In one of his most famous texts, Plato says that “in politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.” In other words, throughout history, and as far back as Plato, it has not been uncommon to find that elections have not always yielded the right person to run a syndicate, a local council, or even a state. Put differently, in any electoral contest there should be a differentiation made between the efficiency of the electoral machine of a given party or association acting on amassing and mobilising support behind its candidates and the effectiveness, as well as the readiness, of such candidates to take over the responsibilities of given electoral posts. A gap exists between the promise or would-be image of the candidates, as projected by the electoral machine, on the one hand, and their actual performance on assuming office on the other. Such a gap has always been filled by the respective party's propaganda, which aims to present a bright image of its candidates while campaigning for the elections and in the aftermath of their electoral success. The media can play a crucial role in this domain by marketing a public image for a newly elected executive authority. But such a virtual image cannot be sustained without concrete steps being undertaken by the newly elected executive fulfilling its electoral promises or at a minimum showing enough leadership or management skills to assure the public that it is up to the challenges of office. It is not the office that rules the masses, but rather it is the incumbent's vision, competencies and style that manage the state. Making a real difference in the lives of millions, particularly in times of socioeconomic upheaval or political crisis, becomes the major determinant of judging the actual competencies of a newly elected president, for example, and not just the support of his party's machine and its loyal media. In other words, people should feel that a new president has provided real added value, as expressed by his approach to issues deemed essential by the vast majority of citizens. Any president will eventually be held accountable to the people for policies that may increase or decrease his acceptance by the general population. This is what is meant by political legitimacy, which is not just about running a state by winning elections. Instead, legitimacy is all about the performance of the chief executive regarding both the state and society. It is about what US academic Bruce Gilley has called “general governance”, a composite of the rule of law, the control of corruption and government effectiveness. Gilley writes that “a state, meaning the institutions and ideologies of a political system, is the more legitimate the more that it holds and exercises political power with legality, justification and consent from the standpoint of all of its citizens.” In other words, legitimacy is a continuous process that is related to the state's performance and not just to the success in elections for those taking over electoral posts in the state institutions. In the same vein, European academic Bo Rothstein writes that “legitimacy turns out to be created, maintained, and destroyed not at the input but at the output side of the political system. Hence, political legitimacy depends at least as much on the quality of government as on the capacity of electoral systems to create effective representation.” It could be claimed that legitimacy is a highly sensitive barometer reflecting popular consent or acceptance of a president's policies and decisions rather than a single reading of provisional popular approval on the colourful day of his election. And in this regard, it is regrettable that President Mohamed Morsi has reduced his definition of legitimacy to a narrow electoral victory over his competitor, Ahmed Shafik, in last year's presidential elections. For Morsi, legitimacy has become an idiosyncratic concept that he thinks has spared him from criticism, opposition and definitely revolution. As such, legitimacy has become an apparently everlasting condition permitting Morsi to rule unchallenged in as much as it has been based upon the popular will as expressed through the ballot box. Yet, this popular will was based on the presumption that Morsi would be capable of managing the state. Moreover, Morsi's narrow majority in the elections was a popular mandate to act in the interests of those who voted for him and not an unconditional acceptance of all his policies throughout a whole presidential term. Since 11 July last year, when Morsi reconvened the dissolved People's Assembly, his actions have been basically dedicated to consolidating his power along with that of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it has been hard to identify a meaningful contribution that Morsi's rule has made to the current crises that Egypt is passing through. The ruling regime could at least have shown that it was on the right track by addressing the economic and political crisis. Yet, on the contrary it could be argued that Morsi's disastrous management of the state, its institutions, and even its resources, has had a negative impact on the pillars of his own legitimacy. To mention just a few examples of this, there has been the war that the regime has waged against the independence of the country's judiciary, which has been a direct cause of the regime's failure to enforce law and order in the state. In Egypt, one of the world's oldest continuously existing states, the inability of a given regime to perform its raison d'être by enforcing the rule of law has always had detrimental effects on the legitimacy of that regime. Meanwhile, the president's constitutional declaration last year, as well as the regime's drafting and promulgation of a new constitution, have devastatingly fragmented the nation. Corruption practices exercised by the regime, among them the so-called “ikhwanisation” of the state, have been destructive to many sectors inside the state bureaucracy and even among the police. Patronage and favouritism are forms of corruption, as are profiteering or illegal gains from public office. For many Egyptians, such examples of mismanagement have irreparably damaged the image of the Brotherhood along with that of its personnel and leading figures. The regime's performance in office has now resulted in an intractable legitimacy crisis in Egypt. Denying this crisis on behalf of the regime will only add to the problems rather than addressing their root cause, which is the regime's mismanagement of the state and its institutions. Blaming others, whether known contenders, unknown conspirators, or both, cannot be accepted as an excuse for the regime's poor performance. Instead, structural and ideological inadequacies intrinsic to the ruling regime, and particularly to its parent Muslim Brotherhood association and its related partners and affiliates, have lain behind this crisis. The only thing that can be inferred from the ongoing events across many of the country's governorates is that the still-born political project of the Brotherhood has now lost the major part of its legitimacy.
