For Egypt’s New President, Getting Elected Was the Easy Part
In the past week Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi has rung up a string of firsts. The first freely elected president in Egyptian history. The first Islamist head of state in the Arab world. And first in line to receive the blame - or the praise - for the Egyptian ship of state’s course. At the moment, it has practically run aground amid political turmoil and a shrinking economy.
The tasks in front of Morsi are daunting. Investment in Egypt has collapsed since Hosni Mubarak was driven from power by a popular uprising in January and February of 2011, the country’s senior officers have demanded an increased share of formal political power, and a politicized judiciary has become an erratic, unpredictable player in the country’s politics - dissolving the freely elected parliament, considering a petition to ban the Muslim Brotherhood that drove Morsi to the presidency, and making pronouncements on the constitutionality of efforts to write a new constitution.
And though Morsi won the presidency fair and square, the Egyptian public is sharply divided. Ahmed Shafiq, a retired officer who served as Mubarak’s last appointed prime minister and who represented the military class’s interests in the presidential race, received over 49 percent of the national vote. Some of those votes were out of a straightforward desire for the stability that largely prevailed under Mubarak’s military-backed regime. But many were cast against an Islamist presidential candidate whose organization’s stated goal is the imposition of the Islamic sharia on Egypt’s people..