Christina Lagarde, head of the IMF, was in Egypt today to negotiate with the Egyptian government the terms of a new $4.8 billion loan.  Predictably, many Egyptians are suspicious.  An Egyptian economist, Wael Gamal, who has solid revolutionary credentials and is economically progressive, writes on Egypt’s economic affairs for al-Shuruq, a leading independent Egyptian newspaper.  He has come out strongly against the proposed loan, first, in a piece in the Shuruq, and again on his blog.

Despite all the turmoil in Egypt, elites in Egypt can apparently unite in mocking the appearance of Muhammad Mursi’s wife, who wears what is know in Egypt as a khimar. 

Egyptians are rightly outraged by the supplemental constitutional declaration issued by SCAF immediately after voting in the runoff ended last night.  There is little doubt that SCAF intends to neuter the power of the recently elected president and reserve real power in its own hands.  The question is whether it can succeed in doing so. 

Morsi’s win came to me as a pleasant surprise, as I had been quite pessimistic going into  the runoff that he could muster enough support outside the base of the Muslim Brotherhood to prevail.  At the end of the day, however, all his victory means is that the people of Egypt did not decide to sign its own death warrant; however, it is still unclear whether Egyptians can achieve a stable political equilibrium grounded in some kind of pluralistic, democratic state.  To do so will require a coalition, first, between moderate Islamists and non-Islamists, both of which were active participants in the Jan. 25 Tahrir Coalition, but parted thereafter, the fact that encouraged the forces of the old regime to attempt a comeback. 

Many revolutionaries who voted for Shafik, or who abstained or nullified their vote, did so on the grounds that they were defending the idea of a “civil” state.  This suggests that, in their mind, there are only two kinds of states in the world: “civil” states and “religious” states. 

As Mahmoud Salem observed in a prescient piece published by The Daily Beast on May 23, 2012, he believed that candidates who were perceived as tacking to the center, such as `Amr Musa, Egyptia’s former foreign minister and head of the League of Arab States, and `Abd al-Mun`im Abu al-Futuh, the breakaway candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood, were not likely to do well in the context of Egypt’s fractured electorate.