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Following a weekend of violent protests, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi has declared a 30-day state of emergency and curfew in three major cities that border the Suez Canal. The Muslim Brotherhood-led government is also in the process of approving a draft bill to permit the military to deploy and arrest civilians.
This latest spate of violence contrasts with previous flare-ups in the level of collaboration we're now seeing between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military, but an expectation of growing unrest under deteriorating economic conditions will also serve the military's goal to keep the Muslim Brotherhood's political power in check.
In spite of the emergency declaration, protesters are already breaking the curfew and more mass funerals are expected to transform into riots in Port Said, Suez and Ismailia provinces, all of which border the Suez Canal. So far, commercial traffic through the Suez has not experienced any disruption from the unrest. Anti-Brotherhood protests are also resuming in Cairo.
The decision to impose a state of emergency in these areas was not an easy one for Morsi -- after all, emergency rule was a tool heavily relied on by the Mubarak regime to sustain authoritarian rule for decades and so it strikes an emotional chord with much of the populace. However, the track record of riots in Egypt over the past two years shows that Egyptian police and internal security forces have not been capable of quelling unrest on their own. Once again, Morsi has had to turn to the military for help.
This exposes the Muslim Brotherhood's undeniable dependency on the military to control a highly polarized state and thus gives the Egyptian armed forces leverage to politically contain the Muslim Brotherhood. The pressure on the Morsi government is also bound to escalate as the government struggles to negotiate a $4.8 billion loan with the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. On the one hand, the loan is urgently needed to stem the precipitous decline of the Egyptian pound and drain on government coffers to defend the currency. On the other hand, the conditions attached to that loan are going to require cuts in subsidies and hikes in taxes that will only fuel more unrest.
Morsi has tried to get around these constraints by delaying the loan, reshuffling his Cabinet and calling for yet another dialogue with the opposition, but none of these moves will allow him to avoid the inevitable and additional pain that is to come from austerity measures. Morsi will first have to get past the unrest associated with the anniversary of the uprising and hold his new Cabinet together to finalize a deal with the IMF.
The military, meanwhile, has no interest in removing Morsi and inheriting the many ailments afflicting the country. It is useful for now to have the Muslim Brotherhood absorb the blame, but that, too, will carry consequences. The Brotherhood is still the largest and most popular political party in the country, but the more the population becomes disillusioned with Brotherhood rule, the more that could benefit fringe political parties.
That includes Egypt's faction of Salafist-jihadists, including the Nour party, which won 25 percent of seats in Egypt's lower parliament in the last election. While divisions among the Salafist groups weaken the bloc overall, they are making an effort to unify ahead of the next elections scheduled for this spring. From the military's point of view, it would much rather deal with the Muslim Brotherhood than with a far more politically intractable group on either extreme of the political spectrum.
Courtesy : STRATFOR (www.stratfor.com)