The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (33 page)

The strategy was not without costs. When people taste a freedom, it becomes much harder to deny it to them later. With the elimination of each red line, the regime curbed its latitude and room for maneuver. There is some academic debate whether a false political opening like Egypt’s can at some point become less a survival strategy and more a permanent condition, a limbo between autocracy and genuine democracy. It’s an unsettled question. But for what it is worth, members of Mubarak’s regime doubted whether they could, as one ruling party official told me, “
play the game forever.” When I put the question to Hilal, he was blunt. “Can you continue that indefinitely?” he replied. “The answer is no, of course not.”

His response reminded me of Alexis de Tocqueville’s admonition
that “the most dangerous moment for a corrupt regime is when it attempts to reform itself.” The specific dangers for Mubarak’s regime revealed themselves quickly. The end of the prohibition on criticizing the president led to more protests and anti-Mubarak political activity than the country had ever seen. The government would occasionally ratchet up its repression, but of the scores of political activists I met, all considered the years 2005 to 2010 to be the most formative for honing their skills as regime opponents. Likewise, after the 2005 presidential election, the regime continued to throw barriers up to anyone who contemplated challenging its hold on power. (It quickly made an example of Ayman Nour, locking him up on politically motivated charges for four years.) Still, it was now possible that someone unanticipated could be a candidate for the country’s highest office. For a regime that detests surprises, there was now a hint, if only a hint, of unpredictability. Certainly, in 2005, no one would have anticipated that four years later people would be wondering out loud whether the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, was interested in being the next president of Egypt. Mohamed Kamal in 2010 had spoken dismissively to me of “the ElBaradei phenomenon.” While many of ElBaradei’s own supporters privately doubted his grit as a politician, the mere injection of a new name into the conversation ignited the enthusiasm of politically minded Egyptians and opened up another front against the regime.

And perhaps nothing caused more resentment and galvanized more opposition than the effort to burnish Gamal’s credentials to be Egypt’s next president. Despite Mubarak’s firm command of the country, it was never assured that the presidency would pass from father to son. The possibility, which became more real each year, ran afoul of the country’s political traditions. As authoritarian as the regime may have been, it was not a family dynasty. The suggestion that no one besides Mubarak’s offspring was fit to rule Egypt violated what narrow compact still existed between the regime and its people.

And the anger did not rest in the hearts of the people alone. The Egyptian military was deeply resentful of the class of new elites—people with close ties to Gamal and his brother, Alaa—who quickly turned their connections into vast fortunes. Clearly, they had reason
to fear that if Gamal became president, his evident push to privatize industries would continue to favor those closest to him—and not the military’s own commercial empire. Despite how sophisticated Gamal may have looked in his Savile Row suits, there was one suit he had never worn: a military uniform. The Egyptian armed forces had been the proving ground for each of the country’s presidents. With no military experience on Gamal’s résumé, it remained an open question whether Egypt’s generals would ever agree to him succeeding his father or whether they would insist on one of their own taking the helm.

We will never know. When the people rose up on January 25, 2011, they denied Mubarak the chance of ever foisting his son on Egypt. A question that had dominated Egyptian politics for nearly a decade would remain unanswered. But one thing was hardly a surprise: as soon as Hosni Mubarak was gone, the military seized the assets of Gamal’s closest friends.

Every dictatorship has faces, apart from the dictator himself, that come to personify the corruption, privilege, and power of the highest echelons. In Egypt, on the eve of the revolution, that face belonged to Ahmed Ezz. The billionaire tycoon and chairman of EzzSteel was roundly considered to be the most influential of the “young guard” of ruling party leaders who had risen largely due to their close personal connections to Gamal Mubarak. In 2010, if you asked everyday Egyptians who had benefited the most from his association with the president’s son, the answer was almost always the same: “Ezz.” In his case, it was widely believed that he had turned a middling family business into one of the Middle East’s largest steel companies on the back of his close friendship with Gamal.
Ezz’s holdings were estimated to be roughly $2 billion, the bulk of it earned since he had become a member of parliament in 2000. But even if his wealth stemmed from corrupt sweetheart deals, Ezz was far more than just a beneficiary of crony capitalism. He was a sophisticated political player charged with giving an old dictatorship a new look. “
We needed a plan,” one ruling party official told me. “Ezz was the man with the plan.”

