Few would take issue with the fact that soldiers and officers of the Armed Forces are fully competent citizens who, in a democratic country, should have the right to vote, albeit without the right to actively affiliate with a political party or engage in electoral or political propaganda. In Egypt, members of the Armed Forces did have this right before the July 1952 Revolution and in the Nasser era. In the first case the army was infiltrated by political organisations of leftist, liberal and Islamist (Muslim Brotherhood) stripes. In the second, all rallied behind the “together-as-one” doctrine of Gamal Abdel-Nasser's leadership. Although the recent ruling on this issue by the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), giving the police and the army the right to vote, is consistent with the constitution drafted by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, the ruling nevertheless triggered vehement criticism from these Islamist forces. Yet it should be borne in mind that while this ruling conforms to the fundamental principles of democracy, societies only meet these principles through what political scientists call a process of democratic transformation. It is a comprehensive process that must embrace diverse political, social and cultural circumstances and conditions, for otherwise it would not be called “transformation”. When endowed with the right to vote members of the Armed Forces or police will naturally feel allegiances or sympathies with this party or that. This is perfectly acceptable in established democracies where there are no radically conflicting outlooks between rival political forces, such as the Democrats and Republicans in the US, or the leftists and right-wingers in Europe. It is another question when we come to sharply polarised Egypt where some rail against a “Muslim Brotherhood occupation” and others lash out at the political opposition as “proxies and agents in the pay of foreign powers”. It is worth asking, in this context, why it took France until 17 August 1945, which is to say the immediate aftermath of World War II, to grant its army the right to vote. The French revolution occurred in 1789. Yet for many decades the French army remained disenfranchised and known as the “silent bloc”. Curiously, some people do not feel that the strength of the Egyptian army has resided precisely in its political neutrality. It is equally odd that those who want to turn it into a political player or party appear to have forgotten that the success of the 25 January Revolution was due to an army that had both distanced itself from Hosni Mubarak and relinquished its pre-1952 legacy of diverse political affiliations. Imagine what the scene in Egyptian streets would have been like during the period of 1 to 11 February 2011 had the Egyptian army been torn by allegiances to rival political camps, one allegiant to the Muslim Brotherhood, another of Mubarak loyalists and a third affiliated with secularists. They would have been slaughtering one another, as is currently happening in some nearby countries, and Egypt would have become another Somalia-like basket case. I believe that the Egyptian army is being targeted precisely because of its strength, cohesiveness, discipline and other such honourable qualities that have set it apart from other armies in the region. Those armies (in Iraq, Syria and Libya, for example) were military extensions of the regimes, not national armies in the proper sense of the term, and they collapsed and disintegrated while the Egyptian army remained strong. True, the issue at hand is not about members of the Armed Forces enlisting in political parties and engaging in politics. It is about their right to vote as free and equal citizens. Yet the fact remains that democratic transformation, by definition, should be gradual and take place in a climate of relative political harmony. Such considerations are absent in the SCC's ruling, although I do not have the slightest doubt about the sincerity of the court's intentions or the consistency of the ruling with the law and democratic principles. Consider the following. Why, at present, have we accepted a military man as defence minister, as opposed to a civilian, as is the case in democratic countries? Why not a rights activist as interior minister, as is the case in many countries? Why is the minister of justice still drawn from the judiciary and why does the minister of foreign affairs still hail from the diplomatic corps? It is because of the complexities of the transitional phase and the necessary accommodations that have to be made. In Egypt, the situation is all the more delicate in view of the many threats and crises that exist at a time when there is no cohesive institution above the current political polarisation, apart from the military establishment. The situation in Egypt at present is critical. It requires keeping the army neutral and unaffiliated, even psychologically, to any political trend. Our task, meanwhile, should be to succeed in instituting the peaceful and democratic rotation of authority and generating a climate in which political rivals regard one another as partners in the nation, as opposed to monopolisers of power or anti-patriotic conspirators. When we succeed in this, the enfranchisement of the army will become natural and acceptable.
The writer is a political analyst at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies and a former MP.
