Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

The decision by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) to keep its activists away from the demonstrations centred around the second anniversary of the 25 January revolution looks as if it might have paid off for the MB.

As a result of this decision, the MB avoided being involved in violent clashes with the opposition, as its supporters were in December in the confrontations over a controversial constitutional decree issued by President Muhammad Mursi in November.  Instead, the MB has concentrated on highlighting the social and medical services it has been offering around the country in a campaign called “Together we build Egypt”.

The MB’s restraint is likely to pay dividends in the new elections to the People’s Assembly, due in the next three months.  In the public’s mind, the violence around the 25 January anniversary is seen as the fault of the opposition National Salvation Front (NSF).  This is important as the NSF has brought together the hitherto divided forces of the liberal opposition.  The NSF was formed after Mursi’s controversial decree by former presidential candidates Hamdin Sabbahi and Amr Moussa and by the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad al-Baradei.

The NSF has also demonstrated a lack of willingness to compromise with an administration that was, after all, elected in a free election.  On 2 February, Sabbahi declared that Mursi’s administration represented only “arrogance, the use of force, and more bloodshed”.  For this reason, he told CBC TV: “We have sided with the street and call for the bringing down of the dictatorship regime and the trial of its figures”.

The quintessentially Western establishment organization the International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a statement on 4 February bemoaning the opposition’s “clinging to the hope of some extraneous event (demonstrations, foreign pressure, judicial rulings, or military intervention) allowing it to gain power while bypassing arduous compromise and politics”.  The problem as the ICG sees it is that one side – the Muslim Brotherhood - adheres to “a narrow conception of majority rule” while the other holds “to a counter-productive notion of street politics”.

The ICG could also have added that there seem to be elements within the opposition that would welcome a return of the military to active politics despite the fact that the military was the principal opponent of the revolution.  This perception, too, could work to the Muslim Brotherhood’s advantage in the forthcoming elections.