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Egypt CONTROLLING THE MASS POLITICAL ARENA
A state may control the political arena through some
combination of legitimacy, coercion, and the incorporation of
participation through political institutions. Nasser used charisma
and coercion to impose a nationalist-populist ideological consensus
on Egypt's political arena and to incorporate a broad support
coalition in a single--albeit weak--party, the Arab Socialist Union
(ASU). His charismatic legitimacy allowed him to balance rival
social forces. For example, he used popular support to curb the
bourgeoisie, rather than to accommodate their participatory
propensities, and to repress those--the Wafd (Al Wafd al Misri),
and the Muslim Brotherhood--that refused incorporation into his
coalition. The post-Nasser regime had to reshape Egypt's political
institutions in order to maintain control over the political arena
without the legitimacy and coercive assets he had commanded.
Sadat resorted to a strategy mixing limited liberalization,
retraditionalization, and repression. He pioneered an experiment in
limited political pluralization designed to control the politically
attentive public. Needing to solicit the support of the bourgeoisie
in the absence of the broad mass legitimacy Nasser had enjoyed,
Sadat had to address its desires for political liberalization.
Moreover, as his "rightward" policy course shattered the consensus
Nasser had built and precipitated the emergence of leftistNasserite opposition, Sadat sought to balance this opposition by
allowing the mainstream Islamic movement and the liberal New Wafd
Party to reenter the political arena. As Egypt's political arena
was thus pluralized, Sadat attempted to incorporate it through a
controlled multiparty system. The ASU was dismantled and opposition
parties allowed to coalesce around its fragments or the remnants of
resurrected prerevolutionary parties. They were expected to be
"loyal" opposition parties that would refrain from "destructive"
criticism of regime policy but within this limit were allowed to
compete with the government party in parliamentary elections. Even
Nasserites and the Marxist left were more or less accommodated
within these parties, although they were vulnerable to exclusion
from the system when they pushed their cases too far; indeed,
ultimately, when they refused to play by his rules, Sadat suspended
the experiment.
Toward the more passive masses, Sadat's strategy was to replace
charismatic with traditional personal legitimacy, projecting
himself as a pious and patriarchal leader and, after 1973, as a
successful war hero. But as corruption and inequality spread while
he pursued Westernization and accommodation with Israel, this
strategy gradually failed, leaving a legitimacy vacuum that paved
the way for his assassination. The absence of public mourning on
his death, in stark contrast to the mass hysteria on Nasser's
passing, was a measure of the decline of regime legitimacy by the
end of Sadat's presidency.
Mubarak inherited a regime lacking a credible legitimizing
ideology or a leading personality capable of attracting mass
loyalties to the state. Indicative of the regime's ideological
bankruptcy following Sadat's death was Mubarak's attempt to portray
his new regime as both Nasserite and Islamic, all the while
continuing Sadatist policies. In the absence of ideological
legitimacy, the Mubarak regime had to restore the faltering
political liberalization pioneered by Sadat. Mubarak revived
opposition parties and widened freedom of political expression,
particularly of the press, permitting much more unrestrained
criticism of the government than was permitted under Sadat. Limited
political pluralization was essential to accommodate the
participatory demands of the educated upper and middle classes, and
given the continuing passivity, poverty, and deference of a large
part of the masses, such pluralization could be managed with less
risk than the alternative of large-scale repression. Moreover, as
under Sadat, liberalization was not uniformly applied to social
groups. The regime sought to accommodate more conservative forces,
such as the liberal bourgeoisie and conservative Islamists, while
reserving selective repression for leftists, strikers, and Islamic
radicals.
Data as of December 1990
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