Democratization in the Arab World? The Decline of Pluralism in Mubarak’s Egypt

Discussions of the prospects for expanded freedom in the Arab world often invoke Egypt as a leading candidate for gradual political reform. ¹ The country's intermediate level of economic development, its extensive array of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and its multiparty system all seem to favor a democratic future. President Hosni Mubarak himself recently claimed that Egypt enjoys "all kinds of democracy." But the truth of the matter is that participation and pluralism are now at lower levels than at any time since Mubarak assumed the presidency in the wake of Anwar Sadat's assassination 21 years ago. ² After a tenuous period of political opening in the 1980s and very early 1990s, the regime has progressively limited opportunities for the dispersal of power beyond the president, let alone for an actual alternation in power.

If any form of "freedom" has been expanded in Egypt, meanwhile, it has been the freedom of the presidency from the informal constraints that earlier limited its authority. Over the past two decades, Mubarak has acquired substantial liberty to have his opponents convicted in military trials, for example, or to shut down newspapers and professional syndicates, or to jail human rights activists. Overall, pluralism has declined markedly since the outset of his rule. And unless domestic and—perhaps more importantly—international actors compel the Egyptian president to cede power to other branches of government and to allow civil society organizations to operate independently, the outlook for organized political contestation in Egypt will only continue to dim.

Since 1967, Egypt has spent all but five months under a declared "state of emergency" by which the regime has rationalized the outlawing of demonstrations, the use of indefinite detentions without trial, and the endowment of presidential decrees with the power of law. President Sadat had terminated the provisions of emergency rule in the spring of 1981, but following his assassination by Islamist militants in October of that year, his vice-president and successor Mubarak quickly reinstated them. In 2000, the People's Assembly—the lower house of the Egyptian parliament, which is dominated by the president's National Democratic Party (NDP)—voted yet again to extend emergency provisions for a further three years.

Early in his presidency, Mubarak applied few of the emergency measures at his disposal. Echoing Sadat, he spoke of administering "democracy in doses," while releasing political prisoners and allowing press criticism of government ministers. The opposition's representation in parliament rose to a record 20 percent in the 1987 elections; nongovernmental associations grew by the thousands; and professional syndicates provided additional forums for debate and protest. These developments, and the regime's decision not to use force against its opponents, suggested that the government was genuinely ceding political space. One early 1990s report from the U.S. Agency for International Development hopefully concluded:

The Mubarak government . . . clearly prefers to use the tactic of repression sparingly, and by regional standards, successfully limits its recourse to "the stick." Whether from calculation or conviction, the government is committed to a process of consultation with important social actors and of political reform. The government's style, in marked contrast to that of its predecessors, has been one of consensus building. ³

But soon thereafter, the prospects for further political reform started to deteriorate sharply. Indulging in executive decrees, the extensive use of military courts, and the broad deployment of security forces, Mubarak reversed Egypt's course and began to "deliberalize"—renewing controls on opposition parties, elections, Islamist activity, civil society organizations, and the press.

The regime's ongoing and costly military campaign against Islamist militants (the annual death toll from which peaked in 1993 at more than 1,000) provided the pretext for a new drive of repression against nonviolent political opponents as well. When members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)—which was formally outlawed but allowed to organize without formal party status—won the leadership elections of the doctors', engineers', pharmacists', and lawyers...