Egypt’s el-Sisi Has a Hegemony Problem

Last December, a star-studded event was held in a lavish banquet hall of the Al Masa Hotel, a five-star establishment in Cairo’s glitzy New Administrative Capital owned by the Egyptian military, inaugurating the launch of the National Front Party (NFP). The event was widely attended by figures affiliated with the regime, including former ministers, retired police and military generals, government-aligned businessmen, media personalities, and even parliamentarians from other security services-controlled parties such as the Nation’s Future Party and the Homeland Defenders Party.

The launch was immediately followed by a flurry of pictures in the domestic press — like the hotel, also largely owned and micromanaged by the regime’s General Intelligence Service (GIS) — of large crowds flocking to notary offices to register endorsements for the new party. In February, the tightly controlled Political Parties Committee granted the NFP official approval to operate in the country.

Founding members, including Diaa Rashwan, who heads the presidential-run State Information Service, say their new party does not seek power, is not concerned with influencing the cabinet, and is neither a loyalist nor opposition party, but rather aims at reviving political life in the country.

These statements may sound surreal. After all, why would a dictatorial regime with total control over the political system launch a new organization, given that it already has dozens of shell parties controlled by the security apparatus, whose sole function is to support the decisions of dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and praise his “achievements”? What does it mean for the regime and its figureheads to establish a party they claim is neither pro-government nor opposition? If the party does not seek power or aim to form a government, how does it envision reviving political life? And why is the regime suddenly interested in restoring the value of political engagement, after spending the past decade systematically dismantling political life and its components, and empowering the military to cannibalize civilian state organs and micromanage society?

Irrespective of the motivations or considerations on the part of individual actors, the founding of the NFP can be linked back to the general crisis of political hegemony facing the regime in recent years. As the economic situation in Egypt deteriorates and el-Sisi’s hitherto ruling strategy delivers increasingly diminishing returns, the regime is now seeking to recreate a flimsy “civil society” to reinforce his waning rule. But will it be enough to keep him in power until 2030?

Mubarak’s Authoritarian Formula

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — who was overthrown in and imprisoned in 2011, but was ultimately acquitted and buried with full state honours in 2020 — was an autocrat by all accounts, but nevertheless presided over a vibrant civil society and political institutions, which he skilfully used to manage dissent. This civil society served two purposes: on the one hand, it insulated citizens from intrusive state excesses, while on the other, it helped the regime to diffuse dissent before it reached a level deemed threatening to public order and the state’s very existence.

Under Mubarak, the state effectively outsourced the policing of Egyptian society to a plethora of civilian institutions, thereby avoiding state repression in many otherwise critical situations. These institutions came into existence following the 1952 military coup, which founded Egypt’s modern republican state. Although presidents changed, along with the labels attached to these institutions, they carried on the collective institutional memory and experience of their predecessors under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat.

Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) was a gigantic organization, claiming to have roughly 2 million members, with branches and representatives in every province and neighbourhood. Founded by his predecessor Sadat, the party relied on thousands of cadres and community leaders who inherited the extensive bureaucratic expertise of Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union, the institutional forerunner to the NDP. These apparatchiks were largely non-ideological, but played a crucial role in enforcing state control and manufacturing public consent. They wielded the bureaucratic machine and ran the local councils (municipalities), which controlled building licenses, water, electricity, road maintenance, garbage collection, and a broad range of licenses that touched the daily lives of citizens.

Sisi remains the brand of the military establishment around whom the regime supporters can gather. There is a strong element of a personality cult that the regime is yet to move beyond.

The NDP was also central to public mobilization in support of the regime, whether it was amassing crowds to shore up support for Mubarak in times of political crisis, busing in voters to the (already rigged) parliamentary elections, or countering mobilizations by the opposition. More importantly, however, the NDP functioned as a conflict resolution mechanism. Local party officials were the go-to for citizens to resolve social, economic, and political grievances before they reached a critical level that could explode into an outright confrontation with the state.

