Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has succeeded where all his predecessors failed: he has prevented the emergence of competing power centers within his regime. This is a notable accomplishment in itself, and a signal feature of the “new republic” he has proclaimed. However, it begs several questions.
First, how does power flow within the regime? More to the point, how do power flows shift or reorient when conditions governing upward mobility within the system—or lateral access into it by outsiders—change? However robust it may be, no regime is static, and so its internal cohesion over time depends on the answer.
Nor, second, are even the most authoritarian of regimes disembodied from their societies and political economies. Quite the opposite in Egypt, indeed, where the chronic inability (or unwillingness) of successive presidential administrations since the establishment of the republic over six decades ago to build a functioning developmental state has generated a “habitus economy” based heavily on personal ties and social networks among economic actors. To what extent, then, are economic access and opportunity within Egypt’s markets shaped by competition among rival clusters of state bureaucrats, military and security officers, and private business actors? And lastly, does radical change in the regime’s social base redirect avenues for access and mobility within the regime or impede it altogether, with what implications for regime stability and durability?
The inner workings of the Sisi regime are more than usually opaque. This may seem odd for a country that receives millions of foreign visitors every year and gives foreign media access, and that also boasts a large diaspora of Egyptians abroad who travel back and forth freely. But the severe narrowing of political space discourages public discussion of government appointments and inner workings. The paucity and unreliability of information made public by state agencies, including in the economic field, additionally impedes assessment of the performance of civil servants and other officials and thus obscures the reasons behind their promotion, demotion, or transfer to other posts. Ever greater reliance on informal means of exchanging information is one result, which is ironic, since officials frequently warn the public against rumor-mongering and yet create conditions that make it inevitable.
The formal prohibition on gathering or publishing information relating to any activity by the armed forces or affiliated agencies, which are extensively involved in the civilian economy, poses a particular obstacle to understanding power flows in a country now run as a military guardianship. And despite the military’s ubiquity in Egyptian life, the sociospatial sequestration of the senior echelons of key state agencies (both civilian and military or security), alongside the upper middle class, in new upmarket cities and gated compounds has greatly limited what might be called the “ethnographic” knowledge that relatives and neighbors previously acquired as they rubbed shoulders with ranking officials and officers in the mundane tasks of daily life, from shopping to socializing. The children of the senior echelons may flaunt exorbitant lifestyles openly on social media, but the political fortunes of the parents must be inferred by interpreting indirect clues.
Comparison with other authoritarian systems offers some analytical insight. Kremlinology immediately comes to mind, namely the methodology that evolved during the Cold War to analyze the power structure of the Soviet Union, by reading between the lines of official statements and public appearances by government and Communist Party leaders. Russian journalist Andrey Pertsev’s more recent discussion of how power flows within the presidential system headed by Vladimir Putin offers an additional analogy that may help analyze Sisi’s administration. To summarize, Pertsev argues that a “vertical” power structure centered on Putin enabled him to govern the country for two decades by distributing material resources and influential positions in return for loyalty, delivery of assigned tasks, and demonstration of usefulness. But, he adds, the contraction of opportunities for upward mobility and of resources for distribution in recent years is prompting elites to expand the scope of their authority proactively and establish “horizontal” connections with each other. This gives them “the chance to survive beyond the post-Putin era, but at the same time, they undermine the foundations of Putinism.”
Is there anything similar in Egypt? On the one hand, Sisi has engineered a highly centralized and personalized regime, in which he clearly controls the “power verticals.” Although “Egypt is less the product of a single force than of the interplay of many leading forces,” the president is the key arbitrator among them, in the words of Nathan Brown, Shaimaa Hatab, and Amr Adly. Much as under Putin, there is room for upward mobility for ambitious individuals within Sisi’s system. Such movement is also similarly siloed, taking place within institutional structures or spheres that remain separate from each other, mediated by the president or his inner circle.
On the other hand, a key difference between Egypt and Russia is that in Russia civilians—whether government officials, political figures within the Putin camp, or private businesspeople—are firmly part of the power vertical, if not indeed its main participants, and enjoy the growth prospects it offers. In Egypt, by contrast, the power vertical is entirely limited to agents of the state, above all to members of the military and, in second place, members of the two principal security agencies—the General Intelligence Service and Homeland Security. Cabinet ministers, senior judges and clerics, other civilian officials, and businesspeople may be well-connected politically, but that does not confer meaningful authority on them or place them within a power vertical.
Even for significant individuals or institutions within the power vertical, the potential to wield meaningful autonomy is highly constrained. It is true that the armed forces, police, and judiciary, in particular, enjoy virtually unlimited authority over their internal affairs, and have won constitutional confirmation of their right to vet command appointments made by the president and to choose one of their own to represent them in the Council of Ministers. But this does not extend to forming principal coalitions or power clusters outside of their institutional silos, nor does it enable them to counterbalance the president. So, for example, Egyptian provincial governors appear to be more tightly controlled by their president than regional governors in Russia by theirs, and they cannot use their positions to build horizontal coalitions and acquire autonomy in the way that their Russian counterparts can, and do.
