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Egypt The Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers, and the Policy-making Process
The prime minister is the president's primary lieutenant,
charged with implementing his policies through the bureaucracy.
Although the prime minister and his cabinet are formally
accountable to parliament and are expected to submit to legislative
questioning, they were, in practice, appointed and removed by the
president, not by parliament. Under Nasser, when key Free Officers
headed strategic ministries, the cabinet was a center of some
power, but subsequently it became merely the staff of the
president. Although the president might preside over cabinet
meetings, the cabinet was not a collegial decision-making body;
instead, the president tended to make key decisions in ad hoc
consultations with ministers and advisers in a given issue area.
Egypt's policy-making process was very much dominated by the
executive branch, and the heart of the process was the interaction
between the presidency and the Council of Ministers. This top
executive level decided on all policy proposals, whether they
originated in the bureaucracy, with influential personalities, or
with interest groups. It was also the arena in which all major
political decisions were made, relatively free from
institutionalized constraints or pressure from other parts of the
political system or the public. Major policy innovations were
typically launched by the president, perhaps under the influence of
close personal advisers or the pressure of a major problem or
crisis and most likely after consultation with ministerial experts.
Particularly when a major policy decision was in the making, the
president might encourage opinion groups to develop in the cabinet.
These groups would advocate different policy options, but although
the policies might seriously affect different segments of society,
the opinion groups were not really representatives of those
segments. Moreover, the president had the first and the last word
in deciding among the groups.
The cabinet itself was, nevertheless, an arena of intraelite
politics because presidents, engrossed in major political
decisions, often left the day-to-day business of government to
their ministers, intervening only to give general instructions or
when something went wrong. Such mid-level policy making might be
set in motion by the proposals of individual ministries, often
generated by high civil servants or even by the interests of
persons associated with a particular ministry, such as public
sector managers or the various professional syndicates. These
proposals might set off factional bargaining within the cabinet and
high bureaucracy. Elite factions might take the form of
shillas, small groups bound by friendship or family ties,
heading client networks that stretched down through the bureaucracy
and competed for control of offices and the personal and venal
benefits that often went with them.
Typically, there was a split in the cabinet between
presidential appointees and the clients the prime minister brought
on board. In the late 1970s, the cabinet was reportedly split
between followers of Vice President Mubarak and Prime Minister
Mustafa Khalil. Sometimes factionalism took the form of
bureaucratic rivalries between ministries over programs, resources,
and jurisdictions; such bureaucratic struggles decided a good part
of "who got what" in a country where the state sector was still at
the center of the economy. As societal interests became stronger at
the expense of government, policy making came more often to take
the form of "trial balloons" in which the government or a faction
of ministers tested public reaction to an initiative and often
backed down if opposition was too strong. If intraelite conflict
could not be settled in the cabinet or if a ministerial initiative
invited excessive public reaction, the president was likely to
intervene, perhaps dismissing a particular minister or faction.
The cabinet was also empowered to plan, coordinate, and control
the work of the ministries in implementing policy, and to follow
up, evaluate, and inspect policy implementation. Toward these ends,
it was divided into two layers, with an inner cabinet of deputy
prime ministers responsible for coordinating several functionally
related ministries in the full cabinet that composed the outer
layer. The independent Central Auditing Agency was responsible for
financial control.
Data as of December 1990
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