government
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Mohamed ElBaradei isn’t technically eligible to run in Egypt’s 2011 presidential election. But the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, backed by the popular but outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, has lit a fire under President Hosni Mubarak’s stagnant rubber-stamp government since he burst onto Egypt’s political scene in February.
Rumours of ElBaradei’s possible candidacy surfaced in December after he finished his fourth and final term at the IAEA. Then, on Feb. 24, he launched a non-party political movement called the National Association for Change, which released seven demands for a fair electoral process in Egypt. As it stands, ElBaradei is ineligible to run because he does not belong to a party approved by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.