Although Mubarak’s parliament was largely of a rubber-stamp nature, it still exercised authority and was the medium through which political compromises could be reached with the opposition, such as the left-wing Tagammu Party, the nominally liberal Wafd Party, the Arab nationalist Nasserist Party, the Egyptian Islamic Labour Party, and even the illegal Muslim Brotherhood.

Besides the NDP and the formal, largely toothless opposition, Mubarak also had the Muslim Brotherhood, a mammoth Islamist organization, originally founded in 1928, with a base of support in almost every province, professional association, and university campus. The opposition group was detested by Mubarak, but nevertheless tended towards a reformist approach and was more than happy to abide by the regime’s rules. If events in Palestine were expected to arouse public anger in Egypt, Mubarak allowed the Brothers to hold protests. These would never leave the university campuses or mosques into the streets, nor would they chant slogans against Mubarak or clash with the police — thus diffusing public anger and preventing it from turning into riots.

If living conditions were deteriorating and prices were soaring, Mubarak had the fundamentalist Salafi movement, who would lash out against Copts, Shi’a, secularists, and unveiled women at Friday prayer sermons, blaming them for the economic malaise, and preach to the public that it was a crisis of morals rather than economic policies. Fatwas against strikes and dissenting against the ruler were also par for the course.

When it came to keeping tabs on the workers’ movement, Mubarak had inherited the state-backed General Federation of Trade Unions, created by Nasser in 1957. These official unions allowed the regime to police the workplaces, ensure that production ran smoothly, discipline dissenters, break strikes, and mobilize public sector workers in support of the regime. Human rights NGOs, which emerged in the 1990s, were certainly a nuisance to the police and the regime. Nevertheless, they played a helpful role in turning flaring social and political struggles into “legal” battles to be fought in the courts, rather than the streets.

This elaborate system was far from perfect. Riots, mini-uprisings, strikes, and significant protests requiring the intervention of the repressive state apparatus still occurred, most notably the 2008 Mahalla uprising. All the same, this formula enabled the regime to survive for three decades.

Counterrevolution and the Death of Politics

In the eyes of Sisi and his fellow generals who led the 2013 coup, it was precisely Mubarak’s mixture of toleration and repression that led to the 2011 “catastrophe”. They regarded Mubarak as too weak and overly lenient. Thus, as they proceeded to crush the revolution, they erected a new regime with a completely different political arrangement.

Immediately after taking power, Sisi set about destroying the country’s civil society. He dismantled the Islamist opposition and all other political parties, together with youth groups, human rights NGOs, and even apolitical charities. The parliament is engineered and thoroughly controlled by the security services and has become meaningless — a rubber-stamp institution whose sole purpose is to applaud and endorse Sisi’s decrees. The old regime institutions that managed to survive, such as the state-backed trade unions, have been structurally incapacitated.

Whereas Mubarak managed dissent, Sisi eradicates it. He is deeply suspicious of any and all civilian institutions, and prioritizes the military’s supremacy in running the country. Acting on his worldview, the repressive apparatus — mainly the military, flanked by the police and the GIS — have cannibalized the rest of the state organs. Today, they rule Egypt without any civil society or civilian institutions acting as a buffer. There is no social contract in this sense — they rule solely by coercion.

Such a toxic formula worked well as long as Sisi enjoyed full regional support from the Gulf monarchies, whose rulers were happy to flood him with billions of dollars to crush the revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood, and as long as Egyptian society fell victim to a collective panic triggered by the revolution and Sisi’s subsequent “war on terror” after seizing power in 2013. Sections of the Egyptian middle class and the ruling elites were willing to enter a Faustian bargain with the military, turning a blind eye to grotesque human rights abuses in exchange for stability and economic prosperity. Yet they received neither.

Despite promising reforms, security crackdowns on dissent continue while regime officials celebrated their ‘national dialogue’.

Sisi woke up in 2022 to find his disastrous policies and white elephant projects had catapulted the country into an unprecedented debt crisis. The Gulf sheikhdoms have already declared no more blank cheques to Egypt, while the latter scrambles to offer them assets in exchange for more funding. Meanwhile, the devaluation of the Egyptian pound and soaring inflation have meant a loss of popular legitimacy among virtually all classes. Indeed, Egypt’s dictator is well aware his popularity has hit rock bottom.

