Source: Barcelona Centre For International Affairs
Author(s): Ricard González
Five years after the first shoots of the Arab Spring appeared, the landscape in the region is bleak: Syria, Iraq and Yemen are torn apart by violence and sectarian hate, Libya is engulfed in chaos, and Daesh already casts its threatening shadow across the whole region. And yet, in no country is the gulf between the hopes raised during the first months of 2011 and the sad present-day reality wider than in Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt. The former military chief has established the most repressive regime in the Arab giant’s contemporary history. Only Tunisia, cradle of the transnational uprising, has managed to stay out of these fires.
Sisi’s government has taken the country back several decades, installing a rough approximation of the reviled Hosni Mubarak regime with its police abuse, fraudulent elections, demonisation of the Muslim Brotherhood and implementation of neoliberal policies. However, Egypt and the Middle East are very different places in 2016 than they were in the eighties. To seize control and hold on to it, the counterrevolution has had to use even more extreme violence….
Read more at Original Link.