After returning to Egypt he became head of the engineering department at Zagazig University. He rose through the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood and served as an independent in the movement's parliamentary bloc from to As an MP, he was occasionally praised for his oratorical performances, for example after a rail disaster in when he denounced official incompetence.
Morsi was chosen as the Muslim Brotherhood's presidential candidate in April after the movement's deputy general guide, millionaire businessman Khairat al-Shater, was forced to pull out. In his election campaign, Morsi presented himself as a bulwark against any revival of the old guard of Hosni Mubarak.
When he came to power in June after a narrow election victory, Morsi promised to head a government "for all Egyptians". But critics complained he had failed to deliver during his turbulent year in office. They accused him of allowing Islamists to monopolise the political scene, concentrating power in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, they said he had mishandled the economy and failed to deal with the very issues that led to the uprising that brought him to power: calls for rights and social justice.
Public opposition to Morsi began building in November when, wishing to ensure that the Islamist-dominated constituent assembly could finish drafting a new constitution, the president issued a decree granting himself far-reaching powers. Analysts assessing the fluid political situation believe that anger is swelling which would translate to more protests in the coming days.
General Assembly in New York. Welcome to Africanews Please select your experience. Watch Live. Breaking News Close. News Egypt's anti-Sisi protests explained in 5 key questions. With millions of people flooding the streets and demanding that he relinquish power, the military was merely responding to the will of the people—not staging a power grab. While few sober observers are willing to believe the anonymous military sources that claimed that up to 33 million people were on the streets, many would still agree that Morsi faced an unusually high level of street protests during his year in power.
Protest data call this narrative into question. Instead of focusing on the size of short-lived protests—however important or symbolic they may have been—the picture becomes more complicated when we look at the average number of protests per day over a longer period of time. Data show the average number of protests per day almost tripled after Morsi was ousted. The five months following the coup against Morsi were characterized by the highest level of protests It was not until interim President Adly Mansour passed the protest law on November 24, that protest activity severely declined, leading to a 52 percent decrease in total protests.
Gamal Eid, the Executive Director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, described the law as more draconian than the protest law it replaced, which was passed by colonial officers when Egypt was still a protectorate of the British Empire. GDELT counts the number of protests as reported in print, broadcast, and web media in languages from nearly every country in the world, thus avoiding the biases of both the Western and Egyptian media.
But as GDELT relies on automated gathering of news sources, it tends to overstate some events that were heavily reported. Moreover, since general access to news has increased and continues to increase in recent years, it tends to underestimate earlier protests during earlier years. However, since we are comparing protests from mid until the end of , this is not a serious issue, as protests in Egypt have had wide coverage during the entire time. However, the protest data do not account for the size of each protest.
A small protest is counted in the same way as a large protest. Although the Rabaa sit-in was much larger than the sit-ins in Tahrir Square in in terms of the physical space it occupied, it only counted as one protest out of the As an elected president, Morsi had the democratic right to surround himself with his own party members and those who could help him implement his political programme.
Ultimately, whether intentionally or not, these myths served to steer Egypt far away from the path of formal democracy. By the end of June , only 11 out of 35 Egyptian cabinet members and 10 of 27 governors were from the Muslim Brotherhood. It is true that some of the Egyptian non-Islamists in the assembly withdrew, but their withdrawals should be understood as part of a larger attempt to suspend formal democratic procedures and elections.
According to one liberal member of the assembly, Mohamed Mohie El-Din, non-Islamist complaints about the assembly were driven mostly by politics , not substantive concerns. The document that was ultimately produced by the process was far from perfect, but also hardly an Islamist manifesto. It included demands for presidential elections, term limits, an impeachment article and political inclusion.
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