The positive The overall objectives are positive. Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi spoke of combating poverty and achieving a certain level of social justice and of confronting terror. The general objectives on the socio-economic and the security fronts are something nobody can disagree with. What he is offering is in line with the general consensus. In a way this is predictable. Given the problems that have accumulated over decades of poor state management there is a little room for disagreement on the priorities The negative There are no details on how he will strike a balance between security, on the one hand, and freedoms and human rights on the other. Freedoms and human rights seem far from being a priority for Al-Sisi, if indeed they feature on his agenda at all. What we have seen so far does not constitute a cohesive vision. Bits and pieces are offered here and there without any clear context of his vision for the future. His ideas on how to deal with vested economic interests groups are unrealistic. He talks about appealing to the good side of the business tycoons who control both the production process and the markets. Things simply don't work that way. In the first few years following the 1952 Revolution Nasser repeatedly appealed to the better nature of landowners but in the end he was forced to apply agrarian land nationalisation laws. He tried to convince them to be partners in development and failed. Al-Sisi has mentioned the creation of vague parallel markets as a way to rein in monopolists. How this is supposed to work when entire processes, from production to distribution, are in the same hands, no one knows. Surely the way to tackle such monopolistic practices is to fix an acceptable profit margin. Even in the oldest market economy contexts profit margins have been fixed and periodically reviewed. The missing Al-Sisi has consistently failed to address the necessary reform of state institutions. Though this must be a priority for any presidential candidate he appears to be shrugging the file entirely. Does he think that as president he can drag Egypt forward without functioning state institutions? He also appears to have decided that the army is the only functioning state institution, the one body he can count on. Though it is probably true that the Armed Forces have not been subject to the same shocking deterioration of other state bodies this does not mean you can avoid the pressing need for institutional reform, not in a country facing as many problems as Egypt, and with a population that is nearing 100 million. Al-Sisi's references to the 25 January Revolution have also been few and far between. This probably has to do with electoral calculations. He would not want to lose voters who never had any faith, or who lost faith, in the revolution and its causes. What I don't think is that he believes the 25 January Revolution was a conspiracy, as some have suggested. I think he realises perfectly well it was a political inevitability.
