Once Upon a Revolution (38 page)

A few days later, the courts stepped in and postponed the elections because of the imperious process by which Morsi had forced through the law. The public mostly forgot about the whole boycott brouhaha, distracted by the shortage of diesel, electricity, and foreign currency reserves. But the supposed liberals had shown their hand. ElBaradei had led them in a retreat from democratic politics, and he had begun voicing in public the secular side's trump card long bandied about in private: the military. “If law and order is absent, they have a national duty to intervene,” ElBaradei said. “They will just come back to stabilize. And then we will start all over again.” Of all the senior secular statesmen, ElBaradei had seemed by far the most liberal, but barely a half year into the first elected presidency in Egypt's history, he was tacitly endorsing a military coup.

Law and order were slipping away fast, and the blame couldn't all be laid at Morsi's doorstep. Most of the government bureaucracy was
in outright revolt against the president. The judiciary was doing everything it could to thwart the Brotherhood's agenda. Police were actively fomenting chaos. Officers joined a mob attacking Christians at the Coptic Cathedral in Abbasiya. They stood by as vigilantes sacked the Muslim Brotherhood's new headquarters on the Moqattam plateau overlooking Old Cairo. Public transportation shut down over diesel shortages that had no obvious explanation. Power cuts were more severe than ever.

Somewhat adrift, Moaz joined the Ghad Party, led by Ayman Nour, the dissident who had run for president against Mubarak in 2005. He liked it because it was a party committed to liberalism and pluralism, and the leadership was willing to accept a former Brother. However, some of his new comrades accused him of only pretending to have been expelled from the Brotherhood so that he could operate as some kind of faux liberal sleeper cell. In a still more bitter sign of the times, Moaz returned from a short visit to Lebanon in March to learn that he was under investigation as a terrorist, allegedly for plotting with Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shia party. Every activist faced a web of pending investigations, but the charges seemed increasingly dangerous.

All over the country, people were understandably afraid and angry. Life was getting harder and more disorderly. The police were clearly at cross-purposes with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the military's cryptic statements left the public unsure whether it would protect Morsi's regime or act against it. The people of Egypt were caught in the middle. Egyptians who supported one side found they that had almost no common ground with the other. Trust was scarce. Moaz met with one of Morsi's advisers and pleaded, “You need to be more pluralistic. You're not meeting people's needs, and you never will unless you work with the people with whom you disagree.” The adviser disagreed. He thought Morsi was doing as good a job as could be expected under trying circumstances, and that his detractors would hate the president no matter what because they were Islamophobes.

A new movement capitalized on this disconnect in May. Tammarod, founded by five young activists, began as a simple cry of frustration at
Morsi. In an echo of the anti-Mubarak Kifaya movement of 2005, their “Rebel” petition proclaimed “We reject you!” and listed Morsi's failures: no security, no wealth, no jobs, no dignity, and no justice. The petition laced fear and xenophobia into its bill of particulars. “We reject you because Egypt still follows in America's footsteps,” Tammarod declared. “Morsi is a total failure in every single goal . . . he is not fit to govern a country as great as Egypt.” The movement's only affirmative demand was Morsi's exit and new elections. All of the five were veterans of Tahrir, and a few hailed from the April 6 Movement. They spoke well and knew how to organize. At first Tammarod was barely taken seriously, considered a symbolic stunt even by its supporters, but by the end of May, after only a month, Tammarod announced that it had gathered seven and a half million signatures. The number was stunning, although Tammarod declined to submit its petitions to any outsider for verification.

The anti-Morsi campaign revealed just how much of Egypt had lost faith in its president. Tammarod attracted onetime Brotherhood voters, people of all social classes, and fans of secular and religious government. Extreme secular nationalists thought the Brotherhood never should have been allowed into politics; a handful of die-hard democracy proponents wanted a referendum or early elections so that Morsi could be tested at the ballot box. Disenchantment with Morsi was a unifying cause, and important players took note, opportunistically jumping to support Tammarod as its nationwide popularity soared.

