Egyptian autocracy bodes ill for Arab region

Mohamed Morsi, the elected Islamist president of Egypt toppled by the army in mid-2013 after only a year in power, was this week sentenced to 20 years in jail for allegedly ordering deadly attacks on protesters demonstrating against his rule. He still faces more charges and a possible death penalty, to which Mohamed Badie, head of the Muslim Brotherhood, has already been sentenced.

Egypt's jails are full and military tribunals are dispensing rough justice on a scale unseen for decades. The security state is back.

The government of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former army chief elected president last year, has popular support for his crackdown on the Brotherhood. But its price is Islamist radicalisation, and an absence of civil liberties that has ensnared liberals and leftwing activists who launched the movement that brought down former president Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the signature upheaval of the so-called Arab spring.

While the US and most of its EU allies partly shunned President Sisi, they are now re-embracing him in light of the alarming spread of jihadi extremism across the Middle East. The US has resumed its annual $1.3bn stipend to the Egyptian army, which in February agreed a $5bn arms deal with France. British and Russian companies were prominent investors at a recent economic summit in Sharm el-Sheikh where deals worth more than $50bn were agreed. Much of the economy is still at a standstill, but Egypt has graduated from the handouts given to Mr Sisi by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Yet the growing acceptance of the former field marshal marks a reversion to the status quo ante the upheavals that began in late 2010: the notion that the Arab world was secure in the hands of pliable strongmen, a lazy equation of autocracy with stability that chose to ignore the way local despotisms are almost a purpose-built assembly line for the manufacture of Islamists and jihadis.

Egypt's securocrats seem to recognise this, but feel it is a threat they can deal with, just as they did during the 1990s. But that was a low-level and local insurgency.

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There is no doubt that the Brotherhood abused its thin mandate to appropriate a revolution it was hesitant to join and attempted to colonise Egypt's weak institutions. But Sisi's Egypt is essentially being run, without basic freedoms, by project managers with a strong corporatist sense of one institution - the army - and almost no sense of the need for national institution building.

In that regard both the Islamists and the generals were operating in a vacuum Egypt's liberals were too weak to fill. "Had any of the liberals tried to lead, the door was open, but they didn't, and the army stepped in", argues one former Egyptian minister.

Yet if Egypt cannot demonstrate a way forward between extremism and autocracy, its prospects, as well as those of an Arab region in turmoil, are bleak - not helped by the west retreating into its comfort zone of backing Arab autocrats.

<>There is even quiet pressure in some western capitals to embrace Bashar al-Assad, which would be a serious misreading of an already desperate situation in Syria. First, there is no chance of Syria's Sunni majority turning against Isis if the Assads remain in place. This is the same, urgent logic that led the US and Iran to dump their shared protege in Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, the sectarian Shia Islamist former prime minister, to try to win back the country's Sunni minority. But second, as the US knows from shortly after invading Iraq in 2003, the Assad regime has a record of collusion with jihadi groups, including Isis and its precursors.

Egypt is nothing like a Syrian-grade tyranny. Yet it is heading in a risky direction after the dashed hopes of 2011. As the former minister phrases it cautiously: "The idea we can leave the politics and civil liberties till later is a major problem; if you start that way that's where you usually end up".

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