Poverty Uprising in Egypt: Causes and Consequences

Causes

Of course, some of Egypt’s most impoverished regions have not so far witnessed demonstrations. But those that have show a clear relationship between poverty and protests in the country.

Poverty and protest: What do the numbers mean?

The demonstrations of September 2020 reflect a long history of worsening economic and social conditions dating back to the beginning of Sisi’s presidency in 2014. The President has combined repression with ultra-neoliberal economics, floating the Egyptian pound and overseeing a sharp rise in prices and the cost of government services – with poverty expanding as a result.

The latest round of protests can thus be characterised as the rebellion of the impoverished. The middle class, by comparison, have been notably absent. This can primarily be attributed to fear of the regime, which has tightened its grip over the cities: the events of 2019, when the security forces rounded up huge numbers of demonstrators, is still very much a recent memory. There is also a broad feeling of disillusionment and apathy towards a revolution whose potential was never realised.

Regime response

The protests seem to have taken the regime by surprise: after seven years of police repression and intimidation, popular mobilisation seemed to have been almost totally smothered. For the first few days it failed to take any action, encouraging others to join the demonstrations and allowing them to spread rapidly across a wide geographical area. It did not use its usual tools of extreme force to break up the protests. The security forces, in fact, seem to have been confused by demonstrators’ new tactics: night-time mobilisation, simultaneous protest across multiple villages, face coverings, and the use of social media to record the protests and send them to foreign media. They may also have been concerned about how those who did not participate would react to intense suppression – that a major crackdown -might lead to protests getting out of control.

The regime’s initial response was thus confined to a media campaign intended to undermine the protesters. At first it denied that protests were even taking place. Once they became too big to ignore, it instead claimed that they were taking place on a limited scale. Then it began to cry conspiracy and pointing fingers at its usual scapegoat, the Muslim Brotherhood. While it may be true, of course, that some members or supporters participated in demonstrations, the Brotherhood itself has lost much of its organising capacity thanks to government repression, and is unlikely to have played any significant role itself.

Foreign media coverage has been unusually limited in these protests.

Turning point

This round of protests represents a turning point for Egypt’s political scene. Firstly, it is the first time that simultaneous protests have taken place in more than one governorate, a point which becomes even more significant when we remember that southern Egypt rarely sees unrest of this kind and that these protests have targeted the head of the regime directly at a time of unprecedented political repression and total closure of the public sphere. Secondly, it is one of the few occasions on which poorer sections of society have come out to protest economic and social conditions en masse. Thirdly, the protests’ wide scope has made suppression relatively difficult. And finally, the participation of young people raises questions about how successful the regime has been in crushing the culture of protest, especially given that many of them are too young to have taken part in the January Revolution. As small as they may have been, these protests represent a major step towards a reclamation of the public sphere in Egypt from the police state.