The decision to delay Egypt’s parliamentary elections, probably until October, has raised fears that growing political tension and polarization could lead to prolonged violence and provoke a military coup.

If the country becomes ungovernable, the “madness” of military intervention can’t be excluded, says Amr Hamzawy (right), a leading liberal and a political scientist at the American University in Cairo.

“This devastating combination of violence, failure of state and opposition and state establishments degeneration means one thing in all likelihood: we are taking this country to a point where it could well be ungoverned and unfortunately could end up being a failed state,” he stated.

The Arab Organization for Human Rights today denounced Islamists’ attacks on prominent human rights activists Hafez Abu Seada, the head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and Dr. Hassan Nafa, a professor of political science at Cairo University.

After 30 years of dictatorship, the Muslim Brotherhood “promised to be inclusive and tolerant,” The Economist notes.

But since Brotherhood official Muhammad Morsi became president, “politics has become steadily nastier. Egyptian society is ever more polarized.”

A group of UN experts today urged Egypt’s Shura Council to reject a draft NGO law, which infringes international standards on freedom of association.

“It is highly regrettable that a government that was formed as a response to peaceful social activism can place such restrictions on people’s right to freedom of association,” said the UN Special Rapporteurs on freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, on human rights defenders, and on freedom of opinion and expression. “All actors should play a role in the conduct of public affairs.”

The draft legislation stipulates that NGO funds should be considered public funds and groups will be banned from securing foreign funds without prior approval.

“These provisions…. will compromise the role of independent civil society organizations, which is essential, particularly in times of political transition,” warned Maina Kiai, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association.

Morsi’s recent threats against the opposition and media have been unhelpful in stemming the mood of political intolerance.

“Their lives are worthless when it comes to the interests of Egypt and Egyptians,” said Morsi, adding that “we can sacrifice a few so the country can move forward. It is absolutely no problem.”

“This is again another form of the perpetuation of violence; that was not the kind of language that one would have expected of the head of the executive who … seems now to be diverting more towards a profile a Mafioso,” Hamzawy said.

But the Islamists’ liberal and secular critics also bear some responsibility for the deterioration of Egypt’s transition, he said.

The opposition has “failed so far and despite the many challenges to offer a cohesive alternative and is confining itself to criticizing the performance of the president and to appease the masses without attempting to offer serious solutions for consideration.”

Even without the postponement of the election, the transition process was in trouble, said Professor Hassan Nafae of Cairo University.

“It was up the president to complete the formation of the institutions. But as a matter of fact, he has not been able to do that in a good way because the constitution has been drafted and adopted through a referendum before it had a real consensus,” he said.

A prominent Brotherhood sympathizer concedes that Egypt is suffering from “a leadership deficiency,” but sees no signs of an end to the current polarization.

Morsi “will survive the political quagmire,” says Moatazbellah Abdel-Fattah, director of the House of Wisdom think-tank, if he “manages to get through the next six months and ends with a functional government place that can address the most pressing economic and security concerns, a fairly elected parliament in place and is willing to undertake the reconciliatory moves necessary to dispel the fears of Copts and the judiciary.”

The current economic crisis and political instability may prompt a military intervention to end Egypt’s democratic transition, says Abdel-Fattah, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo.

“Though let’s face it, if you asked an average Egyptian today if he or she is willing to forgo democracy in return for security and economic stability the chances are they will say yes,” he said. “This is where growing calls for the return of the army come from.”

Political analyst and publisher Hisham Kassem [left] tells VOA the delay could hurt the Islamist parties that dominate government, including the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, with a decline in popular support as economic and security problems mount. But he argues that may be neutralized by disarray in the opposition. …..While the polarization between Morsi and his opponents have led to street battles in recent months, Kassem remains optimistic that stability will prevail.

“We have seen very poor performance of the Brotherhood matched by very poor performance by the opposition,” he said.

“The only positive thing here is that there is still an attempt and enough foundations to prevent the country from going into a civil war or into chaos.”

Given the country’s looming economic crisis, Egypt “needs a government that can take some difficult decisions swiftly,” says The Economist:

To that end, Mr Morsi should select a fresh team of ministers from a much wider ideological spectrum, including technocrats and secular-minded people as well as his own Islamist brethren. Together they might share the opprobrium that will inevitably result from the measures needed to do a deal with the IMF and get the economy working.

Activist blogger Alaa Abdel-Fattah

With the detention of five pro-democracy activists, including a prominent blogger, for protests against the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s Islamist-led government is escalating tensions with its opposition critics, observers suggest.

The arrests follow a clear threat to the National Salvation Front and other opposition groups from President Mohammed Morsi, referring to “emergency measures if any of them makes even the smallest of moves that undermines Egypt or the Egyptians.”

“Their lives are worthless when it comes to the interests of Egypt and Egyptians,” said Morsi. “I am a president after a revolution, meaning that we can sacrifice a few so the country can move forward. It is absolutely no problem.”

“Egyptians are already on guard against the possibility that their first freely elected president may seek to become a new autocrat, and some said they feared that the arrest warrants were the first clear example that Mr. Morsi’s government was using law enforcement as a political tool to punish his critics,” The New York Times reports.  

One of the accused, activist blogger Alaa Abdel-Fattah (above) turned himself in to authorities today, “a day after the country’s prosecutor general ordered his arrest along with four others for allegedly instigating violence with comments posted on social media,” AP reports. “The charges stem from clashes between supporters and opponents of the country’s Islamist president last week that left 200 injured.” 

The arrests are an example of a political party using its influence in the state to settle political scores, said Abdel Fatah’s father and veteran human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif Al-Islam Abdel Fatah.

“President Mohamed Morsi appointed the prosecutor general personally and Morsi is a member and former leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is involved in this case. There is a clear conflict of interest,” he said.

Tensions

The tensions between the Brotherhood and the liberal-secular opposition are also evident in skirmishes over the Islamist organization’s legal status and its attempts to stifle civil society.

“An Egyptian court today postponed a ruling on whether President Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is illegal, agreeing to the Islamist group’s request for more time to present evidence in a case that has put it on the defensive,” Reuters reports:

Brought by anti-Brotherhood lawyers, the court case points to the deep antipathy some harbor towards a group that was formally dissolved in 1954 and forced to operate underground until President Hosni Mubarak was ousted two years ago. The impact of any ruling against the Brotherhood is likely to be more political than practical: analysts find it inconceivable that the state will take any measures against a group that is now at the heart of power.

The Islamist group last week tried to shield itself from any adverse ruling by registering as a non-governmental organization (NGO).

Draft ‘rammed through’

Ironically, the move follows a vote by the Islamist-led Shura Council (left) endorsing restrictive draft legislation curbing NGO activities.

The new law, drafted by the human development committee, which is dominated by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, “was rammed through the council in only one hour,” Al-Ahram reports.

The law prohibits registered NGOs from obtaining foreign funding, either “from foreigners or Egyptians living abroad,” according to an explanatory memorandum.

The law defines NGOs as groups “not involved in profitable activities” that “aim to achieve humanitarian, developmental and/or economic objectives,” said committee chairman Abdel-Azim Mahmoud, a leading FJP member.

“The word ‘foreign’ includes NGOs subject to international agreements or that work in the field of civil society in general,” he said, adding that a proposed coordination committee under the auspices of the social affairs ministry “will also be in charge of scrutinizing the programs and funds of these foreign NGOs.”

Pro-democracy and civil rights groups criticized the draft as more punitive than the Mubarak-era restrictions on NGOs.

The government refused to submit an alternative proposal drafted by civil society groups, said human rights lawyer Malek Adly, describing the Shura Council vote as a warning that the law “could cripple” NGO activities.

The bill “adopts a very negative view of foreign NGOs,” said Sherif Mounir, a representative of the NGO Support Centre. “Obliging these NGOs to give detailed accounts of their sources of funding and donations is a very hard job; it is really aimed at scaring them away from Egypt,” he said.

“The draft would, in effect, nationalize civil society organizations by defining their funds as public money, create a new interagency committee with the authority to approve or veto foreign funding for local NGOs, raise registration costs for NGOs to prohibitive levels, impose stifling oversight restrictions and bring operations of ‘civil organizations’ and law firms engaged in human rights and democracy work under the same legal regime as other NGOs,” said Freedom House, the US-based rights watchdog.

“The law would also prohibit foreign organizations that receive any government funding from operating in Egypt, driving most if not all foreign NGOs out of the country,” it added.

Brotherhood conspiracy theories

But a leading Brotherhood official defended the law, on the grounds that foreign-funded NGOs played a role in promoting Mubarak-era corruption.

“The Americans gave Egypt $70 billion during the Mubarak era and then wonder ‘Why do they hate us?” said Essam El-Erian (left, with Morsi). “I would answer, because your money was used to spread corruption in this country.”

“We don’t have any objections to foreign NGOs doing business in Egypt, but they must know that their funding will be subject to stringent transparency and control measures,” he added.

The Brotherhood’s conspiracy theories are shared by some secular groups.

“Most foreign NGOs in Egypt are, in fact, espionage cells spying on Egypt for the US and Israel,” said Nagi El-Shehabi, a member of the liberal Generation Party. “I see this new law as crucial to Egypt for eliminating the spies who have infiltrated the country under the cover of foreign ‘NGOs’.”

But civil society officials accused the Islamist group of hypocrisy and lack of transparency for covering up its own foreign funding.

