The Associated Press: With dream in reach, Egypt’s Brotherhood stumbles
For months, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has focused single-mindedly on this moment — parliamentary elections beginning Monday that the fundamentalist group is expected to dominate. Now it may be a pyrrhic victory.
The Brotherhood stayed on the sidelines of this week’s protests by secular liberal groups demanding the country’s military rulers step down, hurting its image among key sectors of the Egyptian public who accuse the group of siding with the generals and selling out democracy demands to gain power.
By staying out of the protests, “the Brotherhood has made it clear that they want elections because they want the seat of power, no matter what that seat looks like,” said Abdel-Jalil el-Sharnoubi, who once headed the Brotherhood’s website until he quit the group earlier this year in frustration with its leadership.
Ever since the Feb. 11 fall of autocratic leader Hosni Mubarak, fears have been growing among some Egyptians that the country would take a strong turn toward Islamic fundamentalism.
The Brotherhood was long repressed under Mubarak but it built up Egypt’s largest and most disciplined political organization, with tens of thousands of members around the country, as well as a network of charities providing food, money and medical care to the poor. They have been campaigning furiously for months, while liberal, leftist and secular parties that arose since Mubarak’s fall have been disorganized and divided, struggling to build up their national presence.
But the group’s popularity has limits. Particularly, even many Egyptians who have no problem with greater religious conservatism in public life are suspicious that the Brotherhood is too authoritarian in its ways and too eager to rule. For that reason, the blow to the Brotherhood reputation stings, undermining the image it has pushed hard in its election campaign that it is a trustworthy, pious group that — as their slogan declares — “brings good for Egypt.”