Tammarod's success also raised questions about whether the old regime was backing it, with or without the knowledge of its founders. The five volunteer coordinators worked out of a simple borrowed space in downtown Cairo, and yet the campaign seemed to command vast resources in virtually every town in Egypt.
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businessmen and political parties backed the campaign, while the police left it free to work. Local strongmen who had kept out of sight since Mubarak's time felt comfortable openly embracing Tammarod. Whispers spread that the campaign had the blessing of the former ruling party, the military, the police, general intelligence, general security, and most civil servants who weren't Brotherhood supporters. Police let Tammarod gather signatures in public spaces where politics were legally prohibited, such as train stations. Conservative
billionaire Naguib Sawiris and his Free Egyptians Party quietly contributed their national network. Established
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bosses in the countryside backed the Tammarod volunteers, understanding that this was finally a national movement that had buy-in from the secular security establishment as well as revolutionaries. Tammarod's momentum was unmistakable. By the time of the first anniversary of Morsi's inauguration on June 30, Tammarod hoped to present eleven million signatures, more than the number that had voted for Morsi. Organizers intended a protest so large that it would force him to call early elections, although the petition specified no political path forward, only a total rejection of the president.

A vast groundswell had turned against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Remnants of the old regime were casting their lot with Tammarod, but genuine public outrage had peaked against the sanctimonious and incompetent Brotherhood. People were sick of the unreliable gas and power lines, and the political grandstanding, while Christians feared that with each passing month they would be more likely to hear of a church burning or a lynch mob killing a Christian family in a distant village. The Coptic pope and even the most senior Sunni Muslim cleric in the country, the sheikh of Al-Azhar Mosque, endorsed the right of the faithful to join the anti-Morsi protests. The military began to issue public warnings. Defense Minister el-Sisi claimed he didn't want to take sides, but if forced would always choose “the people.” There was much confusion in the political class about whether the military was signaling support for Tammarod or warning against destabilizing new protests. “The men of the armed forces don't gamble with the present or the future of the nation,” el-Sisi said, clarifying nothing.

In private meetings, the defense minister warned politicians from the government and the opposition that the military wouldn't tolerate unrest. Both sides read what they wanted into el-Sisi's messages. Members of Morsi's inner cabinet were convinced that the military had no intention of taking charge. The opposition understood that if the crisis escalated, the military would step in. Because each side was convinced it had the military's support, there was no incentive to negotiate a political compromise. Basem worked feverishly on a June 30 Committee that
brought together most of the opposition youth movements and political parties. Their sole focus was to maximize the protest turnout. They planned marches in every Cairo neighborhood, every provincial city, every market town.

“It could end up being nothing,” Basem said. “But if it's big, June 30 will be the end of Morsi.” Basem predicted that the Brothers would fight in the streets to defend Morsi, and that if people died, even more Egyptians would turn against the Brotherhood. None of the Tammarod supporters imagined an outcome that left Morsi in office. They weren't out for conciliation or a shift in government.

Moaz thought that early presidential elections would undermine the entire revolutionary transition since Mubarak's removal from office. He knew several of the Tammarod founders. One, Mahmoud Badr, was an old friend who had worked with the Kifaya movement in 2005, and another was active in Moaz's most recent political home, the Ghad Party. He met them at cafés and tried to persuade them to pour their energy into a revolutionary campaign for parliament and then impeachment by constitutional means. Moaz worried that throwing out the first elected president so quickly would doom whoever came after. Badr wasn't convinced, but he agreed to debate Moaz on television.

“Wait until parliamentary elections. If we succeed, we can kick out the president,” Moaz said in the broadcast. “We have a democratic option to solve the problem.”

“Mohamed Morsi is a criminal,” Badr replied. “He is killing the people.”