“The FJP’s NGO law does not put the financial activities of the Muslim Brotherhood under the scrutiny of the central auditing agency, because its officials allege that the group’s funding comes from member contributions, thus exempting them from any financial review,” said Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat (right), a board member of the General Federation of NGOs.

He said that “most of the funds of Muslim Brotherhood International are estimated at $200 billion, most of which are deposited in Qatari banks.”

There are at least five draft NGO laws currently in circulation and all but one prepared by a civil society coalition are restrictive, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. The two drafts under serious consideration are sponsored by the Ministry of Insurance and Social Affairs (MoISA) and the other by the Freedom and Justice party.

The Ministry of Insurance and Social Affairs finalized the draft law’s amendments in January, and they will be reviewed by the next House of Representatives, once it is elected, Egypt Independent reports.

The Islamist group’s registration as an NGO came shortly after the State Commissioners Board recommended that the Supreme Administrative Court reject the Brotherhood’s longstanding appeal against a 1954 decision by the ruling Revolutionary Command Council declaring the group illegal and ordering its dissolution, notes Egypt Source.

“Some analysts argue that the abrupt registration is in breach of the law 84/2002 that forbids NGOs from taking part in political activities, raising doubts about the transparency of the process,” it adds.

“It is regrettable that Social Affairs Minister Nagwa Khalil allowed herself to be manipulated by Brotherhood officials into giving the group an automatic license,” civil society activist El-Sadat told Ahram Online. “Anyway, the process of registering the Brotherhood is very vague; and they did it very quickly in the same autocratic way as former president Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party, in order not to be scrutinized by any institution and remain above the law.”

The FJP bill states that “some NGOs can obtain licenses as full-fledged institutions,” which gives the Islamists the right to engage in all business sectors and establish overseas branches, said El-Sadat (left), chairman of the liberal-oriented Reform and Development Party.

“It’s very dangerous for a group that mixes religion with politics – and works under an international organization aiming to convert all the world to Islam – to get a license,” he said.

“However, as an NGO, the Brotherhood will be subjected to certain restrictions,” as under the 2002 Law on NGOs such groups are “barred from dabbling in politics or having a religious basis,” writes analyst Ramadan A. Kader:

Moreover, the law obliges registered NGOs to disclose their finances. Since the 2011 revolt that deposed Mubarak, the mostly secular opposition has been calling for the powerful Brotherhood to go public with their finances and the sources of their financing.

Shortly after the anti-Mubarak revolt, the Brotherhood, banned for more than five decades, obtained a license for their first-ever political party: Freedom and Justice. The party, which was headed by Morsi before he became the head of state, secured nearly half the seats in the now-dissolved Parliament.

“How will this party fare, should the court disband the parent group, while the Brotherhood have become an NGO, technically barred from practicing politics?’ he asks.

The Brotherhood’s hardline stance on NGO regulation will come as little surprise to observers who recall the group’s support for the former regime’s crackdown on NGOs, imposing a travel ban on several foreign nationals, including U.S. citizens, as part of its prosecution of Egyptian and foreign activists, following security forces’ raids on seventeen pro-democracy NGOs.

The proposal to outlaw foreign-funded NGOs would immediately disable many Egyptian groups working on human rights, corruption and other democracy-related issues, including partners of Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute, that were among the groups targeted in last year’s crackdown and which receive support from the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy.

The Obama administration should be more assertive steps to in?uence the outcome of Arab Spring transitions, engage more broadly than government-to-government relations with a diverse set of actors, and employ leverage and incentives to affect the behavior of key actors, says a new report.

“Don’t just declare a desire or an expectation that governments will take constructive steps—clearly identify rewards and consequences to encourage such actions,”  is one of the key proposals of Moving Beyond Rhetoric: How Should President Obama Change U.S. Policy in the Middle East?

An initiative of the Project for Middle East Democracy, the report from draws on the reflections of leading US-based academics and analysts, including former senior officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations, as well as prominent Middle Eastern voices from Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.

“The power of any country lies with its people, and the historic Arab revolutions have made clear the need for sustained and meaningful engagement directly with the Egyptian people,” say Esraa Abdel Fattah, vice-chair of the Egyptian Democratic Academy, and Bassel Adel, a leading member of the Dostour Party, who recommend:

­ ….much greater direct engagement by the sta? of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo with a diverse spectrum of representatives of civil society, political opposition movements, community associations, and labor unions. 

Moreover, direct people-to-people engagement between the two countries is equally important, and this should include the signi?cant expansion of exchange programs between Egyptian and American civil society organizations, trade unions, social service providers, and businesses.

“How about supporting democracy—loudly, from the top, and often?” asks Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations:

It isn’t a matter of choosing sides in elections or being for or against monarchies. It’s a matter of backing those who peacefully seek freedom of speech and press and assembly, the rule of law, and free elections. It means calling forcefully for the protection of minorities and of the rights of those who (sometimes narrowly) lost an election….. We should make it very clear that an elected leader has no more right to compromise the democratic system than one who seizes power in a coup.

Such an approach does not suggest confronting all Islamist parties, and they will di?er in their approach to democracy. But it does mean we should not embrace them until we are sure what that approach is…

“Many of the political forces emerging in Tunisia are not focused on democracy, but instead on securing their own power,” writes Sihem Bensedrine, a veteran Tunisian human rights activist and journalist who is currently the president of the Arab Working Group of Media Monitoring:

It is essential that outside actors send a clear and consistent message that their support remains with the Tunisian people in our struggle for democracy and not with any forces acting contrary to that goal.

As we have seen in other regions, democratic transitions are long-term processes that are more likely to succeed with consistent international support. …But here in Tunisia, we fear that that U.S. impatience threatens to undermine support for our democracy.

“The second anniversary of the Arab Spring ?nds Arab liberals disappointed and even angered by the United States,” says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, and a founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy:

Their common refrain is that we are not acting on our declared principles, that our historical policy re?ex—to ?atter and embrace whoever is in power—still reigns. ­

Being truer to our democratic principles does not have to mean being naïve and self-defeating. In fact, it is the “realist” position that is proving naïve in Egypt, where a Muslim Brotherhood president has been rolling over liberal democratic norms…..with hardly a word of protest from the administration…. In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has had a long head start on this project and is much further along toward decimating democratic constitutional balances and restraints.

Neither can we be credible with the inevitable forces of change in the region if we keep clinging uncritically to our traditional friends, like the authoritarian monarchy in Bahrain while it imprisons and tortures non-violent advocates of democratic change.

“In the two years since the fall of Mubarak, Egypt has received little assistance from the international community due to the political turmoil inside the country as well as the worry that post-revolutionary governments would adopt populist economic policies,” writes Michele Dunne, the Director of the Atlantic Council’s Ra?k Hariri Center for the Middle East, and a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy:

International concern about Egypt’s political and economic trajectory is justi?ed, but the way to deal with it is not to wait and see but to o?er incentives to Cairo to build democratic institutions and adopt responsible economic and foreign policies. 

The United States cannot on its own provide the billions in grants, loans, and investments that Egypt needs, but it can become the aggregator and gateway for such assistance from many sources. An internationally agreed upon program can also help to dissuade any Egyptian government from veering sharply ….. toward a new form of authoritarianism or irresponsible foreign policies.

­“The Obama administration has opted for a minimalist approach to the Arab Spring, anchored in a cautious wider Middle East policy,” argues Issandr El Amrani, a Cairo-based freelance journalist and analyst who blogs at The Arabist:

Yet, as the recent constitutional crisis in Egypt and other events illustrate, neglect is not always so benign. If the United States is to have a positive impact on the transitions taking place, it must be agile. Interventions at pivotal moments cannot always take place at the level of Secretary (of State or Defense) or President, reactions must be faster, and sometimes policy will need to be made on the ?y.

“Expectations were high when Barack Obama was elected President, as were the hopes for a change in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. However, in the past four years, none of these expectations or hopes has been met,” according to Lily Feidy, CEO of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH):

What we, the Palestinians, are asking for is not a management of the crisis, or an easing of the situation, but an actual, just solution. It is not about making the situation bearable, or calling for negotiations, but actually taking action and making permanent changes to the realities on the ground.

“There is a need to coordinate the funding of a ‘multilateral reform endowment’ that would provide clear incentives to Arab countries to implement necessary reforms,” writes Shadi Hamid, director of research for the Brookings Doha Center:

The endowment would include a minimum of $5 billion, with the goal of increasing total available funding to $20 billion by 2022. Receiving aid would be conditional upon meeting a series of explicit, measurable benchmarks on democratization, which would be the product of extensive negotiations with interested countries. ­ The endowment would be funded with contributions from the United States, the EU, allies like Japan, Qatar, and Norway, rising democracies such as Turkey and Brazil, as well as international ?nancial institutions.

“The United States also needs to continue to diversify the portfolio of contacts and leaders it engages—it must avoid being seen in Egypt and the broader region as simply replacing a Mubarak-centric policy with a Muslim Brotherhood-centric policy,” argues Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at the Center American Progress:

It must outline U.S. interests and values more clearly as Egypt moves through these transitions and have a diplomatic strategy that explains U.S. positions on Egypt to key actors in the broader region.

“The Obama administration should use its political skills and technical expertise to assist in the institution- and capacity-building of the Libyan security forces to increase their ability to confront security challenges that might hinder Libya’s democratic transition,” says Zahi Moghrebi, professor emeritus of political science at Benghazi University in Libya and former director of Vision Libya 2025:

What is needed is a policy of engagement with the Libyan government and more, not less, interaction with all political groups and civil society organizations—without the exclusion of any current or trend.

