Raging Against the Machine: Political Opposition under Authoritarianism in Egypt

2. Loyal Opposition: The Opposition Party Cartel

38 2 Loyal Opposition The Opposition Party Cartel Party politics in Egypt is a rather new phenomenon compared with other political systems in the region.1 Egypt under Mubarak had a noncompetitive multiparty system that has emanated from political liberalization initiated by Anwar Sadat in the second half of the 1970s. This process was accompanied by liberalization in the economic sphere that has come to be remembered as the infitah era (“open-door policy”). In the center of political liberalization stood the breakup of the former single party, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU). Having become a rather monolithic block, the ASU had proven unable of representing important parts of society and, at the same time, co-opting them into the political arena, a mission that had become the party’s raison d’être ever since its inception under Gamal Abdel Nasser (see Baker 1978; Waterbury 1983; Brownlee 2007, 84–93). The reason for the breakup of the single-party system was that the political elite in the early days of Sadat’s tenure has experienced a remarkable transformation and reconfiguration, both in social and ideological terms. New elite members and vocal parts of the intellectual community had a technocratic and professional background (economists, engineers, physicians, etc.) and formed a new stratum of the “state bourgeoisie,” complementing a former more homogeneous political elite that had long been dominated by people with a military background (see Hinnebusch 1. Neighboring Jordan, for instance, had a multiparty system already in the 1950s, with political parties having a large basis of popular support (see Lust-Okar 2001). Loyal Opposition  39 1985, 109–21; Piro 2001). Apart from the social background, ideological differentiation was also decisive. The political program of Gamal Abdel Nasser had featured Arab nationalism, a socioeconomic revolution, and state-led development as its major traits. Nasserism did not disappear as an attractive programmatic point of reference from politics when Sadat, upon his takeover of power, took action against the Nasserists in an attempt to distinguish himself from his predecessor and internal rivals. With the rise of Sadat, Nasser’s ideological legacy was complemented with the introduction of other political ideas that found their way into the new intellectual circles. As a consequence, conservative-Islamist, liberal-Western, Marxist, pan-Arabic, populist-etatist, and capitalist views stood in opposition to one another in a political elite organized in the ASU that resembled a “melting pot” of competing views rather than a homogeneous ruling party (see Abd al-Wahab 2005). The Challenge of Pluralism Stretched to its very limits, the ASU was no longer capable of containing, as a single ruling party, an ever-growing number of political and ideological factions in the regime. Its breakup would later come to be seen as a potential harbinger of democratization, but it was rather meant to adapt to changing sociopolitical and economic circumstances (see Pawelka 1985, 76). In order to guarantee its mission as the regime’s most important political mass organization, a political outsourcing of segments of the heterogeneous political establishment became necessary. Recent scholarship sheds light on the logic behind the breakup of the single-party system in Egypt. An authoritarian regime’s willingness to embark on a distinct path of political liberalization does not fully explain it. Rather, out of an authoritarian logic, a multiparty system can be established with the aim of broadening and outsourcing co-optation. As Gandhi and Przeworski noted, “a single party may not suffice to coopt a sufficient range of the opposition. Multiple parties can be an effective instrument of dictatorial rule if they can be tightly controlled by the dictatorship.” Gandhi and Przeworksi go on to argue (analyzing the Polish opposition under communist rule): “One way to think of this 40  Raging Against the Machine ‘multipartism’ is that it represented a menu of contracts, allowing people characterized by different political attitudes (and deferring degrees of opportunism) to sort themselves out. Membership in each party entailed a different degree of identification with the regime. . . . In exchange, these memberships offered varying amounts of perks and privileges, in the same order” (Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 15). The Egyptian regime followed such a manual and created, in 1978, the National Democratic Party (NDP)—since then the ruling party— along with the Liberal Party (LP, Hizb al-Ahrar) on the Right and the National Progressive Unionist Party (NPUP, Tagammu) on the Left of the formerly monolithic block of the Arab Socialist Union...