The crucial difference between the two presidential systems is that there are virtually no channels or means through which newcomers can join the power structure “laterally,” so to speak, from outside the main institutional silos. The political arena does not in itself offer a means to access, or rise in, Egypt’s power vertical. Parliament is too toothless to act even as a springboard, in sharp contrast to the Russian Duma, even though both are packed with presidential loyalists. Neither does appointment to senior government office, including the Council of Ministers. Sisi’s investment since 2015 in training a new breed of “young leaders” and model bureaucrats, as Hesham Sallam has amply discussed, has provided loyal technocrats and security officers, but has not broadened the avenues into, and then up, the power vertical. Similarly, militarization of civil service recruitment, as Hossam al-Hamalawy has documented, is only cementing the marginal position of civilians in the system, rather than providing an upward path within it.
A second lens for viewing Egypt’s power structure that draws on Russian experience is the evolution of relations between key political figures and officials, private businesspeople, and the infamous siloviki (the “force structures” deriving from the military, security, and law enforcement “power ministries”). The chaotic politics and markets of 1990s Russia generated rival partnership clusters across these three groups, a major characteristic of president Boris Yeltsin’s legacy. Political and administrative consolidation under Putin saw the rise of “a new business elite” drawn largely from the siloviki, who formed the backbone of Putin’s administration and took over major corporate boards in the private sector.
Egypt’s power structure reveals both differences and similarities. Political connections have long played a major role in the capture of public procurement awards, licenses and dealerships, and access to key resources such as land, especially after the partial privatization of state-owned enterprises starting in 1991 and culminating in 2009. But although state managers and well-placed businesspeople benefitted from various forms of insider trading and asset stripping, this did not take place amid the formation of competing clusters drawing on the coercive agencies, political echelon, and private sector. Instead, political connectivity shifted according to who was closest to the center of power: favored businesspeople clustered around the influential son of then-president Hosni Mubarak until his ouster in February 2011, and then reoriented to the armed forces when they took center stage following the July 2013 coup d’état.
The Egyptian state broadly retained internal cohesion and the power vertical remained dominant, but from 2013 onwards the military displaced Mubarak-era cronies and oligarchs—as in Russia. It has moreover concentrated economic power and created “megacorporations” that effectively dictate the terms of market access for the private sector in key sectors of the economy—again much as the siloviki did in Russia. A key difference, however, is that Russia has a significant industrial and scientific base, hydrocarbon and mineral resources linked with advanced refining and processing capacity, an extensive tax system, and, despite the important role of favoritism, a private sector that is far more broadly based and varied than its Egyptian counterpart.
So, although the Russian business class chafes at things such as punishing tax hikes, it nonetheless enjoys significant financial autonomy, and even political influence of its own, in its relations with the state. In contrast, the Egyptian private sector remains both more dependent and parasitical in its relationship with state power, displaying a severely distorted internal distribution between a tiny number of large and medium enterprises and an overwhelming number of small and micro ones.
Rival partnership clusters have not appeared in the Egyptian context, therefore. Economic fiefdoms and market sinecures are baked into the political economy, demonstrated graphically, though not exclusively, by the Officers’ Republic of military retirees embedded across the large state bureaucracy, public-sector enterprises and economic general authorities, and local government. Embedded networks and cliques of state managers, procurement officers, and retired and active duty armed forces officers compete with each other for public contracts for the import of strategic commodities such as wheat, for example, reflected in routine manipulation of tenders, legal rules, and phytosanitary standards to skew outcomes. Novel public-private partnerships involving military agencies and a new breed of private businesses run by regime affiliates and relatives of influential officers are also emerging. But there is no indication so far that any of this translates into shifts within the power vertical, nor any sign yet of military, bureaucratic, and business elites seeking proactively to establish politically significant horizontal connections with each other.
The Sisi regime’s restriction of elite recruitment to the institutional silos of power ministries not only underlines the marginal political status of the private sector, but also reveals the striking absence of a “second stratum,” the necessary social base and intermediary class on which every regime relies to govern and impose its authority. This constitutes the third main factor affecting the power vertical. Since coming to office, Sisi has sidelined “the traditionally state-centric middle class” that depended on employment in the large public sector, as Robert Springborg notes. And in limiting the rehabilitation of the Mubarak-era National Democratic Party, he has also weakened the rural middle classes that acted as the regime’s other conservative social base or second stratum. The lack of civil society autonomy further impedes, if not prevents, the emergence of parallel channels for social mobility into and within the power vertical, let alone for political claim-making and social representation. But nor does the regime offer integration into the power vertical to its new social base, namely the upper middle class and wealthy elites, so far blocking fresh blood from this source.
Sisi’s determination to prevent the emergence of a public political area with genuine substance appears to explain his belief that he does not need a second stratum, however loyalist or necessary it may be to the regime’s long-term durability. Clearly, neither the state nor society is monolithic, and there are many channels and forms of social and economic habitus that mitigate political stagnation. But the regime’s over-dependence on its siloed pools for elite recruitment leaves it potentially brittle.
In the short to medium term, if a financial crisis of the kind that hit Egypt in 2022–2023 recurs, as seems inevitable, the pie upon which Sisi relies to anchor loyalty within the power vertical will shrink. The result could be to generate tensions within the power vertical and trigger reorientation to unfamiliar power horizontals. This explains Sisi’s refusal to slow down military-managed mega construction projects during the Covid-19 pandemic and the later financial crisis, despite urging from the International Monetary Fund and at the cost of further massive increases in debt and debt servicing.
In the long term, new power horizontals involving unfamiliar participants may emerge, as a neo-bourgeoisie forms out of the fusion of the regime’s core members with the upper middle-class elite in a novel propertied class. Whether Sisi and his successors will do anything to anticipate these shifts, and how they will adjust to them if and when they occur, will pose a hard test for the Second Republic he has built.
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