“The Muslim Brotherhood has started a project to Islamicize various sectors of the Egyptian society beginning with the media, cabinet, trade unions, governors, and judiciary, with their eyes set on military and police forces next,” writes Sultan al-Qassemi, an in?uential commentator on Middle Eastern a?airs and nonresident fellow at the Dubai School of Government:

While doing so, they have become adept at shifting their rhetoric with respect to their audience. In English, their statements are full of assurances largely targeted at the international community; in Arabic, their rhetoric is exclusionary and threatening. Late last year, a controversial constitution was passed that allows military trials for civilians as well as restriction of freedom of speech in numerous articles; the abolition of both powers were demands of the non-Islamists who initiated the Egyptian revolution.

If there is no repercussion for such behaviors, these methods could serve as a blueprint for other rising Islamist forces in the region to follow.

“The single most important policy shift the Obama administration must make in its second term is to stop the killing in Syria,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Professor of Politics and International A?airs at Princeton University, and a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy:

­The U.S. and many of its allies have already recognized the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people. …The next step is to support that coalition by taking decisive steps to protect as many Syrian civilians on the ground as possible. In addition to massive humanitarian assistance, we must make clear that military action is on the table. Only then will Assad’s supporters conclude that support for a transitional government is a better way out than clinging to an Alawite mini-state.

“The fundamental insight in President Obama’s embrace of the Arab Awakening was that the region’s autocracies have revealed themselves as fundamentally unstable in an era when citizens were demanding dignity, freedom, and accountable governance,” says Tamara Cofman Wittes, Director of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy:

Security cooperation and economic assistance cannot alone stabilize countries su?ering from the unchecked exercise of power, a lack of political dialogue and compromise, weak political parties and institutions, and/or arbitrary laws. To advance stability and reliable partnerships, the United States must be diligent both in criticizing these ?aws where they emerge in transitional governments and in working to advance the realization of democratic rights and values region-wide.

Second, the administration must embrace the fact that transitions to democracy are not just procedural, but rather intensely political processes…. The inevitable fact is that, in a transitional environment, any American engagement or assistance is likely to be viewed as politically tinged.

­These brief extracts are taken from Moving Beyond Rhetoric: How Should President Obama Change U.S. Policy in the Middle East?

The Project for Middle East Democracy is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. 

Amid escalating protests and violence in Egypt, the United States is watching anxiously for signs that Egypt’s transition from authoritarianism can move forward. Parliamentary elections are expected to take place in the next few months.

These are critical times for Egyptian democracy activists who have not been able to channel the energy of the 2011 protests into victory at the polls. 

What do activists expect from these elections, and what are the obstacles to Egypt achieving progress toward a peaceful democratic transition?  What can the United States do — and what should it not do — to promote human rights and universal values in Egypt in the vital months ahead?  

Human Rights First Invites you to a special live-streamed discussion with Esraa Abdel Fattah – “Facebook Girl” (above) – and Bassel Mohamed Adel Ibrahim. 

Human Rights Challenges as Egypt Prepares for Parliamentary Elections

 Monday February 4, 2013

12.00 – 12.45 

Esraa Abdel Fattah

Leading democracy activist, vice-chairperson of the Egyptian Democratic Academy,

an independent human rights and democracy promotion organization. 

Pioneer social media activist, founder of the April 6 Group on Facebook in 2008. 

Bassel Mohamed Adel Ibrahim

Political activist and journalist.  Co-founder of the Al-Ghad Party with Ayman Nour in 2004. 

Member of the steering committee of the Constitution Party, led by Mohamed al-Baradei. 

Neil Hicks

International Policy Advisor, Human Rights First

Live webcast

(to confirm your registration, please click “Remind Me”

on the bottom right corner of the Facebook/Ustream page)

Egypt’s defense minister has warned that continuing political conflict could lead to “the collapse of the state.”

“In an apparent rebuke to Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president, and his liberal and leftist opponents,…General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, who is also the armed forces commander, said the political, economic and social challenges facing the country represented a ‘danger to Egyptian security and the cohesion of the Egyptians’ state if they remained unresolved by ‘all sides,’” the FT reports:

Diplomats and analysts say the military is not seeking a return to power, and that senior officers such as Mr Sissi consider that the institution’s reputation had taken a battering as a result of its involvement in politics. The army, they argue, does not want to rule as long as civilian authorities can maintain stability, leaving the military to focus on its defence duties and vast economic interests.

Sissi’s statements were “well within the boundaries of how the army understands its role.” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an analyst with the Century Foundation.

“This is a warning that the army is losing patience, not that they want to intervene,” he said. “The question now is whether Morsi and the Brotherhood understand the limitations of their own power. The army still has weight.”

The leading opposition groups comprising the National Salvation Front have rejected Morsi’s calls for dialogue and have demanded a national unity government and a politically diverse, representative committee to amend the Islamist-drafted constitution.

“The opposition is trying to push to get as much as it can,” said Egyptian political analyst Mazen Hassan. “But I think they might just miss the point where it is most suitable to stop and collect the prize of the pressure they are exerting because if the violence continues and they still insist on not participating in dialogue this might backfire against them as people see they are the ones not really willing to cooperate.”

But some observers believe the opposition is not leading but following political developments on the ground.

The front “takes its cues from the street activists, not the other way around,” said Hani Sabra, a Middle East analyst at the New York-based Eurasia Group.

Opposition leaders like Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei “fear that meeting with Mursi would compromise their support at the street level,” he said. “The rift in Egyptian politics is likely to continue to widen and the likelihood of more explosive violence has increased.”

Morsi is responsible for the bloodshed over recent days because he is pursuing the same repressive policies as deposed former President Hosni Mubarak, said Amr Hamzawy, the head of the Freedom Egypt Party and a leader of the National Salvation Front.

“The events since last Friday demonstrate that the current regime uses the same tactics as the Mubarak regime,” Hamzawy told A-Sharq Al-Awsat, “with suppression of the people and the opposition, instead of opening up to the demands of the people and engaging them in serious dialogue.”

The Obama administration said that recent events demonstrate that Egypt is on “a difficult path’ towards democracy.

“We have engaged directly with the Egyptian government as they move forward on the difficult path towards greater democracy and rule of law, and we will continue to do so,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday. “There needs to be a lasting solution to the conflict that we see in Egypt and it has to be a solution that adheres to the rights of all Egyptians.

While many secular Egyptian activists believe the US is bolstering Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, other observers suggest that Washington has no other option but to engage the authorities in Cairo, whichever party is in power.

“This is the kind of group that will be a pain to deal with for the United States, but it’s not al-Qaida; it’s not a security threat,” said Nathan Brown, a professor at George Washington University. “The biggest fear on the part of the (Obama) administration is a political breakdown in Egypt. They are worried that a collapse in the Egyptian state would be destabilizing on the region, and might allow the flow of arms and fighters among more radical movements in the region.”

The recent revelation of virulently anti-Semitic comments made by Morsi reportedly shocked U.S. officials, and legislators on Capitol Hill have expressed their reluctance to approve a $1 billion aid package for Cairo.

“How would the American people feel about cutting money to education programs here and giving money to a government that is anti-Semitic?” said Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding to foreign governments.

“I don’t think the administration has any right to say they are going to grant this foreign aid because I think this Congress may very well condition it,” Wolf said. “I think there are a lot of questions, and I don’t think it’s a given.”

A day after Morsi declared a state of emergency in three violence-stricken provinces, the country’s largest opposition bloc declared that it would not participate in a national dialogue to discuss a unified response to the unrest, the Project on Middle East Democracy reports:

Mohamed El Baradei, a leading member of the National Salvation Front, stated Monday, ”The dialogue to which the president invited us is to do with form and not content,” echoing the sentiment among opposition members that dialogue with Morsi’s government would not produce serious compromise. National Salvation Front leaders insist that President Morsi must first name a commission to amend the country’s controversial constitution and appoint a national unity government before talks can be held.

”We support any dialogue if it has a clear agenda that can shepherd the nation to the shores of safety,” El Baradei said.

Egypt is becoming increasingly polarized under the Brotherhood’s leadership, in large part due to the newly adopted constitution, says political scientist Amar Ali Hassan.

“Before the revolution, to openly speak in a derogatory fashion about the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafis was simply not accepted by the population, as this was the equivalent of insulting Islam,” he tells Qantara.de.

“Things have since changed radically. People in the cafés and out on the squares are explicitly demanding that intellectuals now criticize them,” he says. “They want us to uncover scandals and expose propaganda. This used to be unthinkable. Such demands have only been voiced since the Muslim Brotherhood has been in power.”

The Project for Middle East Democracy is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Over 100,000 protesters took to the streets and filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square today to protest the decree granting President Mohammed Morsi sweeping powers.

“The Muslim Brotherhood stole the revolution” read one banner in Tahrir. The Islamists “are a menace to the political process,” said publisher and veteran democracy advocate Hisham Kassem.

“Voices bursting through megaphones kept up chants, drawing cheers when the names of opposition leaders Hamdeen Sabahi, Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Hamzawy were shouted,” according to one account.

“Morsi is the … president who has sweeping executive (power), sweeping legislative (power) and … puts himself above the judicial branch of government,” said Hamzawy, founder of Egypt’s Freedom Party. “That is a very dangerous mix, which can only lead to a dictatorship.”

