A DISCOMFORTING sight greeted holidaymakers heading to the Red Sea beaches for Eid al-Adha, the feast that this year fell on October 14th and marks the end of the haj, the Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca. Someone had thought to adorn a grandiose toll-booth on the army-built motorway from Cairo with two giant posters of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, deputy prime minister and minister of defence, in dress uniform. The pharaonic images vanished as mysteriously as they appeared; orders probably came from on high after a flutter of negative Facebook comment.
The profile of General Sisi keeps rising, nonetheless. This is not surprising, despite official silence over whether the soft-spoken defence minister intends to run for president. As the power behind the coup that ended the brief, disastrous presidency of Muhammad Morsi in July, General Sisi has become the popular figurehead of Egypt’s state. Battered by the revolution of January 2011 that toppled another military man, Hosni Mubarak, this great, creaking administrative machine has now resumed full control.
The police are back on the streets—and back to the business of cracking heads and hounding dissidents. State-owned or -influenced media are up to their old tricks of fanning public fears, exposing supposed enemies and parroting leaks from shadowy intelligence sources. And the government is back to its old habit of crafting laws to tighten its grip. The latest batch includes rules against street protests, rules regulating mosque sermons, draconian “anti-terror” legislation and rules to tighten oversight of non-governmental organisations. These last, says the minister responsible, should target “evil groups that aim to destabilise the country”.
To complete its return to a cosy cocoon of 1960s-era nostalgia, when many thousands of Muslim Brothers languished in prison and Cairo trumpeted a prickly pan-Arabism, Egypt is clumsily extricating itself from four decades of close partnership with the United States. The divorce has been brewing for some time. Towards the end of his 30-year dictatorship Mr Mubarak voiced disgruntlement with an ally that tried to undermine him by promoting democracy, even as it demanded help in hunting Islamist radicals.
But things have sped up of late. Much of Egypt’s establishment interpreted American anguish over the fall of its first democratically elected government as a devious policy of support for the now-ousted Muslim Brotherhood. The administration in Washington, for its part, has felt obliged to protest, not only against the brutal policing that has led to nearly 2,000 protesters, mostly Muslim Brothers, being killed since June and thousands more arrested, but against a storm of anti-American conspiracy-mongering in Egypt’s press. The stories are silly, for the most part, but effective in painting America as a fomenter of chaos.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced the suspension of a substantial though as-yet-undefined portion of some $1.5 billion in annual aid, the bulk of which is military. Just as in the 1950s, when Egypt turned to the Soviet Union after the West rebuffed pleas to finance the Aswan dam, there is talk in Cairo of finding a more reliable patron. Perhaps, some say, the “popular delegation”, led by politicians still loyal to the nationalism of the late Abdel Gamal Nasser and which ostentatiously visited Moscow earlier this month, has found one.