Egypt on the edge

THE bespectacled Mohamed ElBaradei is a serious man with a pile of degrees in constitutional law and a Nobel Prize for running the UN’s nuclear agency. Last winter he warned of grave trouble if his country elected a president before defining the powers of the office in a new constitution. The generals in charge of post-revolutionary Egypt failed to listen.

That is something many Egyptians will now deeply regret. Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brother and winner of presidential elections in June, shocked the country by issuing a decree that assumes vastly widened powers for his office, including virtual immunity against judicial oversight. He then ordered the assembly that is drawing up the country’s new constitution to cram a month’s work into a single day—so as to produce a draft on November 29th, ready for a referendum in mid-December. All this has met with furious protests. The courts have gone on strike and demonstrators have taken to the streets in numbers not seen since last year’s revolution.

Mr Morsi’s frustration with the courts is understandable. Egypt’s judges have serially and petulantly interfered with the creation of better democratic institutions, disbanding an elected parliament on a technicality and threatening to scrap the constitution-drafting body. His powers will lapse when the constitution is adopted. But all this is eclipsed by his disastrous rush to get the constitution he wants at any price.

For one thing, the draft is flawed. The founding document of Egypt’s new democracy is full of waffle about the role of Islam and draws freely on the dictatorial constitution of 1971. Just as bad, Mr Morsi has engineered the backing of Egypt’s armed forces for the rushed job by enshrining the principle that a serving officer will be minister of defence. In effect, that spares the overmighty army from civilian oversight.