But Gehad el-Haddad, a senior adviser to the Brotherhood and its political party, insists Morsi will not back down. ‘‘We are not rescinding the declaration,’’ he told The Associated Press:

That sets the stage for a drawn-out battle between the two sides that could throw the nation into greater turmoil. Protest organizers on a stage in the square called for another mass rally on Friday. If the Brotherhood responds with mass rallies of its own, as some of its leaders have hinted, it would raise the prospect of greater violence after a series of clashes between the two camps in recent days. ..Another flashpoint could come Sunday, when the constitutional court is due to rule on whether to dissolve the assembly writing the new constitution, which is dominated by the Brotherhood and Islamist allies.

‘‘Then we are in the face of the challenge between the supreme court and the presidency,’’ said Nasser Amin, head of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession. ‘‘We are about to enter a serious conflict’’ on both the legal and street level.

Former U.S. diplomat Jamie Rubin said Morsi’s edict “brings to mind all the fears that people in that part of the world have had about the Muslim Brotherhood when it comes to democracy.”

The protesters’ ranks included Kassem, a veteran democracy advocate.

“The last time I went to Tahrir Square, as a participant, was the day after Mubarak was ousted: February 12th, 2011. But today, I am going out to join the protesters against Morsi,” he said

During Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Kassem sometimes found himself advocating on behalf of Muslim Brotherhood members who were imprisoned on trumped up charges. So, when Morsi won the presidency, Kassem was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Morsi’s decree last week changed all that.

“I have reached the position where I think the Brotherhood are not political adversaries or rivals. The Brotherhood are a menace to the political process,” said Kassem,  a leading member of the World Movement for Democracy: “They do not understand democracy and the minute they felt that they were unable to operate democratically, this stupid move to try and simply push everybody out and take full power.”

The largely liberal and secular demonstrators chanted slogans against Morsi and the Brotherhood, but the Islamist group warned that the opposition “should brace for millions” in support of the president.

Morsi’s controversial decree is an attempt to do to the judiciary what he did to the military, writes Michele Dunne, director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East: “strip it of political power, eliminate its influence over the constituent assembly and constitution, and remove it as an obstacle to his authority.”

“But Morsi is now having to find a way to back down—asserting that his new decree is temporary and applies only to certain kinds of presidential actions—because fierce and ongoing protests, as well as judicial strikes, have made clear that this time he has overreached,” she suggests.

Morsi has officially resigned from the Brotherhood, but suspicions that it was a largely cosmetic separation appeared to be confirmed today when the Islamists launched a fierce attack on Morsi’s critics, Al-Ahram reports, accusing them of “not caring about the country’s national interests.”

“When ordinary Egyptians across the nation see pro-Mubarak [elements] protesting in Tahrir along with Islamists’ rivals, they know this isn’t January 25,” the group added. “The opposition thinks the significance of today is of Tahrir protestors; they should brace for millions in support of the elected president.”

According to Al-Ahram’s Arabic-language news website, the Brotherhood’s authoritative Guidance Bureau is mulling measures to appease protesters, but the group has so far refrained from making any public statements to this effect.

“There are signs that over the last couple of days that Morsi and the Brotherhood realized their mistake,” said Elijah Zarwan, a fellow with The European Council on Foreign Relations, adding that the protests were “a very clear illustration of how much of a political miscalculation this was.”

Opposition leaders insist that protecting the integrity of the judiciary is only the first step in a broader campaign against what Abdel Haleem Qandeil, a liberal intellectual, called “the miserable failure of the rule of the Muslim Brothers.” Morsi “unilaterally broke the contract with the people,” he declared. “We have to be ready to stand up to this group, protest to protest, square to square, and to confront the bullying.”

Monday’s announcement that Morsi might accept constraints on his prerogatives is unlikely to appease his critics. 

“It has to be politically worked out. It’s clearly a way for Morsi to preserve what he really wanted plus to save face,” said Nathan Brown, a professor at George Washington University and an expert on Egypt’s legal system.

The move, if it were given legal weight, would confine Morsi’s courtroom immunity to decisions in which he is acting on behalf of the entire nation — such as going to war and signing treaties. But leaders in the region have also used such power on behalf of national security, which can be broadened to encompass far more.

The distinction “has been a slippery legal concept, because authoritarian rulers have used it in the Arab world to get away with almost anything in the last half-century,” Brown said.

Rights activists said Morsi’s statement raised “more questions than answers.”

“Right now, these are just verbal explanations that contradict the written word of the declaration, so that discrepancy needs to be settled,” he said Hossam Bahgat executive director of the Egyprian Initiative for Personal Rights, a rights group that filed a lawsuit challenging the edict’s legality.

Morsi is trying to save face and disguise a strategic retreat, said Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University.

“He is trying to simply say, ‘I am not a new pharaoh; I am just trying to stabilize the institutions that we already have,’ ” he said. “But for the liberals, this is now their moment, and for sure they are not going to waste it, because he has given them an excellent opportunity to score.”

But it remains to be seen whether Morsi’s critics mobilize sufficient opposition to force him to retreat, says H.A. Hellyer, a Cairo-based fellow at the Brookings Institution:

Instead they may have to focus on long-term plans, such as mobilizing a “no” vote in the referendum on the new constitution if they don’t support the document put forward and building a network of support for the next parliamentary elections, he says. If opposition parties are unhappy with the constitution, they could start now to mobilize a vote against it, and also begin building the grassroots support necessary to increase their representation in the next parliament.

“They’ve got a good nine to 12 months before parliamentary elections. The question is, are they going to take advantage of that?” says Hellyer. “If they really want to do this, they have to swallow their pride, accept this is a transitional phase of the revolution, which means you don’t get to mark out your turf –you have to choose a strategic objective and focus on that. And once this is done you can go back to your little squabbles and ideological differences.”

Some analysts believe the current unity within Egypt’s notoriously inchoate secular opposition will prove to be short-lived. 

“This is not a united front, and I am inside it,” said Rabab el-Mahdi of the American University. “Every single political group in the country is now divided over this — is this decree revolutionary justice or building a new dictatorship? Should we align ourselves with folool” — the colloquial term for the remnants of the old political elite — “or should we be revolutionary purists? Is it a conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the pro-Mubarak judiciary, or is this the beginning of a fascist regime in the making?”

In any event, there appears to be little prospect of a rapprochement between the liberal and secular groups which initiated the revolt against Mubarak and the Islamists who proved to be the prime beneficiaries.

”There is a deep mistrust,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. ”It is an ugly round of partisan politics, a bone-crushing phase.”

The controversy has exposed the Brotherhood’s deeply authoritarian instincts, says Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for Al-Arabiya News Channel. Like the communist and fascist movements of the 20^th century, it is a harshly centralized and disciplined movement, primed to seize opportunistic advantage of any opportunity to advance its own sectarian interests.

“Morsi’s majoritarian mindset is not anti-democratic per se, but depends upon a distinctive conception of winner-takes-all politics and the denigration of political opposition,” the Century Foundation’s Michael Wahid Hanna argues:

As opposed to mustering a more durable and broad-based consensus for change and reform, Morsi’s fateful step ensured that the divisions that have marred the post-Mubarak era will only be heightened and more irreconcilable. More broadly, this recurrent pattern raises fundamental questions about the Brotherhood’s commitment to an inclusive democratic process in which compromise and consensus are necessary ingredients. At root, the Muslim Brotherhood believes that it represents the authentic voice of Egyptian society and that its years of repression and its impressive electoral victories have invested it with the right to implement its agenda. As opposed to undertaking the arduous and difficult task of negotiating consensus outcomes, the Brotherhood now seems intent on eschewing the give and take of democratic politics and monopolizing political power.

But some observers believe that Egyptians have come too far to cede newly-won freedoms, even temporarily, and that the current standoff reflects deeper fears about the Brotherhood’s hidden agenda.

“The current standoff between Morsi and the courts reveals that Egyptians no longer accept an authoritarian leader, whether an Islamist or a secular autocrat like Hosni Mubarak,” writes Jeffrey Fleishman. “The deeper misgivings by liberals and non-Muslims are that Morsi is advancing a political Islam that aims to gradually expand sharia law to alter the nation’s character and limit civil and religious freedoms.”

A similar point is made by Council on Foreign Relations analyst Steven Cook, who believes the protests are likely to continue.

“No one doubted that there would be setbacks in Egypt’s transition, but Morsi and his Brothers have failed to grasp that after 60 years of suffering under strongmen, Egyptians will not tolerate authoritarian detours in the name of democracy,” he notes.

“Wasn’t the State of Emergency temporary? Weren’t Mubarak and the National Democratic Party always employing authoritarian measures ‘to prepare the country for democracy’? For the Egyptians who have turned out into the streets to protest Morsi’s decree, it all seems depressingly familiar, right down to the violence the government has employed to suppress them.”

The Obama administration “appears disinclined from pressing Morsi publicly on domestic matters, apparently still believing that this will achieve Morsi’s cooperation on foreign policy,” writes Eric Trager, citing what he calls “the State Department’s vanilla statement” calling on  Egyptians “to resolve their differences … peacefully and through democratic dialogue.”

“Yet Morsi’s constitutional declarations make ‘democratic dialogue’ virtually impossible, because it insulates Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from all meaningful checks on their authority,” says Trager, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

Moreover, Washington’s soft approach towards the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t moderating its violent ambitions. Witness, for example, Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie’s statement … that, “It’s Muslims’ duty to work to recover Palestine through all means and capabilities, first and foremost by preparing for force.” Or the Brotherhood party’s call for unilaterally amending the peace treaty with Israel. Or Brotherhood foreign relations official Mohamed Sudan’s recent announcement that Morsi is “cancelling normalization with the Zionist entity gradually.”

