CAIRO — For the first time ever, Egypt has a freely elected president: Mohammed Morsi, a US-educated engineer backed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Not clear, however, is the actual function of the new president.
Over the past two weeks, the country’s interim governing authority, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, has issued decrees giving itself vast legislative and executive powers while divesting the presidency of all but its ceremonial functions.
Yesterday, Morsi said he’ll ignore those decrees and act under the old rules, which gave the president virtually dictatorial powers.
It’s not clear how all this will work in the absence of a clear constitutional framework and no parliament to pick a prime minister and decide a governmental program.
Morsi faces other troubles, too.
To start with, his status within the Muslim Brotherhood remains murky. He was chosen as its candidate in haste when the government banned Brotherhood leader Kheirat al-Shater from running.
He says he won’t “take orders” from the Brotherhood’s “Supreme Guidance Council,” a star-chamber-style organ developed during the Brotherhood’s decades underground. But Morsi, with no organizational base of his own, may find it hard to ignore the council’s “advice.”
Then there’s the narrow margin of his victory. In the second round of the election, he collected just over 13 million votes, or 51 percent of the total cast — but so many stayed away from the polls that nearly three out of four Egyptian voters did not cast a ballot for him.
Because he served in parliament under ex- President Hosni Mubarak, Morsi is generally regarded as a moderate. He has promised to appoint women and members of the Coptic Christian minority to senior positions, even the vice presidency. And he announced just days before the second round that he’d refused to receive an emissary from Iran’s “supreme guide,” Ali Khamenei.
Morsi’s claimed moderation may be a mask, a tactic other Islamists have used before.
But the platform he ran on was not anti-democratic. It promises respect for Egypt’s international commitments, presumably including the peace treaty with Israel, and makes no mention of reviving the Islamic Caliphate or imposing an Islamic dress code, as the Iranian regime has done.
This is why some pro-democracy elements campaigned for him. They saw getting rid of the remnants of the Mubarak regime as a priority, and that meant defeating Ahmed Shafiq, the military’s candidate for president.
Now the important thing is to insist that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces hand over power by the end of June so that the military can return to its barracks. Morsi could then appoint an interim government to supervise the writing of a new constitution and the election of a new parliament as quickly as possible.
Egypt can’t make do with a powerless presidency. But it will do poorly if the old powerful presidency is restored with the Muslim Brotherhood acting as a facade for the military.
Once the military is out of active politics, Morsi and his interim administration will face the immense majority of Egyptians who still hope to build a democratic future.