Put simply, Ezz’s job was to win elections. Several years ahead of the 2010 parliamentary elections, the NDP tapped Ezz to oversee the party’s organizational strategy for winning seats. Of course, the ruling party had never failed to win a majority of seats in the parliament. (Since 1976, the president’s party had won a supermajority in nine consecutive elections.) The trouble was, as a ruling party, it was highly unorganized in how it arrived at that majority.
The weakness of the party’s brand was evident in how its candidates chose to compete for seats. Most ran as independents, relying on personal or family connections to curry favor with local voters. Afterward, they would simply pledge their loyalty to the NDP, because being a member of the ruling party was the only way to access the government’s patronage. In fact, a majority of the NDP’s 311 parliamentarians won their seats as independents only to rejoin the party later. Ezz’s task was to instill more discipline and professionalism in the party.
Several officials told me that Ezz had studied the methods of Tony Blair’s New Labour Party in Britain and intended to adopt them in Egypt. In April 2010, Ezz described his role to my friend the former
Washington Post
reporter Janine Zacharia. “
What I do is more organizational,” he explained, “how to prepare for getting out the voters, how to screen candidates, how to help sort out how the party leadership chooses candidates, and how to prepare the organization to fight elections.”

Like many things Ezz said, it sounded good when he said it. But for all the talk of voter outreach, modern campaign messaging, and professional organizing, the November 2010 parliamentary elections were nothing more than a rigged game. In retrospect, it was abundantly clear why the regime had steadfastly refused to allow any foreign monitors at the polling stations. As the party’s organizational secretary, Ezz presided over one of the most fraudulent elections in recent memory.
The NDP captured more than 90 percent of the total seats. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had won eighty-eight seats in the last election in 2005, improbably lost all eighty-eight of its races. The regime’s theft of the election was so brazen it was daring even by the standards of Egypt’s oppressive political climate.

In the lead-up to the vote, Ezz was fond of saying how much freer Egypt was than just five years ago. If things were so bad, why did Egyptians seem so unconcerned? Their top issues, according to
Ezz, were jobs, inexpensive food, and clean water—not wider political concerns that ran to the heart of the regime’s legitimacy to rule. “Why are people not rebelling? Why are they not coming out in millions when political freedoms are being discussed by the opposition?” asked Ezz. “Why? Because Egyptians feel free. The freedom that they want is there. The freedom of expression, the freedom to join parties, the freedom to bring Ahmed Ezz, who people perceive to be someone with some influence, and grill him and send him to hell if need be … Egyptians feel free.”

It is impossible to know precisely why the party would turn to such heavy-handed fraud. Perhaps the party that Ezz helped lead was too weak to rein in its own members. But the party’s brazen behavior was almost certainly the product of one simple truth: the regime had come to believe its own lies. That is one of the best explanations for why, after having opened political life to permit more criticism and opposition in the media, the regime felt so comfortable stealing an election from voters. It had such contempt for the people that it believed it could still rig elections without any cost or consequence. The government had gone to great lengths to create the architecture of a modern authoritarian regime. It had the tools—opposition parties to soak up public resentment, elections to reward and punish loyalists, a parliament to give voice to public concerns—but in the end it chose not to use them. These trappings of democracy became even less than the facade they were supposed to be. Facades are meant to cover up something unattractive, but they only work if people act as if they are real. After the election, some members of the opposition planned to establish a “shadow parliament” that would be more representative than the actual one. President Mubarak responded dismissively, saying, “
Let them entertain themselves.”

