Facing a hazy future, Egypt holds its breath
President Hosni Mubarak is adamant that his son will not succeed him. So who will?
Michael Matza is The Philadelphia Inquirer's Mideast bureau chief
CAIRO, Egypt - The bluntness of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's first pronouncement of the new year was designed to quash speculation.
Contrary to rampant rumors, the 75-year-old president said, his younger son, Gamal, a rising star in Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), will not succeed him as the next leader of the world's most populous Arab country. The reign of Egypt in the 21st century, Mubarak testily told Egyptian state radio, is not an "inheritance," as is power elsewhere in the Middle East.
The surprise announcement may have also sent a signal that the United States' closest Arab ally reads the Bush doctrine on democracy loud and clear.
While no one says a message was passed from the United States or any foreign power to sideline Gamal, "democracy is the general mood internationally," political analyst Saad Eddin Ibrahim recently told the English-language weekly Cairo Times, "and Egypt does not want to have its reputation damaged" by an inherited transfer of authority.
The Bush administration has made no secret of its hope that, with a successful democratization of Iraq, democracy will finally bloom all across the Mideast.
Now everyone here is wondering: If Gamal, the dashing 40-year-old bachelor, is not to succeed his father, then who is?
For Egyptians facing a tightly controlled presidential election next year in a virtual one-party system, "that's the million-dollar question [causing] warranted worries," noted Mohamed El-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a Cairo think tank. "The succession is not really clear."
Whoever it is will be immediately tested by the country's chronic and seething problems and a population that is restive.
Under Egypt's constitution, a two-thirds majority of parliament chooses a presidential candidate, whose name is presented to the electorate in a plebiscite. The president chooses a vice president if he wants one. With the NDP holding 95 percent of parliament's seats, its sway is absolute.
Whoever it is, the next president will have a lot to worry about. Egypt has 70.7 million people - half of whom are illiterate - with 1.3 million more each year. Ninety percent are packed together on just 4 percent of the land area; per-capita annual income is $1,530; and there is a history of insurgencies and food riots.
The climate, said Walid Kazziha, political science professor at American University of Cairo, is ripe for upheaval, especially if instability persists in Iraq and across the West Bank and Gaza.
"That could lead to a breakdown in law and order, and that's the worst scenario you can imagine in Egypt, with increasing poverty" and rising popularity of fundamentalist Islamic groups, Kazziha says.
While Mubarak, a stolid former air force general who has ruled Egypt for 23 years, could run for another six-year term, Western diplomats generally predict he will not.
The issue of succession came suddenly to the fore three months ago when Mubarak, looking pale and in distress, interrupted a nationally televised parliamentary address because he was feeling ill.
For a tense hour, Egyptians held their breath as state-run television filled the air with canned images of Islamic monuments. Then Mubarak returned to great applause to finish his speech. Aides chalked up the incident to a serious flu, compounded by Ramadan fasting. But the trauma left Egyptians thinking about succession, wondering whether the son, a former banker with no military experience, could fill his father's shoes, or whether someone else would be groomed.
"For a moment, everyone in his own mind had an exaggerated vision of what will happen next. I know one banker who was saying, 'Should we open tomorrow? Is there going to be a run on the banks? Will there be enough food in the market? Will there be bread?' " Kazziha said.
"The president is like your father. When he gets sick, you get upset," said Ala Hinnawi, 34, director of a sports club named for Mubarak in the rundown rural village of Mashala - an hour north of Cairo - where Mubarak was born.
Since the army coup against the monarchy in 1952, Egypt's tradition is for its leader to come from the military elite. That's the route Mubarak took as head of both the air force and its military academy. Now, decades later, his aging circle of advisers is, as one retired general was recently quoted, a "gerontocracy."
With pressure growing for economic, social and political reforms, some Egyptians think a younger civilian leader could be an invigorating alternative.
"The wars [with Israel] are over. We need a civilian to develop the country... a young man who is well-educated," said Arabic teacher Mohammed Daoud, 44.
"We have always had a military leader. But it doesn't have to be. Anyone who looks after the interest of the Egyptian people" could serve, says Abdelazziz Mubarak, 70, who lives on the unpaved street where the president was raised and described himself as a distant relative.
By most measures, Egypt needs urgent reforms, say critics of the status quo. Although Mubarak's regime has improved infrastructure, transportation, sewage, and access to clean water, the economy stagnates and the bureaucracy is bloated and often corrupt. Emergency laws renewed every three years are used to jail dissenters, privatization of industry is stalled, and the country depends too much on $2 billion a year in U.S. foreign aid, $1.3 billion of which goes to the military.
"Egypt can't be allowed to become a failed state," said Cairo Times publisher Hisham Kassem. "Already we have this socialist orientation where the people are paying to keep the state going without the state sustaining the people. It can't go on."
Whether the president comes from the army or the private sector, Kassem said, "the next leader doesn't have an option. The figures are screaming. We need to create 600,000 to 900,000 jobs. Sixty percent of Egypt's population is under 25. What we have here is a ticking bomb."
In the absence of a civilian candidate who could win the army's backing, the most likely replacement for Mubarak is Omar Suleiman, 67, the powerful head of general intelligence, Kassem and many others say.
Tall, trim and dapper, Suleiman had a distinguished career as an army general before taking charge of Egypt's version of the CIA in 1993.
Since 2000, he has been increasingly visible as Mubarak's troubleshooter, particularly in efforts to calm the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and on visits to the United States, where his word is respected, U.S. officials say.
While there are advocates of popular election of the president, such a change is unlikely anytime soon, most observers say.
"When Mubarak looks around, he's not ready for totally free elections with just any candidate being put forward," said a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Egypt is still at a stage of development where the assent of the military is important to who governs... . Is [the country] that volatile? No. Are we watching very carefully? Sure."
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