#epicfail

Whatever happens tomorrow in Egypt, it can’t be good.  That anyway is the consensus among journalists and experts for the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations planned to mark President Morsi’s first year in office.

According to Pew, the Muslim Brotherhood and the more conservative Salafists have a marginally favorable view of the country’s direction, of how democracy is working out and of the government’s respect for personal freedoms.  By wider margins, they also like the new constitution and think future elections will be fair.  Islamists are clearly prepared to defend Morsi from what they regard as an illegitimate rebellion against him.

The gap with non-Islamists in the National Salvation Front (NSF) is dramatic and widening.  They don’t like the country’s direction, are dissatisfied with the new constitution, don’t think elections will be fair, don’t like the way democracy is working out or the government’s respect for personal freedoms.  A substantial portion of the NSF adherents are now backing Tamarod, the petition-based rebellion calling for Morsi’s ouster, a new constitution and new elections.

The leadup to tomorrow’s events has already been violent, killing among others an American Jewish college student who was in Egypt to teach English to children and improve his own Arabic.  Tomorrow could be much worse, as both Tamarod and Brotherhood supporters seem determined to clash.

Certainly Morsi has a lot to answer for.  His administration has so far been shambolic at best.  Egypt’s economy is still in a tail spin, he has failed to undertake serious economic reforms, minorities (especially the Coptic Christians) and secularists are feeling excluded, and security throughout the country has deteriorated.  The long-pending $4.8 billion International Monetary Fund loan is still pending.  Without cash infusions from gas-rich and Brotherhood-friendly Qatar, Cairo would be in truly desperate straits.

The opposition in Egypt is not without fault.  Morsi won election only with the support of many NSF adherents, who last year backed him in preference to the Mubarak regime holdover Ahmed Shafiq.  Some of us thought that a bad idea at the time.  While they now resent what they view as American support for Morsi, Egypt’s secularists and more moderate Islamists could more appropriately blame themselves for his election.  The Americans are dealing with a democratically elected government, as they must.  The NSF subsequently did badly in parliamentary elections, though that matters little now that the Egyptian courts dissolved the lower house.

An Egyptian banker told me a couple of weeks ago that she expected Morsi to be gone at the end of June.  I doubt that.  There is no legal provision in Egypt for a new presidential election as the outcome of a petition.  The Brotherhood did not get where it is without determination and grit.  Morsi will likely tough out tomorrow’s mess, possibly using the army once again to quell what the Brotherhood and Salafists will regard as an effort to undo a democratically elected president who represents the will of the majority.  But the disorder will make the economic situation worse and alienation of minorities, secularists and moderate Islamists more dramatic.

Disorder after a revolution is far worse than disorder during one.  It prevents the new regime from consolidating itself and providing the kinds of services that what Egyptians call “the party of couch”–those who did not join in the public demonstrations against former President Mubarak–expect.  Most Egyptians, who number close to 85 million, are poor and crowded in a relatively small part of the country along the Nile and in its delta.  A major explosion of disorder and violence is certainly possible.  If tomorrow somehow turns out fairly peaceful, that will be an enormous success.  But it would not change the fact that Egypt is already suffering an #epicfail.