“Washington must press Morsi to reverse course now,” he suggests. “Specifically, it should use its economic aid and influence within the International Monetary Fund, from which Egypt is seeking a $4.8 billion loan, as leverage for confronting Morsi with hard decisions that might lead him to moderate his behavior.”

Morsi’s decree against the judiciary “attempts to strip that institution of its proper role as a balance to the executive branch,” writes Dunne. “That role is all the more important because there is currently no lower house of parliament.”

The part of Morsi’s decree that extended the mandate of the constituent assembly was perhaps justified, as he tried to remove at least one source of pressure on the conflict-ridden assembly. And his desire to replace the Mubarak era prosecutor general in itself was also understandable. But attempting to place the constituent assembly—and, even more alarming, all of his own decisions as president—beyond the reach of the courts went too far. His claim that the decree was temporary rang hollow, and the attempt to throw a bone to non-Islamist activists by reopening prosecutions related to violence against them was too transparent.

“It is to be hoped that he will learn that there are limits that even a democratically elected president in a chaotic post-revolutionary transition should not transgress,” says Dunne, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

RTWT

The “monopolizing” of political power by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is raising concern amongst the country’s democrats and external observers.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed El-Baradei warned against “fascism cloaked in religion,” after a pro-Brotherhood cleric (above) justified  killing the group’s liberal opponents. 

Having emasculated the country’s military, President Mohamed Morsi appears set to target the judiciary, perhaps the sole remaining constraint on Islamist rule, observers suggest.

“This is a dramatic change of events,” said Tarek Radwan, an analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East in Washington, DC. “This was a process that was expected to take much longer. The fact that the two main Mubarak men have been ousted so quickly is significant.”

The Project for Middle East Democracy* notes analyst Dina Ezzat’s observation that regime insiders expect Morsi to target the judiciary now that Ramadan is over.

“Morsi is considering a tactful end to the mandate of General Prosecutor Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud who, like Tantawi and Anan, assumed his job under the rule of Mubarak,” according to one source.

For judges, “There’s a feeling of being besieged, that they’re in the cross hairs,” said George Washington University’s Nathan Brown, who specializes in Egypt’s legal affairs.

Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood appear firmly in control after dismissing the most senior military leaders and unilaterally seizing executive and legislative powers, writes Dennis Ross, a former special assistant to President Obama on the Middle East.

On the plus side, “Morsi has imposed civilian leadership on Egypt” although “non-Islamists are more prone to see recent actions as the Muslim Brotherhood removing any checks on its power,” he writes in today’s Washington Post.

“None of this means that Egypt’s path of change is foreordained. It does mean that the president, who has largely surrounded himself with members of the Muslim Brotherhood or sympathizers, dominates all of Egypt’s institutions of power.”

Leading liberal Amr Hamzawy (left), head of Egypt’s Freedom Party, has called on Morsi to reconstitute the more inclusive constituent committee, charging that his appropriation of both legislative and executive authorities is anti- democratic. The president should specify a date for parliamentary elections and give guarantees for freedom of speech and judicial independence, he said.

The new justice minister, Ahmed Mekki, justifies purging courts of Mubarak-era jurists.

“Judges are a society that want cleansing….The judges will cleanse themselves, not me. I will just remove the immunity of judges who are corrupt,” Mekki told the Wall Street Journal:

Some critics fear that they could help Islamists hold broader control of state institutions than Mr. Mubarak did. The push to shake up Egypt’s judiciary comes as the country is preparing to draft its first post-revolutionary constitution and hold new parliamentary elections.

“Morsi is trying to do to the judiciary the same thing he’s doing to the military,” said the Hariri Center’s Radwan. “The next frontier in terms of where this struggle is going to be fought is in the courts or the judiciary at large.”

Activists and analysts believe the government’s attacks on independent media and judiciary demonstrate the Brotherhood’s illiberal approach to governance.

“These are monopolistic plans,” said Sameh Ashour, president of the Lawyers’ Syndicate. “The Brotherhood wants to control all aspects of the state.”

Rights activists are also concerned about what many consider an Islamist power-grab.

“This means that now the Brothers have all the powers, whether inside the existing Constituent Assembly or in any future one, in case Morsi decides to form a new one,” complained Bahey el-din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.

Morsi will pass laws to neuter the courts, said Ashour, who alleged the Brotherhood wants power to “make decisions unchallenged so they can continue their campaign of terror against intellectuals and journalists.”

Other observers are more sanguine about recent developments:

More so than the formal handover of power in July, the move marks the end of the transitional period following Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow and the beginning of civilian rule, said Manar Shorbagy, a scholar who sits on the 100-member assembly that is drafting a new constitution.

“This was coming anyway,” she said. “The people were pushing in this direction. This was a major demand by anyone who had a part in the revolution.”

But many liberals are alarmed at the emergence of an intolerant political climate, evidenced by an edict by pro-Brotherhood cleric, Sheikh Hashem Islam, a member of the Fatwas (religious edicts) Committee of Al-Azhar Egypt’s supreme Islamic authority.

In an online video, he described a planned protest against the Brotherhood as “a revolution that starkly goes against democracy and freedom.”

“We must fight against the participants in the 24 August demonstrations, who are protesting against the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Mursi and spill their blood.”

The demonstrators “would be committing high treason against their nation, God, his prophet and Muslims,” he said, adding that “if you kill them, that would be righteous.”

Nobel laureate Mohamed El-Baradei, the co-founder of Egypt’s Constitution Party, condemned the legitimizing of political murder.

“Unless those responsible are promptly prosecuted we will slide into fascism cloaked in religion,” Baradei said.

A leading analyst disputes the characterization of Islamist rule as fascistic.

“Let me get this straight: #Egypt under Mubarak wasn’t fascist. #Egypt under SCAF wasn’t fascist. But Egypt under 1 wk of Morsi is ‘fascist’?” tweeted the Brookings Institution’s Shadi Hamid.

But comparisons with Mubarak are “a straw man,” Washington Institute analyst Eric Trager retorts.

The fact is that #Egypt‘s revolution “has become [a]contest among blatantly undemocratic forces.”

For the Century Foundation’s Michael Hanna, “the point is that repression is the salient issue not the identity of the actor. Press censorship was bad then and it’s bad now.”

There are three reasons why Egypt’s military consented to the apparent dilution of its political power, says analyst David Gardner:

First, the Morsi presidency has the legitimacy of a democratic mandate, which the generals recognised in allowing his electoral triumph to stand. With their reputation tattered by their overweening and incompetent performance over the past 18 months, Egypt’s praetorians need a slice of that legitimacy.

Second, Mr Morsi and the Brotherhood have been tactically astute in winning over the younger generals, impatient for promotion. The seemingly eternal Field Marshal Tantawi, moreover, was chosen by Mubarak in part for his mediocrity. To hold on to his position he had to hold down any talent that could outshine him or, more to the point, build a challenge.

The third interest is common to the old guard and the new commanders: to secure immunity from prosecution; to control their own budget; and retain their tentacular business interests.

“Tantawi was threatening the presidency and not willing to put himself under the modicum of civilian rule,” said Hamid, of the Brookings Doha Center.

Several analysts describe Tantawi’s replacement, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, as sharing the Islamists’ ideological outlook.

“Al-Sisi is very close to the Muslim Brotherhood’s mentality,” said Emad Gad, head of international relations at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, who met the general last year. “He spoke a lot about the ethics of Islam and how we are an Islamic society, and he opposed women going to the street to demonstrate.”

Egypt needs significant external assistance and investment to realize their “renaissance plan” to revive the economy, including a $3.2 billion International Monetary Fund loan that the Brotherhood previously rejected, notes Ross, a counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

In this respect, Morsi and the Brotherhood seem to recognize reality. But in another important regard, they appear determined to deny it. Consider that Morsi denied sending Israeli President Shimon Peres a response to a note that Peres had written him after news of the correspondence provoked a backlash in the Brotherhood over Morsi having any such contact with Israel. …. What conclusions should be drawn about an organization that cannot admit the truth? That insists on living in its own reality? If nothing else, it’s clear that the group the Brotherhood is wedded to its ideology and cannot admit anything that might call its basic philosophy into question.

Known for its strategic patience, the Brotherhood is committed to a long-term strategy of gradual Islamization of society at the expense of democratic norms, some observers suggest.

“The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is a patient organization,” notes FT analyst Gardner:

Having waited more than 80 years, it will doubtless see no need to rush things now. One institution it will have its sights on, however, is the army. For all its privileges, it is more attached to a generally pious society than its Turkish counterpart.

That leaves the democratic resilience that will have to be developed by citizens demanding the government, now that the power struggle with the army is in abeyance, repairs the broken economy and gets Egypt back on its feet. The time for slogans is over. Egyptians need to make the Brotherhood deliver.

Recent Ramadan power outages are among the latest signs, however, that the Brotherhood is failing to deliver.

External actors can provide assistance to help the government revitalize Egypt’s moribund economy and deliver services to its needy citizens, but only if democratic conditionalities are respected, writes Ross, a senior director on the National Security Council staff from July 2009 to December 2011:

Egypt’s president and people should also know that we are prepared to mobilize the international community, and global financial institutions, to help Egypt — but that we will only do so if Egypt’s government is prepared to play by a set of rules grounded in reality and key principles. They must respect the rights of minorities and women; they must accept political pluralism and the space for open political competition; and they must respect their international obligations, including the terms of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

“Softening or fuzzing our response at this point might be good for the Muslim Brotherhood, but it won’t be good for Egypt,” he concludes.

