Mohammed Morsi meets with Ayman Nour in Cairo, Feb. 16, 2013. (REUTERS/Egyptian Presidency/Handout)
That Mohammed Morsi faces considerable opposition from liberals and secularists is well known. What is perhaps less known is that he faces opposition from his allies on the right. The embattled Egyptian president and his Muslim Brotherhood are looking at a growing threat from the ultraconservative Salafi Al-Nour party, which has triangulated against the Islamist president to take advantage of popular skepticism of his authoritarian impulses and his movement’s near-monopoly on power.
The threat was highlighted Monday by the resignation of Bassam Zarka, a member of Al-Nour and a Morsi advisor who jumped ship to show support for Khaled Alam Eldin, another member of the nascent far-right party who was fired from the administration for allegedly abusing his power.
This on the same day that the president’s draft electoral reform law was rejected by the nation’s high court — essentially a logistical setback, but one that adds to a deluge of bad news for an administration that is continuing to struggle to contain public unrest. Monday also saw continued protests in Port Said in the aftermath of a bloody crackdown by security forces there in January.
The fresh challenges mixed with the old do not bode well for the government’s stability moving forward, which Morsi hopes will get a boost from parliamentary elections this spring. Assuming the legal issues are resolved — and that gerrymandering doesn’t cause such an uproar that the election’s legitimacy is in severe doubt — the Islamist parties can be expected to dominate once again, though whether the Brotherhood sheds some of its supporters to Al-Nour is worth watching. That would mean there is a sustained audience for multiple potent Islamist political parties, and, perhaps to the comfort of the West, that the country is not uniting behind one monolithic political force. Instead, the two movements could keep each other honest, preventing the kind of totalitarian spiral that liberal opposition activists have been warning about for months now.
Most important for the young democracy’s future is that secular and liberal parties — who will almost certainly fail to generate the kind of broad support needed to join the government — not be so completely swamped in the months ahead that the electoral process loses all of its appeal. When there is buy-in from a wide swath of political parties and movements, elections can, in fact, produce stability.
And in Morsi’s Egypt, that’s exactly what has been so conspicuous by its absence.
