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![]() Egypt’s Political Economy
Unholy Coalition Between Bureaucracy and Business
Egypt’s political community is scratching its head over the next Egypt’s president: Gamal Mubarak or Omar Soliman? Is it the son of the president, or rather the powerful head of the Egyptian Intelligence ?
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Saturday, November 22,2008 04:31 | |||||||
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Egypt"s political community is scratching its head over the next Egypt"s president: Gamal Mubarak or Omar Soliman? Is it the son of the president, or rather the powerful head of the Egyptian Intelligence ? The question reveals to what extent the Egyptian community is aware of the dual facets of today"s political power in Egypt: money and the army. Mubarak"s son epitomizes the business elite as he acquired a master"s in business and worked as a banker. As for General Omar Soliman, he personifies the strong physical force of the army. The very fact of leaving the seat of vice presidency vacant is much telling of the difficulty of finding a candidate who can best represent the different factions of the ruling collation. Quite the contrary, for Nasser and Sadat, the task was simpler because the backbone of the regime at that time was only the bureaucratic military institution. Today, the regime has two backbones : the military/police and big business. That is why-- for the first time since the 1952 military coup--the political community is asking about the possibility of having a civilian president. Business Creeping the State Taking over political power in 1952, the Free Officers put on the shelf the old political elite, confiscated the wealth of big landowners and big capitalists ,and created a wide public sector. At that time, the bureaucracy became both the ruling and the owning class. The change was certainly dramatic, but the state at that time enjoyed a flow of rentier revenues of foreign aid, oil revenues and Suez canal dividends that stabilized the country. The state maintained about 60 percent of the Gross Domestic Products (GDP) --not counting the informal sector of economy. The rentier flow persisted till the first years of Mubarak"s rule. However, starting from mid 1980s, this flow has declined due to the relatively small size of the Egyptian economy and increasing population.
To give just two indicators, businessmen"s presence in the parliament went from 12 percent of the seats in 1995 to 17 percent in 2000 to 22 percent in 2005. For the first time since the 1952 coup, three ministers of Nazif"s Egyptian cabinet are businessmen , like Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali, who are known to be liberal technocrats sticking to the fundamentals of market economy and staying very close to the business community. Shifting Dynamics of Power The presidency is no doubt the center piece of Egypt"s political system as all presidents of the July regime have had their mark on the Egyptian economy and politics . However, it would be misleading if one to assume that the presidency is the most powerful. Today ,The most powerful groups are the bureaucracy ,especially its military branch and the rising business groups ,and whoever will be the next president should please both groups. Whether the new president will be from the military ,the business community, or from any other background is not the fundamental issue. The crux of the matter is that the political power today is laying at the hands of a ruling coalition between military/police and the business elite. Actually, the next president can not ignore the interests of both groups. Similar to the most of Latin American countries during the eighties, it seems that Egypt"s political formula in the near future will be an authoritarian rule on the political level and some kind of a" liberal" on the economic one. Egypt"s ruling coalition is having internal tension between the military/police and big business, yet this tension should not be overestimated. Since the eighties, the military has heavily participated in civil economy, building numerous construction projects. So, there is an organic relationship linking the army to big businesses, and the bureaucracy cannot do without the cooperation of the business community. The regime depends on the private sector for services that the government can no longer provide, like creating jobs for the public. And, the business elite can not continue working without the regime"s authoritarian rule backed by the military/police In reality, Egypt"s businessmen are known to endorse all kinds of political systems except democracy, because it will certainly give a space for demands and aspirations of laborers and the lower classes.
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Posted in Activites , Human Rights |
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