*The Project on Middle East Democracy is a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.

Egypt’s new defense minister has pledged to maintain strong military ties between Cairo and Washington, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta said today.

But some observers suggest that President Mohamed Morsi’s replacement of Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi with Abdel Fattah al-Sissi (left), allegedly a rare Brotherhood sympathizer in the country’s senior military, threatens a creeping Islamist takeover of state institutions.

“General al-Sissi expressed his unwavering commitment to the US-Egypt military-to-military relationship, which has been really an anchor of stability in the Middle East for more than 30 years,” Panetta told reporters following a phone conversation with his new counterpart.

“This is someone who we’ve worked with for a long time, who has shown himself to be eager to work with the United States, who sees the value of peace with [Egypt's] neighbors,” a senior Obama administration official said of Gen. Sissi. “What I think this is, frankly, is Morsi looking for a generational change in military leadership.”

Yet analysts and activists alike suggest that the Islamists are consolidating power in a fashion that excludes other political forces.

“It is too early to say whether Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are bent on dominating the state, but there are legitimate concerns given that Morsi now holds executive and legislative authority as well as having an avenue for intervening in constitution writing,” said Jeff Martini of the Rand Corporation.

“Normally, I would have been thrilled that an end has come to military rule, given that the military is now accountable to civilian authority,” says veteran democracy advocate Hisham Kassem. “However, I am quite disturbed by what is coming: the (Muslim) Brotherhood entrenching themselves in power to this extent.”

Sissi’s appointment may represent a compromise between the military’s secular old guard and the Brotherhood.

“People with knowledge of the Egyptian military said Gen. Sissi has a broad reputation within military circles as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, a rare trait in a military culture inured against Islamism,” reports suggest.

“Sissi is known inside the military for being a Muslim Brother in the closet,” said Zeinab Abul Magd, a professor at the American University in Cairo and an expert on Egypt’s military.

Tantawi’s successor “is rumored to be a deeply religious man — perhaps the closest thing on the council to a Brotherhood ally,” Time reports:

“It’s Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood who appointed them,” says Robert Springborg,   an expert on the Egyptian military and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. “So their political careers are dependent on Morsi.”

Sissi is apparently not the only senior military figure to share Islamist sympathies.

The Arabist’s Issandr El Amrani has dug up a 10,000-word essay by General Sedky Sobhy, who was appointed Chief of Staff in Morsi’s weekend reshuffle:

The essay, about the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, was written in 2005 when Gen. Sobhy was studying for a master’s degree from the U.S. Army War College. Well before anyone predicted the events of the Arab Spring, he wrote that if democratization in the Arab world was viewed as the result of U.S. demands and interference, “then these processes will suffer from the public perception of illegitimacy.”

He wrote that the democratization process must also have “political, social, cultural, and religious legitimacy [his emphasis].”

Mori appears to have assumed more power than his autocratic predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, according to some reports:

If left unchecked, there are fears Morsi and his fundamentalist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, could turn the clock back on the country’s tumultuous shift to democratic rule and pursue their goal of someday turning the most populous Arab nation into an Islamic state.

The Brotherhood already won both parliamentary and presidential elections after the uprising last year that forced Mubarak out. The question now is whether there is any institution in the country that can check the power of Morsi and the Brotherhood and stop them from taking over the nation’s institutions and consolidating their grip.

“Are we looking at a president determined to dismantle the machine of tyranny … or one who is retooling the machine of tyranny to serve his interests, removing the military’s hold on the state so he can lay the foundations for the authority of the Brotherhood?” asks prominent rights activist and best-selling novelist Alaa al-Aswani.

“He must correct these mistakes and assure us through actions that he is a president of all Egyptians,” he wrote, warning that Morsi will not be allowed to turn Egypt into a “Brotherhood state.”

Morsi’s accommodation with the armed forces is designed to protect the generals’ interests and privileges, said Tewfik Aclimandos, an analyst who specializes on the military.

“This is a big victory for Morsi,” he said. “It is by no means symbolic. But the military still have tools in the apparatus of the state which would allow it to intervene, and of course, every now and then there will be people [opposed to the Brotherhood] who will invoke them to come to their rescue.”

“Those in the state apparatus who implicitly relied on army protection in resisting the Islamists, now understand that they can’t rely on securing it. You deal with a real president differently from someone you see as a powerless figurehead.”

Other observers detect a new modus vivendi between the Brotherhood and the military.

“Since Mubarak’s ouster and the beginning of Egypt’s political transition, the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts to assert its power have repeatedly been countermanded by the military, and Morsi’s decree could similarly be reversed,” the STRATFOR research group reports:

Under the new arrangement, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces remains powerful, but its composition and leadership have changed. Sensing an opening, Morsi has already issued presidential orders beyond what may have been agreed upon with the military. Morsi canceled a June 17 constitutional addendum issued by the ruling council and amended the constitutional declaration issued on March 30, 2011, with one that grants him full executive and judicial authority as well as the power to set all public policies in Egypt and sign international treaties. The declaration also gives Morsi the right to form a new constituent assembly tasked with drafting an Egyptian Constitution should any future developments prevent the current assembly from carrying out its responsibilities.

These presidential orders have not been implemented, and the judiciary or the military is likely to block them from ever being enacted just as they have done with previous initiatives intended to empower the legislature or the president. While Morsi may have achieved a symbolic victory in removing long-serving members of the former Mubarak regime from their military posts, the military had its own reasons for going along with the moves — reasons that are intended to increase, not reduce, the military’s influence over the civilian government. Furthermore, Morsi is unlikely to exercise unencumbered authority any time soon, especially with the new constitution, which will likely limit the powers of the president, being drafted.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is now “officially in power,” declared the independent Al-Watan daily, as President Mohamed Morsi “consolidated power with stunning speed and shrewdness” by removing senior generals from office and assuming full executive power.

But the Islamist leader’s move has divided analysts and activists alike, with some welcoming the curbing of military power as a sign of progress in the country’s troubled democratic transition, while others fear the military’s political diminution may remove one of the few obstacles to the Brotherhood monopolizing political power.

“There was a bet in the past on the military being the guarantor of the civilian state,” said Hisham Kassem, a Cairo-based publisher and democracy advocate. “This is no longer the case.”

Former liberal MP Amr Hamzawy said that “Morsi’s decisions are going in the right direction and ends the site of the undemocratic junta,” Daily News Egypt reports.

But he called on Morsi to develop a national consensus to resolve the current constitutional impasse, warning that the president’s “consolidation of both legislative and executive powers is unacceptable and raises further concerns over the monopolization of power by one faction.”

The Brotherhood is quietly pursuing its long-established gradualist strategy of an incremental march through Egypt’s political institutions, some observers believe.

“They had to make sure that the media is in their hands and that the army is under their control before they go and make major changes in the Ministry of Justice and in the justice system,” says Mamdouh Hamza, a leading businessman and pro-democracy advocate.  “The next step will be the new constitution.”

“The Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t do anything off the cuff. Everything is according to plan and may be known for a few months before,” Hamza says.

Morsi’s move at least ends a debilitating stalemate, said Emad Shahin, a political science professor at the American University of Cairo.

“The negotiation process over the last year and a half was not working. It’s not producing results,” Shahin tells the New York Times:

Morsi struck a bargain with the younger officers, he might have enhanced his credibility with political forces outside the Brotherhood who had clamored for an end to military rule. At the same time, he could gain a degree of loyalty from a cast of officers who owe their new prominence to him. ….[Shahin] said the younger generation of military leaders, recognizing that fact, might have welcomed the change in leadership. They included Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, whom Mr. Morsi named as Field Marshal Tantawi’s replacement.

“I see tons of reasons why Sisi should cooperate,” Shahin says. “If I were in Sisi’s shoes, I would say, ‘Maybe if we remove these stubborn generals, something will happen.’ ”

The military reshuffling occurred “mostly within the logic of promotion typical of the Egyptian military (i.e., no people were suddenly dropped into the senior ranks from lower ranks or outside the senior staff),” according to The Arabist blogger and analyst Issandr el-Amrani.

“The overall impression I get is of a change of personalities with continuity in the institution. More junior officers are taking the posts of their former superiors, and some SCAF members are shifting positions. The departure of Tantawi was inevitable considering his age and unpopularity.”

The killing of Egyptian troops by jihadists in Sinai was another catalyst for discontented young officers.

“This is definitely a failure of the military institution to uphold its responsibility,” Shahin said.

The removal of several leaders of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces represents a negotiated “safe exit” for military leaders in the wake of the security scandal in the Sinai Peninsula, observers suggest

“It’s obvious SCAF can’t keep up with Sinai and the political situation [at the same time],” said Kassem.

He is disturbed at the prospects of “full executive, legislative and constitutional powers being held by an unpredictable president, backed by the powerful and often opaque, Brotherhood.”

“His legislative power should be withdrawn immediately, or he will be the most powerful and most dangerous president Egypt has ever had,” Kassem said. “Not even Gamal Abdel Nasser had this kind of power.”

But some analysts and secular activists welcomed Morsi’s consolidation of power.

“This is the outcome of revolution: for the first time ever the people are now part of the political equation,” said political analyst Rabab al-Mahdi. “For the first time there is a ruler who can claim legitimacy through the ballot box and he is using this legitimacy.”

“This is an extremely positive step,” said Wael Khalil, a prominent blogger. “It is historic. This way we have established that those backed by votes possess more political authority than those who have weapons.”

