On the evening of July 3 in Egypt, the military coup d’état was the final move of the military-judiciary tutelage regime that had been continuing for the last one-and-a-half years. The regime in Egypt and the people in the streets had attributed completely different meanings to Hosni Mubarak’s downfall after a 29-year and 120-day of rulership. The crowds who had to live in the Egyptian police-intelligence State for years were reading the departure of Mubarak as a revolution. The establishment in Egypt, however, has never read Mubarak’s step down as a crisis for the establishment. On the contrary, the establishment perceived this as liberation from an unbearable burden and a withdrawal of a figure whose biological-political lifetime had ended long before. Just from this viewpoint, the only thing they had in mind after February 11, 2011 was to carry Mubarakism into effect through the tutelage regime without Mubarak in it.
The Egyptian political system has been subjected to the military-judiciary intervention many times under the tutelage of the Supreme Military Council (SMC), which had taken over the government after February 11. First, the parliamentary elections were held despite all the engineering and frauds of the military-judiciary tutelage even though this took two and a half months. The social and political structure of Egypt was begun to be represented for the first time in the Parliament quite successfully.
THE BREAKING POINTS OR CHRONOLOGY OF THE PROCESS
The SMC did not attach much importance to the parliamentary elections. The real issue by which they were prepossessed was the presidential elections. Still, they did not hesitate to abolish the Parliamentary Constitution Committee through an absurd court order although the Committee had rolled up the sleeves to make a new constitution. This was followed by the cancelation of an Ikhwan leader Khairat al Shatir’s candidacy thorough the judiciary intervention although he was the strongest candidate in the presidential polls. The third serious intervention was the dissolution of the Parliament ahead of the presidential vote again through a judicial decision although it was the only legitimate political platform in the country. This was followed by the military takeover disposing almost all of the presidential authorities before the elections again and by a judicial decision.
When Morsi was elected president, he had no parliament, no constitution with him. A profound crisis of confidence existed between Morsi and the police-intelligence-military, and the judiciary and the media; as the economy was being dragged into a disaster. Morsi having almost nothing but only the authority to issue decrees was a leader with no authority, yet all the accumulated issues before and after Mubarak were on his shoulders as a burden. Soon after, the Egyptian establishment was not late to declare de facto strikes in all of the State institutions against Morsi.
Morsi gave his first response to the paralyzed State apparatus by removing the Chairman of SMC, Tantawi, and the Director of Intelligence, Murad Muwafi, from office. Along the process, he formed a technocrat Cabinet consisting of figures from different segments of the society. His attempt to appoint actors from different sects to vice-presidential and counselor positions was turned down by the leading names of the “Morsi is not sharing the power with us” campaign.
If the liberals – the perpetrators of the Tahrir coup today – had accepted the positions offered by Morsi, the ratio of Ikhwan members in the Cabinet would have been less than 35 percent anyway. Likewise, although the Ikhwan had only 32 members in the Parliamentary Constitution Committee consisting of 100 members from 22 different Egyptian parties, the same names labeled Morsi as “The Pharaoh” and did everything to disable his decision and governing mechanism. In Egypt where election turnout never goes beyond 50 percent, the referendum results wer