Piecing together Egypt’s rupture
Egypt’s unrest has its root, ironically, in democratic success: the Muslim Brotherhood’s overwhelming ballot box victories, a Harvard Kennedy School Middle East specialist said during a roundtable last week. In elections following the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood captured the president’s office and a parliamentary majority. While those victories were bad news for Egyptian liberals and the remnants of the former regime, alone they weren’t enough to prompt this summer’s military action, according to Tarek Masoud, associate professor of public policy. Instead, Masoud said, it was the prospect of continued electoral dominance by Brotherhood candidates at all levels that led to the move. “The Muslim Brotherhood was just too good at winning elections,” Masoud said. “If the liberals actually thought they could win an election, they would have channeled [public dissatisfaction] into the next election. … The opposition was not confident it could beat the Brotherhood in...