If any observer had wanted to sum up the situation of the current Egyptian regime, and compare it to the pre-25 January 2011 situation, it would be difficult to find anything better than the “mistake” committed by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, when he called the current Egyptian president “Mohammed Hosni.”
Many people believe that Abbas made an error in pronouncing the name of the Egyptian president, during a speech in Cairo before the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit. However, I believe that it was more of a Freudian slip, revealing more than it conceals about the truth of the picture that the Palestinian president wanted to portray as taking place in the land of the Nile, after the fall of the regime of Hosni Mubarak.
These days, if you ask most Egyptians who are not benefiting from the current regime, or those in whose name the regime does not claim to speak, they would agree with the “mistake” made by Abbas when he tried to say the name of Mohammad Mursi. They would say the Mursi regime is not much different than the Mubarak regime, in terms of its actions. “It’s like nothing happened,” as the saying goes. The post-uprising regime has failed to meet the demands and live up to the slogans of Tahrir Square of two years ago, and these demands, as everyone including the current regime’s opponents acknowledge, require time to be addressed, and see Egypt move from one situation to another. Moreover, and more importantly, the reason behind the situation is the violent and rough actions by the security forces. Most recently, this has emerged in the behavior of policemen against demonstrators in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities. There has also been confusion in the steps taken by the Egyptian president, hinting that more than one source of authority lies behind these decisions, in addition to the corruption that remains endemic in Egypt’s bureaucracy.
In this sense, one can talk about “Hamadi bin Ali” if one comments about events in Tunisia. Many officials from the Nahda Islamist movement have made accusations of treason against members of the opposition in their speeches. There have also been threats, made by hard-line Salafists, that these opponents will be put on trial, or killed. Such statements meet with no serious condemnation; they all indicate that the prevailing political climate in Tunisia, which led to the assassination of opposition leader Shukri Belaid, are not really that different from that under the deposed Tunisian president – under the rule of Zein al-Abidine bin Ali, not a single opposition politician was killed in the streets of Tunis.
In the end, it simply has to do with the understanding of the Egyptian and Tunisian regimes of the meaning of democracy and the manner in which it is applied, and how much respect they have for the process. It is not enough for the ruling authorities in Cairo and Tunis to declare that they were established on the ruins of a dictatorship, and that they came to power via the ballot box. This is all good, and should be welcomed, naturally. But what is more important is these regimes’ ability to embrace opposition voices, and hear them out. They must take them into consideration if they find that they contain a correction of their errors. As for considering political power as something infallible, and believing that their decisions involve no process of accountability, but are in fact of divine inspiration, in the eyes of some, then they will lead to the old methods of behavior that were known in the years that we all thought were behind us.
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