Here’s Stanley Kurtz, writing at the Corner:
Although it’s too soon to fully understand what they mean, there are important developments in Egypt today in the run-up to this fall’s election. First, a major coalition of parties has formed that includes not only the Muslim Brotherhood, but two key liberal parties, Wafd and Ghad. The coalition also includes a left leaning Nasserist (Arab nationalist) party, Karama, and the socialist Tagammu party. At the same time, a there is talk of yet another coalition of liberal and socialist parties forming to oppose the first coalition, given that it seems to be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
What is going on here? We can only speculate at this point, but it looks as though the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood has allowed it to coopt the core of its opposition. This assures weak non-Islamist parties of some representation, while also providing the Brotherhood with protection against backlash from the military or the United States, should it dominate the coming election. Yet the new coalition likely puts the Brotherhood in position to control an only nominally diverse parliament.
Many of the most prominent leftist and Nasserist parties are already in the Brotherhood-dominated coalition. That would leave a second, more purely secular coalition weak. On the other hand, if non-Islamist Egyptians are alarmed by the Brotherhood’s rising power, they could turn a possible counter-coalition into a significant force.
For now, however, it seems as though the Muslim Brotherhood has moved to coopt its opposition, and therefore has an excellent chance of exercising de facto control over the new parliament, with appropriate cover. The one thing that brings together Egypt’s liberals, leftists, and Islamists is foreign policy. So expect a Brotherhood-dominated coalition to be less than entirely friendly to the United States and Israel.
One of the only positive developments here is that the start of actual party maneuvering may force the Western press to start talking openly about socialist and Arab-nationalist parties. The media’s current characterization of nearly all non-Islamist groups as “secular liberals’ is deeply misleading.
And here’s another perspicacious observer, writing as the Egyptian “revolution” unfolded, back on January 28th:
The implosion of the senescent Mubarak dictatorship will create a power vacuum in the region’s most populous (and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim) nation. The US, seeing that Mubarak is no longer the “strong horse’, has now conspicuously withdrawn its support for him, and has made public statements asserting the “universal human rights’ of the protestors now rioting in the streets, and expressing its optimism about democracy in general ”” despite what democracy can be expected to lead to in situations like this.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and although the newspapers have so far reported that religious groups appear not to have played much part in the uprising, anyone who has paid any attention to Egypt’s modern history will know that the principal opponent of the secular Egyptian dictatorship is, and has always been, the Muslim Brotherhood ”” the patient, hydra-headed global Islamist organization (its front groups include Hamas in Gaza, and CAIR in the US) that has been awaiting its chance in Egypt for decades (and which of course has never forgotten the execution of its chief political theorist, Sayyid Qutb, by Nasser in 1966).
The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan’) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners ”” for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence ”” as a “moderate’ Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.
… We should not be surprised to see ”” in fact we should be astonished not to see ”” the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long.
…“Democracy’ there may be, briefly, in the wake of Mubarak’s fall; but anything resembling a secular, West-friendly democracy will be short-lived indeed, if it comes to pass at all.