POLITICS

People is struggling and reform is blocked

Egypt is the most populous, politically weighty and geographically strategic Arab state but

• government negligence

• rising prices, (food prices have risen fast at the overall inflation rate of 23%)

• inefficient state schools,

• capricious judges,

• corrupt bureaucracy and

• a cronyist regime that pretends democracy but in fact excludes all participation

have caused rising resentment among the population.

Egypt’s president of the past 27 years, Hosni Mubarak is now 80 years old with no clear successor.

That’s why a conjure aimed to Islamic revolution is espected, in order to sweep away the autocratic state created in the wake of Egypt’s last big dynastoc revolution, the officers’ coup of July 1952 that overthrew King Farouk.

That time the Muslim Brotherhood helped prepare the ground for the 1952 coup but they were imprisoned.Their suppression radicalised some Islamists, helping spread jihadist ideas.

Since the 1980s the Brotherhood has become the strongest force in the political opposition.

Probably it constitutes the silent majority in the country. In order to oppose it, the government has changed the Constitution so that it formally banned parties based on religion, and organized campaigns of arrest and confiscation of business assets. That’s why the ruling National Democratic Party ran unopposed, after having postponed municipal elections scheduled for 2006. In the meanwhile, the Brotherhood has an opaque leadership which is ageing. It promotes conservative ideologues at the expense of younger reformers.

The army, police, secret police, justice, the lucrative petroleum industry and foreign relations fall under the purview of the presidency, which just wants state security and regime survival.

As a consequence, the prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, a Western-educated businessman, since 2004, holds a diminished portfolio restricted to economic and social policy.

He has enacted some economic reforms

• the cut of tariffs and taxes,
• changes to investment rules,

has pushed the overall growth rate from below 4% to above 7%.

• Exports have more than doubled,
• Revenues have been boosted high oil prices and sizeable gas exports but and by a doubling of income from the Suez Canal, (a surge in industrial exports and a doubling of tourist arrivals)
• foreign direct investment has also accelerated, reaching an amount wich is five times the 2004 level

Economy

• Even if wage remain low there’s a broadening prosperity (sales of private cars have quadrupled since 2004).
• unemployment rate has fallen from 11% to just over 8% between 2003 and 2008,
• skilled labour have rapidly boosted white-collar wages

The biggest obstacle to growth is the bad quality of Egypt’s university graduates

Even if Egyptians are moaning about accelerating inflation, they don’t suffer for global commodity-high price. The undercuts of bread and cooking gas despite a recent hike in petrol prices hasraised taxes on non-essential items such as cigarettes and luxury cars, targeting only people relatively well-off.

Egyptian lack of freedom and its relation with the USA

Before he started his fifth term in office, in 2005, Mr Mubarak promised more democracy. But his regime has removed civic freedoms. New antiterrorism emergency laws have been applied against every kind of dissent.Therefore citizens resort to private vendettas.

In May the American president, George Bush, declared that Egypt had disappointed hopes that it might lead the region in democratic reform. This reflected that Egypt’s relations with the United States have come to their lowest point since the 1973 war with Israel.

It’s not just

• a shift in American attention towards other parts of the region, and American criticism at Egypt’s ugly human-rights record,
• but also Egyptian annoyance over policies such as the invasion of Iraq and the Bush administration’s uncritical embrace of Israel.

Egypt now has few supporters in Washington and its influence in the region is also diminished.

Since he has been in office, Mr Mubarak has cleverly used Egypt’s regional weight to please Washington.

Mubarak’s successor

According to the constitution, candidates can come only from legal parties having held parliamentary seats for at least five years gaining signatures from hundreds of elected local officials

The only party that can easily fulfil all these criteria is Mr Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.

Maybe this party will choose Mr Mubarak’s 44-year-old son Gamal. Altough he’s the champion of economic liberalism he represents the business elite that common Egyptians criticize.On the contrary, some assert that the army, police and intelligence services could prefer to promote a more trusted figure (as Putin has done in Russian Federation) instead of him.

In any case, the frailty of Egypt’s economy, relied on tourism and foreign investment, makes a powerful argument for pursuing continuity rather than taking radical departures. The country’s future administrators may be tempted to make populist gestures, even opting for a tactical alliance

with the Muslim Brotherhood.