“This goes beyond Morsi. It is important for the political future of the country. We were in danger of having a sham democracy. The prospect of a duality of power between the Brotherhood and the military was disturbing.”

While Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei described Morsi’s move against the military as “a step in the right direction,” he cautioned that as the concentration of legislative and executive powers in the hands of the president was at odds with core principles of democracy, it should only be a temporary arrangement.

Other observers believe the military will continue to exercise influence and act as a check on the Islamists’ consolidation of power.

“Will the military leave completely…? I don’t think so,” said Mona Makram Obeid, a member of a civilian advisory council that consults with the military. “They have the economic power, they have the military power and they have, no matter what, the love and respect of the great majority of the people.”

Morsi’s maneuver is probably only the latest in a series of conflicts that will shape Egypt’s future, says a leading analyst.

“There’s still a battle to be fought over the new Egyptian constitution, new parliamentary elections after that,” says Michele Dunne, director of the Atlantic Council’s Center for the Middle East. “And it’s really hard to say whether the military will reassert itself. It still has a lot of economic power. And so I think the struggle for power between the civil and the military in Egypt is far from over.”

Recent developments seem to confirm that the secular democrats and liberals who launched Egypt’s revolution are increasingly sidelined.

“What it means is that the Brotherhood is going to be able to dominate yet another aspect of Egypt’s political transition, unchecked,” said Eric Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“At this point Egypt’s revolt has become a revolution, because a new group has asserted total power. But I certainly don’t think it is completely settled,” he tells McClatchy.

Other experts believe the armed forces are more concerned to defend their economic interests than safeguard the transition or constitution.

“This seems to be a move to preserve the military’s long-standing privileges as opposed to a move to back the military’s purely national defense mission,” said Hisham Sallam, an editor at the Middle East blog Jadalliya.

“I would love to believe that this is a step in the transition toward democracy, but I’m very apprehensive,” said Nora Soliman, one of the founders of the liberal Justice Party. “They have control over most of the levers of power.”

Soliman said she was no fan of the country’s generals but saw them as a necessary evil during Egypt’s democratic transition “to get Morsi out if he did something absolutely contrary to the nature of the state,” she tells the Washington Post:

Analysts say the absence of Islamist rhetoric during Morsi’s time in office and the relatively few high-profile Islamists he has appointed to key jobs are reasons he has been successful in restoring the far-reaching powers of the presidency. In addition to dismissing top generals Sunday, Morsi also nullified a decree that would have substantially weakened his office by giving the military council final say over security matters.

“He has moved up people from within the organizations and people who seem well qualified for the position,” said Dunne, a board member of the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy. “It was pretty well thought out.”

The weekend’s power shift “seems like a mix of a civilian counter-coup and a coordinated coup within the military itself,” said Shadi Hamid from the Brookings Doha Center.

“There are some members of the SCAF who helped Mr. Morsi to do this, and they will now be beholden to him and owe their positions to his administration,” he told the Economist. “What we’re going to see is a temporary accommodation in the short-term. But the institutional struggle between the military and the Brotherhood will continue.”

“Egypt’s strategic partners were certainly concerned about the duality of power in Egypt, so there had to be a consolidation of power within one institution and normally it had to be the elected one,” said Lina Attalah, editor of the Egypt Independent. “I imagine the move was well supported if not blessed by strategic partners because it has been so messy in Egypt amidst two contesting powers and what happened in Sinai served as an index for this state failure.”

“The Morsi move is well calculated in that it’s not a hard coup against the military nor an attempt to end the military legacy in Egypt,” she said, “It’s the replacement of a critical rank, the kind of personnel who are in charge of critical elements in the military such as weaponry and intelligence. It’s a very tactical move.”

The Brotherhood’s power-play only confirms the Islamists’ growing political hegemony, observers suggest.

“A close observation of the sequence of events within the past 18 months reveals that the balance of power between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood had actually been in favour of the latter,” said political analyst Ayman El-Sayyad. “And the Brotherhood has reaped the benefits of its being on the stronger end of the rope when Morsi took office.”

“The decisions have effectively ended the ongoing power struggle between Egypt’s presidency and the military,” he said. “All accountability now falls on the president alone.”

“The nullification of the [SCAF's 18 June constitutional] addendum – which had many problems and restricted the president’s authorities – was an even more important decision than the military and security reshuffles,” added El-Sayyad. “The abrogation of the addendum and the modification of the [SCAF's 30 March] Constitutional Declaration effectively eliminated the SCAF’s political jurisdiction.”

But the president’s decision has disturbing implications for Egypt’s democratic transition, says Kassem.

“Normally, I would have been thrilled that an end has come to military rule, given that the military is now accountable to civilian authority,” Kassem tells VOA. “However, I am quite disturbed by what is coming: the (Muslim) Brotherhood entrenching themselves in power to this extent.”

Morsi’s decisions may establish “a new modus vivendi” between the Brotherhood and the army, observers suggest. The arrangement has been welcomed by investors, but analysts fear that a $2bn loan from Qatar will “not be enough to plug Egypt’s large and growing external and fiscal financing needs” but “it will certainly help shore up dwindling reserves and give further room to man oeuvre to the authorities to secure other sources of financing, including through the acceleration of talks with the IMF and other donors in the coming weeks.”

“A key issue is that the army had very specific demands with a minimum and a maximum,” said Omar Ashour, a professor at Exeter University and visiting scholar at the Brookings Doha Center.

“This is the difference between Tantawi and al-Sisi. The former was going for the maximum and he wanted to draw the boundaries of the political landscape, whereas al-Sisi has gone for a minimum – a veto in high politics and on sensitive foreign policy issues such as relations with Iran or Israel.”

One clue to the nature of the agreement seems to be the survival of the National Defence Council, a body created by the military in June to make decisions on vital security issues. It is headed by the president, but soldiers outnumber civilians on it. In what could be seen as a concession to the military, Mr Morsi has not abolished this council.

“Morsi’s power struggle with the military continues, but this is the first time in Egyptian history that an elected civilian overrules and sacks generals,” says Ashour, who is currently in Cairo.  “It tips the balance that was ingrained in Egypt since 1952 towards civilian authority.”

He expects the Brotherhood and military to negotiate a new form of political cohabitation.

“I think there is a minimum for the military establishment,” he said.“They want a veto in sensitive foreign policy issues, including on Israel and Iran — any policy that can implicate the country in a foreign confrontation. They will want to negotiate the independence of their economic empire.”

“Sisi was inclined to accept minimum, as opposed to what Enan and the field marshal were asking for, which was more or less the power of the Algerian military, combined with the legitimacy of the Turkish military,” Mr. Ashour said, referring to the broad political powers seized by Algeria’s generals in the 1990s and the Turkish military’s interventions in domestic politics. It remains to be seen whether a new formula will greatly alter the dynamic between Egypt’s military and civilian authorities.

“Is this going to be another partition of the military and civilian spheres, with a new group in charge of the military sphere?” asked Robert Springborg, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and an expert on the Egyptian military.

“Is the Brotherhood taking control of the military? Or is it the beginning of democratic control?” he said.

“I think the new commanders will have some demands,” said Ashour. “Morsi won a battle but not the war.”

Morsi’s power grab provides five key lessons about Egypt’s transition, writes Time’s Tony Karon, including the confirmation that the country’s institutions are weak and lack legitimacy:

There’s no constitution, and a democratically elected parliament has been dissolved by a Mubarak-appointed judiciary that sought explicitly to limit the power of elected institutions in favor of military control. Between them the generals and the judges sought to make nonsense of democratically elected institutions and enfeeble the presidency while executive power in the hands of SCAF. Now, Morsi seems to have struck back, but many fear he’s playing the same game, the rules of which are not entirely clear.

“Morsi acted extra-legally,” says Michael Hanna, an analyst with the Century Foundation. “That’s not a moral or political judgment — revolutions often involve upending the existing legal political frameworks. And the one he was overturning was also established extralegally by the SCAF. The point is that Egypt’s institutions have been weakened to the point that there’s no institution adjudicating the battle for power. The result, until now, has been a series of competing power grabs between the generals and the Muslim Brothers.”

But, he warns, the political tug of war between these rival power centers does little to build and legitimize the institutions necessary for a democratic transition:

“Those seeking to build a stable democratic Egypt shouldn’t feel more comfortable with President Morsi amassing overwhelming executive authority over the political and constitutional process than they have been with the SCAF amassing that same authority.”

The weekend’s developments confirm that “the current phase of Egyptian politics is going to be a long, grinding institutional war of position,” says George Washington University’s Marc Lynch:

Morsi’s moves were a bold and unexpected frontal assault on the senior military leadership, but not a decisive one.  His appointment of the respected jurist Mahmoud Mekki as Vice President could be seen as another such bold move in institutional combat, by potentially co-opting or intimidating the judiciary. But bold as the moves were, they don’t instantly wipe away the real power centers in Egyptian politics. Morsi today is more of a President, but Egypt is a long way from the “Islamic Republic” being bandied about by the Brotherhood’s critics”

But Egyptian liberals fear that the Brotherhood’s consolidation of power will tilt the political playing field to their advantage in the forthcoming parliamentary elections.

“I don’t think other parties will have a good chance in the next parliamentary election,” said Mohamed Aboul Ghar, leader of the Egyptian Social Democratic party.

“They will exert pressures like in the days of Mubarak. In the previous election, even when they were not in power, they used religion in their campaigning in breach of the electoral law and tried to influence voters waiting in line to cast their ballots. They were doing this when they were not in power, what will it be like now?”

