In trying to predict what Egypt’s next leadership will look like, two unlikely names keep popping up: Nelson Mandela and the United Nations.
Mandela, to illustrate what Egypt lacks; the UN, to demonstrate what there might just be too much of in the race to succeed Hosni Mubarak.
“If there were somebody that could walk in and take over like Nelson Mandela, we’d know who that person is,” the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano told Big Peace this week. “That person doesn’t exist in Egypt, I don’t think.”
Mandela’s name also came up in an interview with Yoram Meital, chairman of the Herzog Center for Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, while discussing the recent attempts by Mohamed ElBaradei to harness the energy of the Egyptian protestors and form some sort of alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. Meital told Big Peace:
“Mr. ElBaradei, though he is not Nelson Mandela, he has that credibility by many in Egypt today and he was the first actually to raise the flag against Mubarak and to call upon the international community and Egyptian society to put on as much pressure as they can on President Mubarak to allow free elections in Egypt.”
The momentum behind ElBaradei, Carafano said, is indicative of the desire of Egyptian protestors to see what perhaps isn’t there:
“I think the one thing you really have to be careful of is everybody looking for the white horse. People have put ElBaradei in there as sort of the savior–I think that’s ludicrous. He’s got lots of baggage all his own.”
That baggage brings us back to the United Nations, where ElBaradei served as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where he was often criticized for whitewashing Iran’s nuclear program (and may have fabricated a story used against George W. Bush right before the 2004 election).
But ElBaradei isn’t the only UN bureaucrat to likely throw his hat in the ring for the post-Mubarak Egyptian leadership; Amr Moussa, former Egyptian foreign minister and secretary-general of the Arab League, who was also Egypt’s ambassador to the UN and a member of the United Nations High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change for International Peace and Security is expected to join the fray.
“Of course Amr Moussa and others will come now and join this festive atmosphere of democratization,” said Meital.
The emergence of Moussa and ElBaradei while the streets are filled with those demanding a change in leadership shows the delicate line between familiarity and unacceptability. Marina Ottoway, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Big Peace that while some familiar names might be considered outsiders enough to gain the support of Egypt’s population, current vice president Omar Suleiman is on the wrong side of that line.
“Omar Suleiman is very much part of the old regime,” Ottoway said. “It’s not just that he was appointed to be vice president right now, even if he had not (he’d still be unacceptable). His name has been around for a very long time as one of the possible successors to Mubarak. He would be seen as a sign of continuation and not of change.”
But, Ottoway said, Suleiman will have to be part of a transitional government:
“So far the protestors have been really reasonable, and I think that they understand that there has to be the representation of the old regime in any in any transitional mechanism.”
What about ElBaradei? “There is no groundswell of enthusiasm for him. At the same time, nobody objects too strongly to him,” Ottoway said. “And that may well be his strength.”
Suleiman was the intelligence chief and national security advisor to Mubarak before he was asked to join the cabinet as vice president early on in the protests. Not only was Suleiman the West’s first choice to lead a post-Mubarak government, he was, according to one of the WikiLeaks cables, expected to lead a transitional government even if Mubarak’s son, Gamal, ended up succeeding his father.
Suleiman’s role becomes that much more crucial now that he’ll have to guide a transitional period fraught with dangerous scenarios. The two riskiest, according to Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, are a “disorderly collapse” and holding elections too soon.
A disorderly collapse, Schanzer said, leaves a vacuum in a period of great unrest and chaos. And holding elections too soon–such as the scheduled elections in September–would virtually ensure the Muslim Brotherhood’s success.
“The Brotherhood are potentially the best mobilized to take control,” Schanzer said. “As opposed to all the other opposition groups that have languished under the Mubarak era and have not been allowed to really gain strength.”
The practical solution, according to Schanzer, is to postpone elections perhaps another year, and give the other political groups a chance to “level the playing field.” After that, a democratic Egypt could–possibly–emerge.
Ottoway disagrees with that assessment. Egypt, she said, has enough political infrastructure in place, and must now be allowed to utilize it:
“Egypt has all the trappings of a democratic system already. Egypt has an elected parliament; it holds elections all the time… Egypt is one country that could move toward a true democratic process pretty quickly. And I don’t think the protestors are going to give up without a guarantee that there will be elections–not only presidential elections that are already scheduled for September, but presidential elections that are truly competitive.”
Ottoway says the next stable Egyptian government will be a truly multiparty parliament in which the Muslim Brotherhood is represented. It’s also possible, she suggested, that when the Egyptian constitution is amended it might abolish the presidency in favor of a prime minister, taking the power away from one centralized figure.
Carafano is less convinced that Egypt has the civil society in place to transition to democracy. “Can Egypt follow the South Korean model? The answer is, kinda maybe,” Carafano said. “But it could equally follow an Iran model.”
One thing that is almost certainly true, according to Carafano, is this: “Whatever you see evolve in the next couples of weeks–that’s probably not the final answer.”
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