Temporary relief came in the form of the financial support received from the Gulf and the West following the outbreak of the October 2023 war in Gaza, as all regional and international powers were terrified of the potential instability in the region and a political explosion similar to 2011. The bailouts exceeded 50 billion US dollars in the first three months of 2024 alone, including 8 billion from the EU, whose corporations are at the heart of the Egyptian regime’s policy of debt-fuelled mega-projects.

However, the price Sisi is paying for these debts includes selling state assets to foreigners at rock-bottom prices and imposing austerity policies that are devastating Egypt’s impoverished classes. The regime may have weathered the Gaza storm for now, but its complicity in shutting down the Rafah Crossing to Gaza and stifling Palestine solidarity activism with mass arrests is further eroding Sisi’s legitimacy, who since 2013 has presented himself as a strongman capable of projecting power in the region and is currently trying using his opposition to US President Donald Trump’s Gaza displacement plan to prop up domestic support.

Sisi realizes that in the event of popular unrest, there would be no buffers or barriers to protect his regime. This is the context in which we must understand his call for a “national dialogue” with what remains of the crippled opposition or his encouragement of some loyal local leaders to launch the Union of Arab Tribes and Egyptian Families, alongside his oversight of the launch of the NFP.

Sisi is desperately trying to engineering something akin to Mubarak’s NDP to consolidate state hegemony without having to deploy security forces and the military into the streets. He is fully aware that the institutional shells of parties he created cannot be relied upon, especially the Nation’s Future Party, whose conferences in support of Sisi have turned into anti-regime protests, and whose attempts to control professional associations have led to humiliating defeats for regime-backed candidates, as seen in the elections of the Journalists’ and Engineers’ Syndicates.

Thus, “reviving political life” does not mean reviving parliamentary activity, opposition debates, or opening the public space for organizing and criticizing the president. Instead, it reflects a desperate attempt to create a political tool capable of absorbing public anger if an uprising occurs.

Challenges Ahead

Recreating the NDP is easier said than done. Mubarak’s sprawling ruling party was not invented overnight, but was the product of decades-long bureaucratic experience that shaped its cadres. While some of them still linger around and are willing to transfer their expertise to the current regime, changing the modus operandi of the repressive apparatus — from a default mode of lethal and carceral violence to skilful management of politics that include compromises — is simply an impossible task after a decade of unprecedented level of state violence, cemented by ideological indoctrination for the rank-and-file members of the security services, who now see themselves as engaged in an existential battle with the population at large.

Despite promising reforms, security crackdowns on dissent continue while regime officials celebrated their “national dialogue” with the opposition. The few remaining human rights watchdogs operating under very difficult conditions say little has changed with regard to the systematic and widespread use of torture, other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, unfair trials, and appalling incarceration conditions.

Sisi’s presidency is set to end in 2030 following constitutional amendments passed in 2019 extending presidential terms from four to six years, and allowing Sisi to run for two additional terms beyond his original mandate. As a result, Sisi’s previous term, which began in 2018, was extended to the end of 2024, and the amendments granted him eligibility to run for another six-year term, which will last until 2030 after he “won” in an electoral circus that saw him imprison his competitor in late 2023.

That said, there is no sign the now 70-year-old autocrat plans to leave office when his time is up. The NFP’s founders have already declared that the new party will contest parliamentary and senate elections, scheduled to take part sometime this year (dates are yet to be announced). With the help of this new body, the security services will carefully engineer the composition of the lower and upper houses, since they will almost certainly oversee another expected constitutional amendment to allow Sisi to rule beyond 2030.

“The amendment of the constitution is probable, especially considering that no successor is being groomed to replace Sisi”, says Maged Mandour, the author of Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge. “He remains the brand of the military establishment around whom the regime supporters can gather. There is a strong element of a personality cult that the regime is yet to move beyond.”

Yet amidst the ongoing economic crisis and growing regional turmoil, the question remains: Will Egypt’s strongman make it to 2030?