Eric Trager was the Esther K. Wagner Fellow at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
A crucial bloc within Egypt mainly wants stability, rather than the deep institutional reforms that a true revolution would require.
When an Egyptian court dismissed all criminal charges against former dictator Hosni Mubarak last weekend, many called it the final nail in the coffin of the "revolution" that ousted Mubarak from power in February 2011. "Egypt's revolution is dead," CNN reported. "The January revolution is over; they ended it," the father of an activist who was killed during the uprising told the New York Times. After the July 2013 ouster of Egypt's first freely elected president and the subsequent rise of another former military general to the presidency, the end of Mubarak's criminal case looks like the icing on Egypt's counterrevolutionary cake.
Yet this narrative misunderstands what Egypt's Tahrir Square revolt meant to many Egyptians, particularly those from the country's political center, which is overwhelmingly rural and traditional, although not necessarily Islamist. Far from desiring the far-reaching -- revolutionary -- political reform that the "Arab Spring" narrative embodied, many of these Egyptians endorsed only the uprising's two most basic goals: ending Mubarak's 30-year rule and preventing the succession of his son Gamal…