His concerns are shared by Kassem, a leading member of the World Movement for Democracy.

“His legislative power should be withdrawn immediately, or he will be the most powerful and most dangerous president Egypt has ever had,” Kassem said.

“Not even Gamal Abdel Nasser had this kind of power,” he said, referring to Egypt’s first military president in 1952, and who kicked-off 60 some years of martial rule.

Liberal and secular political forces have long decried the Brotherhood’s attempts, through the parliament, to mold the constitution as a primarily Islamist document. The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party currently dominates the constitution-writing committee. And if Morsi retains the current powers he usurped from SCAF, he himself will have the ability to submit disputed sections of the text to the Supreme Constitutional Court.  

“[The court] also has the power to investigate the constitutionality of any legislation issued by Morsi, but whether or not they do it remains to be seen,” Kassem said.

“The country is boiling,” he said. “And unfortunately we can’t enjoy the end of military rule with a dangerous Islamist president in power.”

“Egypt’s choice should not be between democracy without liberalism (what the Islamists are accused of seeking) or liberalism without democracy (what the liberals are likely to get),” writes the FT’s Roula Khalaf:

That is the fake choice that kept Hosni Mubarak in power for three decades, his regime sustained by a political and business elite, and an outside world that feared the Islamists. And it will remain as long as all sides in Egypt’s political divide fail to find a minimum of national consensus.

The rearguard action by Egypt’s old guard is likely to have profound regional implications, some analysts believe.

“From Libya to the Gulf, the rise of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has buoyed Islamists around the region,” reports suggest, “but the military’s bid to curb their power has also exposed the fragility of the gains Islamists have made since the Arab Spring.”

Adopting a sectarian and opportunistic approach to potential anti-authoritarian allies, the Brotherhood failed to learn lessons from neighboring Tunisia. 

“I always tell Arabs: ‘Look at Tunisia,’ ” says Ibrahim Sharqieh, deputy director of the Brookings Doha Center, who routinely meets with politicians of countries including Libya, Yemen and Syria. “There, we are genuinely seeing a pluralistic model emerging.”

Tunisia….never had the friction between military and civil society that Egyptians have had to face. But Tunisia’s political parties have also sidestepped mistakes that Egypt’s political actors have made. Tunisia boasts a coalition government that pairs the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, winner of the region’s first post-Arab Spring election, with a coalition of secular groups. The head of state is a former human-rights activist…. Ennahda’s leaders rejected the winner-take-all mentality that some analysts say set Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood on a collision course last week with the army and supporters of the old regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

The Tunisian party gained more respect this spring when the co-founder of the movement, religious scholar Rachid Ghannouchi, refused calls by extremists to make Shariah, or religious law, the basis of the new constitution. The national interest relies on consensus, “not narrow partisanship,” he said in a speech last month. So far, Tunisia’s political reforms haven’t been met by the same backlash among traditional authoritarian Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf that has greeted Egypt’s democratic experiment.

“Economics is what can threaten the entire democratic reform model for the region,” says Sharqieh,. “Protesters were motivated in part by economic frustration. They want to see the fruits of change and democracy.”

Egyptian democrats were naïve to expect the head of the SCAF, 76-year-old Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, who was Mubarak’s defense minister for 20 years, to lead a democratic transition, say observers.

“People expected that after the downfall of Mubarak that he might be changed and he might be serious about leading the country to change,” said Khalil al-Anani, an Egyptian analyst at Britain’s Durham University.

Instead, Egyptians discovered Tantawi had “the same mentality as Mubarak, who would like to keep things as it is”.

That view had been echoed, back in 2008, well before the Arab Spring in a leaked diplomatic cable from the U.S. ambassador to Cairo. Francis Ricciardone described Tantawi as “charming and courtly” but “aged and change-resistant”.

The U.S. envoy was in a good position to know, as the United States gives Egypt’s military $1.3 billion in aid each year.

“He and Mubarak are focused on regime stability and maintaining the status quo through the end of their time,” Ricciardone wrote. “They simply do not have the energy, inclination or world view to do anything differently.”

“The problem is a gap between two generations: one thinking about a new Egypt and another that leans toward the continuation within the old regime,” said Nabil Abdel Fattah, an expert at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

“He is the son of the military institution and is interested in the military keeping its status and the shape of the military relationship within the new political system.”

The weekend’s constitutional decree gives the military considerable authority and de facto legal immunity, observers suggest.

“This is the most dangerous phase in the modern history of Egypt,” said Khaled Fahmy, a historian at the American University in Cairo. “These [constitution amendments] are the continuation of a series of moves, taken by the SCAF on its way to a military coup, using both the law and judicial bodies,” (AUC) told Ahram Online.

“This is an excessive use of power and an unprecedented action in the course of Egypt’s modern history,” Fahmy told Ahram Online.

But other analysts consider talk of a military coup to be far-fetched, recalling reports that the military’s assumption of power in February 2011 was itself a “quiet military coup”.

Furthermore, the military’s constitutional decree does not indicate that the generals “want to stay in government…..to continue administering Egypt on a day-to-day basis,” according to Steven A. Cook, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“What they would like to do is return to the position that they were in under Mubarak where they could play an influential role from behind the scenes–that they would be the ultimate force of authority and power in this system; and that their economic interests would be taken care of,” he argues.

Recent events in Egypt have also highlighted the pitfalls of comfortable analogies and generalized predictions.

“After the Arab Spring, many people spoke of the ‘Turkish model,’ by which was meant a democratic Islamist government,” notes one observer. “But now a very different Turkish model is being discussed — the one from the past where a military holds on to power, unwilling to give it up for decades.”

Hussein Ibish, the senior research fellow for the American Task Force on Palestine, named this week to Foreign Policy magazine’s Twitterati 100, has acknowledged his own erroneous predictions about the trajectory of Egypt’s transition and the wider Arab awakening.

 “Resist trying to impose any grand narratives. Take every apparently emerging pattern as contingent and unstable. Be prepared for Arab states and publics alike to pleasantly surprise or disappoint without warning,” he wrote.

“Avoid predictions whenever possible. And acknowledge that we frequently don’t really ‘know’ what we think we ‘know,’ for political realities are always at least a dozen steps ahead of every analyst.”

While Egypt’s democrats have been denied consistent assistance by the crackdown on pro-democracy NGOs, the Muslim Brotherhood is one of many regional Islamist groups to benefit from substantial and largely covert funding from the Gulf states. Qatar has been an especially generous and largely opaque funder of Islamist groups, but intra-Gulf tensions are raising questions about such cross-border assistance.

“The UAE has serious problem with the Qataris trying to support a regional role for the Brotherhood,” said Ayham Kamel, London-based analyst at Eurasia Group. “Abu Dhabi and Dubai see the regional rise of the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat. Qatari support for them is likely to create tensions within the GCC and even on a bilateral level.”

While the UAE government is likely to accept whatever leader emerges victorious in Egypt’s run-off, the growing clout of the Brotherhood and its potential emulators at home could yet strain ties within the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

“The UAE is clearly worried about local Islamists… It has a problem with Islah and its own Islamists,” said Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdullah. Egypt’s presidential elections were “a blow to would-be pro-democracy revolutionaries,” according to Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio.

“In the attempt to prevent control being passed to either the revolutionaries or the Muslim Brotherhood, the armed forces have used a range of well-known techniques used by the regime under Mubarak,” they observe:

First, divide the opposition. This was fairly easy, partly because of the lack of cohesion amongst ‘revolutionary forces’, but mostly because the leadership of the country’s largest and best-organized political movement – the Muslim Brotherhood – notoriously favours systematically seeking compromiseand coexistence with the regime.

Second, play the fear card. This the military junta has done from the very beginning of the post-Mubarak period, invoking the spectres of economic instability and insecurity, blaming them on the revolutionaries in the hope of reaping the support of those who will eventually call for order over ‘chaos’. ….. The most infamous manifestation of this climate was state television’s claim during the so-called ‘Maspero Incident’ that unarmed civilians had attacked the army’s armored personnel carriers, inviting ‘all honorable citizens’ to take to the streets to defend the army.

Thirdly, keep the opposition guessing, keep enough people hoping – through hints of reform – and most importantly keep institutional options open.

But the long-term viability of such tactics is questionable as “the junta’s power …is more brittle than it may appear,” they contend:

Firstly, for structural reasons: its leadership is ageing, the gap between lower, mid and higher ranks has sparked sporadic dissent, and unlike the Brotherhood’s, the military’s economic power relies in no small part on exploiting the labor of its own conscripts. Secondly, because none of the measures it has taken so far address the increasing economic tensions which lead to a strong labor mobilization before, during and after the Uprising. These tensions are the direct result of policies from which both the military and the Brotherhood benefit. Thirdly, because the junta’s inability thus far to engineer a smooth transition in which it would protect its interests while remaining in the background has meant it has ended up attempting to occupy virtually every seat of public power. ….

Finally, so long as the Brotherhood is kept away from power, it will be able to build on its legitimacy as an opponent of official corruption and authoritarianism, as it has for the past several decades. It will also gain legitimacy from its charitable work – from schools to hospitals– which will virtually guarantee that most people will be willing to give it its ‘turn’ in office.

“The presidential elections have presented the military with the dilemma underlying its position: it can persevere on its current ‘maximalist’ path of saturating all levers of state power, including by manipulating presidential elections,” Teti and Gervasio contend, “but if it does so it will not resolve the structural tensions which eventually crippled the regime under Mubarak and lead to the January 2011 Uprising.”