Inside his party, Moaz had better luck. Some Ghad members wanted to join the Tammarod protests and the June 30 Committee. Moaz said that as a liberal party, Ghad should leave its members free to follow their consciences but should institutionally oppose a movement that was setting the stage for the military to return to power.

“Should we accept that any time a president makes mistakes and the military disapproves, there can be a military coup?” Moaz said at the internal party debate. “These things will make our country unstable, with coups for generations.” He prevailed. Ghad members voted not to endorse the Tammarod rebellion.

Morsi dismissed everything about Tammarod, despite his mounting
and measurable failures in governance. “I am the legitimate, constitutional president,” Morsi insisted. He ignored the demand that he govern less like a dictator and more like a civilian elected by a narrow margin. Although he didn't seem to know it, Morsi's mandate was to steer an enormous, poor country out of authoritarian rule and toward democracy, and not to replace Mubarak with the Muslim Brotherhood. Until June 30, Morsi had plenty of options. On the drastic side, he could have scheduled a referendum on his presidency, buying time. He could have called for early presidential elections rather than serving his full four-year term, in the process ridding the Brotherhood of responsibility for a declining Egypt. Less radically, he could have pushed for immediate parliamentary elections, so there would be another branch of government to balance his powers. Or he could have dismissed his cabinet and appointed a new team of non-Brotherhood technocrats, dispelling the charge that he had mismanaged the state and appointed only cronies.

Instead, with the support of the Brotherhood, Morsi took the most extreme tack possible. He acknowledged none of the criticisms of his presidency, and he dropped all pretense of moderation. He appointed as governor of Luxor a member of Gamaa Islamiya, the group that in 1997 had derailed Egyptian tourism with its terrorist attack on a temple in the province. At a rally for Syrian jihadis, he praised Islamist extremists willing to seek martyrdom. He smiled as clerics on the stage condemned the Egyptian opposition as godless infidels. Some of the clerics urged Egyptians to join the jihad in Syria, which was against Egyptian law and crossed one of the military's historic red lines. It was a chilling performance: the president of Egypt sharing a platform with extremist clerics, blessing a religious war against anyone who opposed President Mohamed Morsi.

Questions about Morsi's competence grew, particularly in military circles. Mysteriously, a private meeting was aired on television. Morsi presided as advisers argued about a dam under way on the Upper Nile, in Ethiopia. The Egyptian government considered the dam a threat to the national water supply, and politicians had argued over the most effective way to persuade or force Ethiopia to abandon it. Senior politicians made incendiary proposals to sabotage the dam or arm Ethiopian rebels. To members of Egypt's security establishment, the meeting made Morsi
look like a dangerous amateur who might carelessly plunge Egypt into a regional war.

The most charitable explanation for the Muslim Brotherhood's obstinacy was that long decades underground had ill prepared it for public life. After a history of state suppression and anti-Brotherhood propaganda, even a well-intentioned Brother might find it confusing to distinguish real criticism from propaganda. So out of touch was Morsi that he told his counselors he was confident the armed forces would stay out of the fray; he believed in el-Sisi's loyalty. The Brothers also exhibited unmistakable signs of messianic fervor and religious primacy. Morsi declared repeatedly that God had blessed his group, so it couldn't ever be all that wrong. He was also shockingly comfortable with religious violence. The Brotherhood itself had foresworn violence long ago, in the 1950s, and had condemned its alumni who turned to
takfiri
murder of those deemed unbelievers. But now President Morsi had very notably failed to condemn the spate of anti-Christian attacks and the mid-June lynching of four Shia Muslims in a Cairo suburb. The more the Muslim Brotherhood considered itself under political assault, the more it resorted to menacing sectarian rhetoric. Morsi didn't contradict his supporters, who went on television warning that a challenge to Morsi's “legitimacy” could unleash the hellfires of Islamist jihadi extremists. For now, the jihadis were holding their fire only because the Brotherhood's electoral success had given them the notion that maybe, just maybe, Islamists could gain dominion through politics rather than holy war.