What a difference a year makes
The hounding from power of Egypt’s president, Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brother who was elected a year ago, leaves the most populous and influential country in the Arab world in a dangerous state of flux, and it will have sweeping implications for politics across the Arab world—Egypt has always been a bellwether for its region.
On June 30th, when as many as 14m protesters poured into streets in towns and cities across the country, the Egyptian army issued an ultimatum calling on Mr Morsi to “meet the demands of the people” baying for his departure. Egypt’s Islamists, as well as columnists in Western newspapers, were quick to decry an impending military coup. As was the case with the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, Egypt’s large, disciplined and professional army was taking upon itself the duty of sweeping away a collapsing administration and stepping into the breach.
This it did on July 3rd, when armoured vehicles started to roll out. In the evening the army announced a transition plan developed in consultation with opposition leaders and religious figures. The Brotherhood-crafted constitution passed by a referendum late last year has been suspended; a committee will revise it. The supreme court will issue a new electoral law for early parliamentary and presidential elections. Nearly all political parties, including Salafist former allies of the Brotherhood, have endorsed the road map. Adly Mansour, a supreme-court judge, will be interim president.
The Tahrir-Square-filling tactics that took three weeks to topple Mr Mubarak two years ago did the same trick in just three days this time, and this swift, dramatic ouster was greeted by an even greater cacophony of joy than the previous one.
One might have expected Egyptians to be especially wary of military intervention. The period of army rule between the fall of Mr Mubarak and Mr Morsi’s election was marked by hamfisted management, maladroit politics and vicious human-rights abuses. Before that, Egypt had suffered six decades of increasingly corrupt, army-dominated government behind a façade of civilian presidents, all of whom had previously been army officers. It should have seemed a dangerous precedent to have the army cut short Egypt’s barely-started first experiment with full-scale democracy.