Presidents and Pretenders: Meet Egypt’s New Government

This article was originally published here on ForeignAffairs.com on July 22,2013.

In the wake of the July 3 military intervention that brought Mohamed Morsi’s presidency to a premature end, Egypt has a new opportunity to build more just political order. But that task is just as difficult now, if not more so, than it was in February 2011. The Muslim Brotherhood and its poor decision-making, incompetence, and authoritarianism in the last two and half years did make Egypt’s problems worse, but it did not create them, either. Those old problems -- economic inequality, creaky infrastructure, a failing public-health system, nonexistent government services, and a political system rigged to serve the elite -- have persisted for decades and might just lead to further uncertainty and instability.

There are reasons to like the transition that Mansour and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have set up, notably its sequence. The generals have put constitutional revisions before parliamentary and presidential elections, which will avoid the destabilizing politics that occurred during the transition from Mubarak to Morsi, when Egyptians voted for a parliament and a president whose responsibilities had yet to be enumerated.

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