The revolution continues: Morsi’s miscalculations and the Ikhwan’s impasse
Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood may have seriously overestimated the Islamist movement’s grip over Egyptians’ allegiances. Having passed a decree which awarded the presidency both legislative and executive powers, as well as rendering the President himself immune from judicial oversight, the Brotherhood now has on its hands protest as serious as any which a post-Mubarak government has faced. Several times, since the January Revolution’s heady days, have opposition groups called for milioneyya, million-man marches, but rarely have these resonated with the broader public.
The President’s power-grab, however, seems to have united disparate groups in protests which were not only well-attended in Cairo, but across the country. The only precedent for such intense opposition was nearly exactly one year ago, during the protests – and running battles – on Cairo’s Muhammad Mahmoud Street. But even then there was not the nation-wide breadth of protest seen on November 28.
The Constitutional Declaration itself contains a provision that undermines judicial oversight of both legislative and executive powers, by preventing the judiciary from either dissolving the upper house parliament (as they have done, claiming the electoral law to have been unconstitutional) or from impinging on the President’s decisions (Art. 2). It also confirms for the President the power to rule by decree (Art. 2, 6), which he ‘inherited’ from the military junta, and prevents his decrees from being challenged through the courts.
The Declaration also contains unusually specific measures, such as the establishment of a four-year term for the prosecutor-general (Art. 3), and in what is hardly standard fare in constitutions, orders the reopening of trials against former Mubarak regime figures (Art. 1). The single most worrying article for the Brotherhood’s opponents is the sixth. This article states that, “in case of the emergence of a danger threatening the January 25 Revolution, the life of the nation, national unity, national integrity or that impedes the work of the State’s institutions, the President shall possess the power to undertake all necessary measures to face such danger, in compliance with the law”. The article’s formulation entails the same kind of vacuity that enabled many authoritarian regimes before Morsi’s to cover power grabs in a thin veil of legitimacy. Moreover, while the President does have the right to pass a law or administrative decree, constitutional declarations must be put to a referendum – as even the military junta did – which thus far is not on the horizon.
The President’s move is of greater concern because it comes in the context of a bitter climate of contestation between the Brotherhood and its political arm on the one hand, and opposition forces on the other, each side protesting the other’s unwillingness to compromise. Morsi and the Brotherhood claim they are not without their reasons, trying to stigmatize the Constitutional Court as felool, remnants of the previous regime appointed by Mubarak. Some elements of the former regime doubtless have been attempting to protect their power and are distrustful of the Brotherhood, but the judiciary in general, and the Constitutional Court in particular, are far from Mubarak stooges. And, it is the judiciary in general that will be negatively affected by this declaration.
The Brotherhood: a non-hegemonic actor
The instrument of ‘constitutional declarations’ is not without precedent: it was used by the military junta to change and override portions of Egypt’s 1971 Constitution, leaving post-Mubarak Egypt in a state of limbo...
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