The Real Coup: Egypt’s ElBaradei Named Interim Prime Minister

Source: Forbes

Just days after Morsi’s removal from office by the Egyptian armed forces, there is a remarkable replacement: Mohammad ElBaradei, the lone leadership figure with deep Western appeal — and the resume and ideology to match. Details:

Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros, reporting from Cairo, said the main question is how much power ElBaradei will have in his new role as interim prime minister.

“It is not really a surprise. ElBaradei was sitting next to General al-Sisi when he announced the oustre of President Morsi, which already indicated that ElBaradei was to take up an important role in the new government.”

Color me surprised. There’s a huge difference between an important role and the most important role. It’s possible that the Army chose ElBaradei because they’re really committed to liberalizing, and not just democratizing, Egypt. It’s possible that the choice reflects nothing more or less than the relatively thin Egyptian bench. Or, it’s possible that Egypt’s kingmakers were nervously refreshing their Facebook and came across this old thing from a couple years back:

The ruling military council on its Facebook page asked voters which candidates they supported most in the current field. ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, took first place with more than 19,000 supporters, or more than 30 percent of those participating [...].

If you’re like me, you trust informal polls about as far as you can throw them, especially on Facebook, which is, after all, quite nearly ElBaradei’s only constituency. There’s no doubt that ElBaradei represents the smallest and least powerful of the main factions supporting big reform in post-Mubarak Egypt — the others being Team Muslim Brotherhood and Team Army. Young, wired, liberalized Egyptians may bring a twinkle to the eye of the West, but they’ve got much work to do to make a real-life dent in Egyptian politics and Egyptian rule. And there’s not much of an indication that ElBaradei can actually help them with that.

For the Army, ElBaradei is the closest they’ve got to a Terry MacAuliffe — love him or hate him, he keeps those donors writing checks. US dismay over regulations which prohibit foreign aid to coup-stricken countries will surely abate when it’s ElBaradei standing beside President Obama in the Rose Garden. This is a man no self-respecting Western leader can deprive of cash. The appointment of ElBaradei sends a clarion signal to Egypt’s creditors, summed up in three letters: B.F.F.

Notably, ElBaradei lacks the disruptive and risk-forward character of Egypt’s own young liberals. Personally, he’s not Generation Facebook. He’s Generation UN. He’s more like Hans Blix and Kofi Annan than he is like Mark Zuckerberg or Wael Ghonim. It’s very hard to see how much traction he could get as the voice of a new era in Egyptian politics. He’s running plays from a liberalization playbook that’s decades old — not just pre-Arab Spring but pre-9/11, pre-Internet.

And no matter how many hearts, flowers, and dollars he’ll keep flowing Egypt’s way, inside his own country ElBaradei will remain a sharply divisive figure. If the military is in a tight spot, having appointed such a man after declaring that the popular will dumped Morsi, ElBaradei’s position is even less enviable. His best chance for uniting Team Liberal and Team Army is to focus on declawing the Muslim Brotherhood — an effort sure to have broader regional implications.

Those implications won’t be fun and easy to handle. But Israel, on the other hand, must be pinching itself right now. Could anything better have happened in Egypt from Israel’s point of view? A fresh relative calm on Israel’s southwest flank makes Syria the focus again — less as a “powderkeg” and more as an isolated, contained problem.

But all this presumes that ElBaradei’s appointment is a turning point in the Egyptian chaos. If this effort to reconcile military government with liberal attitudes succeeds, it could look to many observers like a template for the new Mideast. If it fails… the West will continue to struggle to understand just what is unfolding in the Muslim world.

 

Tags: Al Jazeera, arab spring, coup, Egypt, Facebook, Generation Facebook, government, Israel, Kofi Annan, leadership, military, Mubarak Egypt, Muslim, Muslim Brotherhood, observers, President Morsi, Sherine Tadros, signal, Syria, us

http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/13772