Throughout the last 10 years, wherever and whenever Egyptians have taken to the streets to demonstrate against government policies and to demand full independence from outside powers, many of them raised pictures of late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the leader of the Free Officers Movement of 23 July 1952. In 2013 and from June onwards, particularly on 26 July when mammoth demonstrations took place to respond to an appeal by Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, the number of times that Nasser's pictures were carried by demonstrators multiplied. It was interesting for me to be there and watch silently all those hundreds of thousands from the younger generations of Egyptians, who were not contemporaries of the Nasser era, like I am, raising pictures of a great Egyptian leader whom they never saw, and who has been depicted by the extreme right, business circles as well as the pro-Western lobby in the country as a dictator, and the reason for all the problems afflicting Egypt throughout the last 40 years. Nowadays, and after the wave of popular support for Field Marshal Al-Sisi to run in the next presidential elections, the pictures that are being sold on the streets include Nasser, late president Anwar Al-Sadat and Al-Sisi, all of them from the Egyptian army. But the coming back of Nasser to haunt the imagination of Egyptians from all age categories and from all walks of life stands in stark contrast to the demonisation campaign that targeted Nasser as a leader and his rich legacy. This campaign has started in the year following his death and reached a crescendo throughout the 1970s. It was an orchestrated campaign backed by American, Western and Israeli circles. It was disheartening to see textbooks taught to Egyptian students in foreign schools operating in Egypt refer to Nasser as a dictator. There have been Egyptians who also kept maligning the legacy of Nasser. Today, we detect in some articles in the Egyptian media, unfortunately, the attempt to throw dust on the achievements and policies of Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Not only Nasser, but also the July Revolution, which is being called now a coup d'etat after all the revolutionary changes that Egypt had seen from 1953 to 1967. An example of this campaign is an article that appeared in a leading Egyptian paper last week, entitled “Al-Sisi Mahathir and not Al-Sisi Nasser”. The writer wanted to convey the idea that Mahathir Mohamed, the former Malaysian prime minister, was a much better ruler, and led his country on the road of prosperity, than president Nasser. The unstated aim was to try to preempt any association between Nasser and Al-Sisi. This attempt came at the expense of historical facts. Egypt under Nasser was more advanced than South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore combined. So far, Field Marshal Al-Sisi has not announced whether he would run in the presidential elections or not, but the association with president Nasser in the minds of millions of Egyptians has sent jitters in the business community and the media lobby that stands behind them. And the question that seems absent from the debate around the similarities between Nasser and Al-Sisi is whether the times are ripe for a repetition of the 1950s, and 1960s in Egypt. I think both the world and Egypt have changed drastically from the Nasser era. I do not think, for instance, that we could nationalise the private sector, nor could any Egyptian government seize the assets of individuals to finance investments or to reduce the budget deficit. Nor could we revive the idea of agrarian reform as it had been applied in 1952. Times have changed, so have the most appropriate approaches and policies to carry out ambitious development plans. Back in the mid-50s, Nasser's Egypt had begun a five-year strategy that aimed at doubling the national income every 10-year period. Today, and after we finish the implementation of the roadmap to the future, we can start carrying out similar plans, albeit with different policies and measures. Definitely, what we can borrow from the Nasser era is the determination and the vision that had been the driving force behind his leadership. He succeeded, like no other Egyptian leader in modern times, to mobilise the nation behind a grand agenda for progress in the true sense of the term. The idea of progress that he espoused was rooted in the national struggle of the Egyptian people that characterised the first half of the 20th century. The detractors of president Nasser have, strangely enough, missed the fact that all the policies that he had enacted, and endeared him to the people till today, incarnated demands and ideals long discussed before president Nasser came on stage on 23 July 1952. Take, for example, the idea of free education. Taha Hussein, the great Egyptian and Arab thinker, known as the dean of Arab literature, said in the 1940s that education should be free, like air and water. The basic idea, and it was revolutionary at the time, was that no Egyptian child should be deprived of education because his family cannot afford sending him to school. In addition, education has been the great lift towards social mobility for millions of poor Egyptians. It is still the bedrock for equality among Egyptians. Just imagine the country without free education. Millions of children would be unjustly denied the opportunity of a lifetime, to escape poverty and misery. The fact that education is suffering from a shortfall should not mean that we should close public schools. Another example is the idea of agrarian reform. Some thinkers and even holders of big acreage before the July Revolution talked about the need to limit land ownership to 50 acres. The idea behind free public education, on the one hand, and the agrarian reform law of 9 September 1952 was really about providing the people with equal opportunities in life. Who would condone that the wealthy would be the only ones in society to guarantee to their children the best education and the best jobs in the land, while those wretched poor remain forever chained to their misery and deprivation? No one in Egypt, today, will ever accept the persistence of the widening gap between the haves and the haves-not that has been a destabilising factor in society for the last 10 years. One of the basic reasons that Egyptians took to the streets in 2011 was the widespread idea, that lacking wealth or power, or both, would always remain an insurmountable barrier to an aspiring and enterprising rising generation fulfilling themselves in a society that rewards not the wealthy and the powerful, but the ones who are really fit and suitable. As a matter of fact, this spirit of equality, as well as fraternity among Egyptians, has been a guiding force behind the popular mobilisation Egypt has seen in the last three years. I hope that those who keep speaking about democracy, freedom and human rights will not drop the ideas of social liberalism (including equality of opportunity) from their lexicon. Democracy is based on equality, both political and social. I am afraid to say that in the Egyptian context, social liberalism comes, in order of importance, and priority as well, before political liberties. One of the lessons of the elections of 2011 and 2012 is that poverty and deprivation do not provide for smooth democratic transitions. On the contrary, they give rise to the most undemocratic forces in society. That should be a lesson that we should retain from the Nasser era. Social liberalism made for good governance back then. It would be impossible to recreate the past, but that does not mean that we should not learn from it. The Nasser years provide us with many lessons as to how this country should be governed. The spirit of equality, fraternity, social fairness and a national sense of ownership of the idea of progress and change that were the hallmarks of those years will ever be enshrined in the collective imagination of millions of Egyptians. We must work together to create the New Republic based on those national values that have made the Egyptian experience in the second half of the 20th century a story of national redemption from poverty, disease, illiteracy and foreign domination. Whenever I have looked at the pictures of president Nasser in the demonstrations of the last three years, I thought to myself that Egyptians have developed a nostalgia for the Nasser's years because they felt the injustices of a free market economy that has run amok, leaving behind millions living in poverty and without hope that their tomorrow will be better than their yesterday. Nasser has given them hope that they can become, once again, masters of their own destiny. Their message to the future rulers of Egypt lies in the spirit of the age of Nasser. A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by two young female reporters. At the end of the interview, they took me by surprise and said, “we envy you because you had lived the era of Nasser.” I dedicate this to everyone who aspires to govern Egypt in the future. And I agree with what they said. The writer is former assistant to the foreign minister.
