Egypt’s 2011 Revolution: A Demographic Structural Analysis

At the end of January 2011, Mubarak faced such a combination of long-, medium- and short-term factors that he had no way to counter: (1) The explosive growth of the population of educated youth (caused by both the drop in mortality against the background of still high birth rates in the early years of Mubarak’s rule and the rapid expansion of higher education) led to the emergence of a huge mass of unemployed (or inadequately employed) educated young people concentrated to a high degree in the capital. (2) The rapid and rather bloodless fall of the authoritarian regime of Ben Ali, which was brilliantly and talentedly broadcasted by Arab satellite channels, provoked the leaders of the already existing liberal secular dissident (mostly youth) groups, structured primarily through the Facebook groups “the April 6 Youth Movement” and “We are all Khaled Said”, to make a similar attempt in Egypt. It was the educated youth who acted as the strike force that launched mass protests. (3) The second wave of agflation (2009-2011) led to a rapid rise in food prices, which contributed to the fact that the masses of Egyptian commoners, who were brought by explosive price growth below the poverty level, joined the impact force of the Arab Spring—unsettled highly educated youth. (4) All this took place against the backdrop of an acute intra-elite conflict that broke out between the military and the economic elite (headed by Gamal Mubarak), as a result of which the military elite decided to use popular protests to liquidate (at least, politically) its main opponent, and refused to suppress protests, which ensured their unexpected and rapid “success.” (5) To this one should add a purely internal (but typologically quite natural for partial autocracies) factor. A very important role in the genesis of the Egyptian protest tsunami was played by a flagrant violation by the Egyptian authorities in November–December 2010 of the informal rules of the game with regard to the Muslim Brotherhood, who were running candidates as ‘independents’ in the 2010 Parliamentary elections. As a result of particularly large-scale falsifications, the authorities managed to block almost completely the entrance of the Brotherhood’s representatives into the Egyptian parliament. As a result, having deprived the Muslim Brotherhood of the opportunity to conduct its political activities legally, the Egyptian authorities actually “pushed” the Muslim Brotherhood into Tahrir, forcing them to switch from legal (and semi-legal) opposition activities to protest activities. In turn, the joining of the protests by the Muslim Brotherhood (with their colossal practical experience of organizational work) gave the protests an incomparably greater scope and organization.