Even members of the regime weren’t bothering to act as if the facades were genuine anymore. A good example was the National Council for Human Rights. Mubarak’s government established the council in 2003, and it was broadly charged with ensuring “the observance of human rights” in Egypt. Given the regime’s systemic use of torture, most activists were understandably skeptical of a government-run body with such a mission. It appeared to be the definition of window dressing. And in large measure it was. A diplomat at the Egyptian
embassy in Washington sniggered when he recounted how they had played on the former UN secretary-general Boutros
Boutros-Ghali’s vanity to get him to lend his name as president of the council.

The council, however, did count some serious and genuine human rights advocates among its twenty-five members. (
I interviewed several members of the council, and they generally agreed that eight to ten of their colleagues were truly committed to human rights work; the rest were a hodgepodge of opportunists and regime loyalists.) One of the respected members of the body was the man who ostensibly led it, its vice president, Ahmed Kamal Aboul Magd. An accomplished constitutional lawyer and scholar, Aboul Magd was, in Egypt, one of those rarest of men: someone whose integrity and commitment to human rights were unimpeachable, and yet who was respected by the regime as well. Aboul Magd had served as a minister to Anwar Sadat and has the cautious, deliberative nature of a seasoned jurist. However, in February 2010, he was unexpectedly sacked from his position on the National Council for Human Rights.

A month after he had been fired, I visited him in his home in Giza, a short distance from the Pyramids. Aboul Magd explained that when he had returned from a business trip to Kuwait, there was a letter waiting for him. It was a personal letter from President Mubarak. It thanked him for his service but indicated that it had come to an end. I wanted to know why he had been pushed from his post. “
Why did they decide to get rid of me?” Aboul Magd replied. “People say they are planning things that I would be the wrong person to handle. So let’s avoid this situation by letting him go free before he would try to do something.” Even more surprising than Aboul Magd’s dismissal were some of the names the regime suggested to replace him. Its first choice was a former police officer and official at the Interior Ministry—the government body most responsible for the country’s horrible record of human rights abuses. That suggestion was quickly shouted down. Nevertheless, Aboul Magd was troubled by the list of names the government had drawn up. “They are not good choices,” he said. “I cannot put them on a list of proponents of human rights. They send the wrong message.”

But Aboul Magd was troubled by more than the government stacking a toothless council with reliable friends of the regime. He
believed Mubarak and his confidants had fallen deaf to the country they lived in. He could not point to a single specific thing, but he had an unease about the moment the country was about to enter. “I hear silence,” Aboul Magd told me. “And it makes me worried because it is not genuine silence.”

The regime was too cocksure and confident, Aboul Magd meant. It believed its autocracy would always be safe for the autocrat, and that is a dangerous moment in the life of any authoritarian regime. In Egypt’s case, the course it chose was particularly volatile. Life had not improved for most Egyptians. Basic political repression remained a fact of life. And yet, in an effort to release some tensions from the system, the regime opened up small spaces for public criticism and limited types of activism. Then, even as the government began to tolerate more freedom of speech, it continued to steal elections, harshly round up protesters, and, in perhaps its most unwise move, lay the groundwork for a dynastic succession. The regime became uninterested in following the cues or signals from the public, perceiving those concerns as irrelevant to its grip on power. Wael Nawara, a senior adviser to the opposition leader Ayman Nour, told me a month after the revolution that in the five years before Mubarak’s fall, the regime and its people had effectively been put on a collision course. “
These two curves had to collide. I remember writing on my blog after the November elections that the regime had boarded a train heading to the terminal and there were no stops between here and the terminal. It couldn’t get off even if it wanted to,” Nawara said in his office. “I think the final blow was to have the brochure: how to start a revolution, how to oust a dictator. That was Tunisia.”

Perhaps Ezz had a premonition. Near the end of his April 2010 interview, he bragged for several minutes about how active the Egyptian street had become, with demonstrations at Cairo University and elsewhere at least every other month. He painted a picture of an Egypt bubbling with political life and opinions, and he rejected the idea that the regime had used the emergency law to stifle its opponents. Then he paused and said, “I will tell you quite frankly, however, I would be uncomfortable if I saw a demonstration in Tahrir Square.”