An Important News Egypt

Egypt’s Election Should Be a Lock. So Why Is President Sisi Worried?

CAIRO — Days before Egypt’s presidential election, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s beaming visage adorns billboards across Egypt. His rivals are in jail, the news media is in his pocket and his sole challenger — a politician so obscure many Egyptians would struggle to name him — hasn’t bothered to campaign.

With the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power putting Mr. Sisi’s odds of losing at 1 in 500, most Egypt watchers are already looking past the vote that starts Monday to his next challenge: whether he can change the Constitution to extend his rule beyond the current eight-year limit.

The mystery, then, is why Mr. Sisi is acting like a man with something to lose.

As the election loomed, the Egyptian leader sometimes acted in ways that looked oddly jittery. He fired his army chief in October and a powerful spy chief in January. In speeches, he struck a choleric, sometimes threatening tone, railing against unspecified enemies. In a fierce media crackdown in the final month of campaigning, the government expelled a British reporter without explanation and even imprisoned a pro-Sisi TV host deemed to have stepped out line.

“It’s very confusing,” said Anwar Sadat, a presidential contender who quit the race in January out of concern for the safety of his campaign workers. “Sisi has everything in hand. So why the fear?”

The reason, experts and diplomats in Cairo say, lies within the precincts of true power in Egypt — the military and security agencies that form the bedrock of Mr. Sisi’s authority. While the vote is expected to be a stage-managed confirmation, along the lines of those in China and Russia last weekend, it has exposed a rumble of discontent inside the security establishment that appeared to rattle Mr. Sisi.

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Tensions spiked in the early stages of the election when two former generals stepped forward to challenge him. He quickly dispatched their bids — one man is in jail while the second, after a month in detention, disavowed his ambitions.

Few analysts gave either candidate much chance of beating Mr. Sisi, who retains broad support for his tough policies against Islamist militancy. But his unsparing reaction to their bids stoked speculation that they enjoyed support from a corner of the security establishment, a smidgen of dissent that Mr. Sisi found intolerable.

The security apparatus, which removed Mr. Sisi’s predecessor in 2013, poses the only real challenge to his power, said Robert Springborg, an Egypt scholar at King’s College. “The election puts that into relief,” he said. “It provides the shadows on the wall of the struggle that’s going on underneath.”

Pharaoh or Mamluk?
Egypt’s modern leaders are often likened to pharaohs — all-powerful leaders of a disciplined state. Mr. Sisi has encouraged that image, whether standing imperiously at the prow of a boat plowing through the Suez Canal, or posing against the backdrop of the pyramids.

But a more apt historical analogy, some say, lies with the Mamluks, a fractious military caste that ruled Egypt in the Middle Ages. For almost three centuries, Mamluk sultans ruled from Cairo’s citadel, but their supremacy rested on a cabal of restless subordinates who jockeyed for supremacy.

Under Mr. Sisi, a tight circle of generals and security chiefs wield vast economic and political power, overseeing secretive business and media empires while cracking down on any hint of opposition. Deciphering the inner workings of this circle is notoriously difficult, and the subject of a sort of Kremlinology among Western officials. But this year’s election seemed to crack open the lid on hidden strains.

That the two retired generals would run for office was no surprise. Ahmed Shafik, a former air force commander who served briefly as prime minister in 2011, ran for president in 2012. Sami Anan, who led Egypt’s army from 2005 to 2012, backed out of the 2014 presidential election after he was attacked in pro-state news media.

But this time they offered rare public criticism of Mr. Sisi and proposed to loosen his harsh rule.

Mr. Shafik, in his video message to launch his campaign, said: “A true democracy and basic human rights are not a given.” Mr. Anan tendered an olive branch to the young revolutionaries who helped oust President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and who have been hounded by Mr. Sisi.

Mr. Anan was charged with breaching military rules and thrown in jail, where aides say he has been interrogated by military officers in balaclavas. Mr. Shafik was detained at a luxury hotel for a month before he publicly withdrew his candidacy.