Nouh El Harmouzi
Roots of Egypt’s Revolt
Rent-seeking and autocracy.
Posted February 21, 2011
Egypt has been a pressure cooker for decades. Like others in the region, the Mubarak regime was been sitting atop a simmering political crisis, simultaneously attempting to contain rising Islamist violence and snuffing out pockets of political resistance. The country has been under a continuous state of emergency since the assassination of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat in 1981. That state of emergency has been the foundation of a policy of “stability through continuity,” which in fact has meant the monarchical exercise and transmission of power by a president backed by a military junta and with the support of the barons and apparatchiks of the hegemonic National Democratic Party. It’s now all crashed down, and Mubarak is gone. How did such a “stable” regime become destabilized so fast?
Read more
Comment: The surprise with regimes like these is not that they come falling apart, the curious fact is how long suppression, inefficiency, and corruption can be held up by the blockheads in power.
No comments:
Post a Comment