CAIRO — President Mohamed Morsi speaks darkly of imminent threats from a conspiracy of unnamed foreign enemies and corrupt businessmen. He vows to uncover counterrevolutionaries hiding under judicial robes. His advisers charge that loyalists of the former dictator have infiltrated the opposition, saying it would gladly sacrifice democracy to defeat the Islamists.
In a one-week blitz, Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood cast aside two years of cautious pragmatism in an effort to seize full control of Egypt’s political transition. Mr. Morsi decreed himself above the reach of the courts until completion of a new constitution. He went around the laws to install his own public prosecutor in a stated drive to go after those who abused power or reaped profits under the old government. And his Islamist allies in the constitutional assembly rammed through a charter over the objections of their secular opposition and the Coptic Christian Church.
As hundreds of thousands of their supporters rallied on Saturday in Cairo, this flash of authoritarianism in Egypt’s Islamist leaders has aroused a new debate here about their stated commitment to democracy and pluralism at a time when they dominate political life.
Mr. Morsi’s advisers call the tactics a regrettable but necessary response to genuine threats to the political transition from the vestiges of the autocracy of former President Hosni Mubarak, what they call the deep state, especially in the news media and the judiciary. But his critics say they hear a familiar paranoia in Mr. Morsi’s new tone that reminds them of talk of the “hidden hands” and foreign plots that Mr. Mubarak once used to justify his authoritarianism.
“I have sent warnings to many people who know who they are, who may be committing crimes against the homeland,” Mr. Morsi declared in an interview with state television on Thursday night, referring repeatedly to secret information about a “conspiracy” and “real and imminent threats” that he would not disclose. “If anybody tries to derail the transition, I will not allow them,” he said.
In a speech to supporters that unveiled his new push to seize control of the transition’s end, Mr. Morsi was even more zealous. “To the corrupters who hide under respectable cover, I say, ‘Never imagine that I can’t see you,’ ” he declared. “I’m on the lookout for them and will never let them go.”
“We can’t allow corrupt funds collected under a criminal regime to pay thugs to attack institutions,” he added, promising “serious law enforcement now that there are clear facts.”
As judges across the country walked off the job to protest Mr. Morsi’s attempts to limit judicial power over the transition, his party’s newspaper reported that lawyers filed complaints asking prosecutors to charge the Mubarak-appointed judge who led the call for the strike with “inciting to topple the regime,” and to ban travel by the Mubarak-appointed public prosecutor Mr. Morsi sought to remove.
At Saturday’s rally at Cairo University, Islamists chanted for legal action against both men and denounced opponents as remnants of the old government in disguise.
The Brotherhood has adopted a tone of “open threats and intimidation,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Liberal critics note that the Brotherhood has already broken its pledges not to take more than a third of the parliamentary seats, run a presidential candidate or monopolize power.
Mr. Morsi’s supporters say that revolution means breaking the old order, and that his extralegal measures are necessary to remove the grip of the old government so Egypt can build a stable constitutional democracy.
They point in particular to the Mubarak-appointed judges of Egypt’s top courts. The courts have already dissolved Egypt’s first freely elected Parliament in more than six decades as well as a first constitutional assembly. On Sunday, the Supreme Constitutional Court is expected to issue a ruling that could dissolve the current assembly as well. The court “spearheads a scheme for the demolition of the Egyptian state,” an Alexandria judge linked to the Brotherhood declared in the Brotherhood’s newspaper and on its Web site.
In an interview, Bakinam El-Sharkawy, an assistant to Mr. Morsi for political affairs, called it a virtual counterrevolution. “All the new democratic institutions that have been built have been under attack all the time, and ironically the old institutions continue,” she said, arguing that some judges “still intellectually belong to the old way of thinking and to the old ideas, and maybe the revolution is not very appealing to them.”
The Morsi team marveled to see figures from the old government re-emerge in the secular or “revolutionary” political groups, “reintegrated with almost no resistance,” she said. Most gallingly, they watched many secular liberal or leftist leaders gravitate to Mr. Morsi’s rival in the June presidential runoff, Ahmed Shafik, who was Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister and campaigned as a new strongman who could keep back the Islamists.
It was a very clear indication, Ms. Sharkawy said, that Egyptian politics was not longer about “a process of ‘democratic forces against despotic forces,’ or ‘revolutionary against antirevolutionary — it is purely partisan political conflict.”
“In this very important moment you need the public prosecutor to neutralize the antirevolutionary forces, the corrupted forces,” she argued, justifying Mr. Morsi’s move to replace the Mubarak-appointed prosecutor as crucial to safeguarding the political process. “You can’t just have a partial measure and wait to be attacked by everyone. You need to put down the road map and secure it.”
Some more detached observers say Mr. Morsi’s worries are well justified, noting the pattern of judicial rulings and the military’s reluctance to cede power.
“There are serious fears of vested authoritarian enclaves in the state trying to undermine the elected institutions and trying to torpedo the constitutional assembly,” said Mona El-Ghobashy, an Egyptian political scientist who teaches at Barnard College in New York. Some members of the former governing elite, she said, are trying to fire up opposition among more sincere “revolutionaries” who distrust the Islamists and “fence-sitting politicians” who see opportunity if the Islamists fail.
Still, Ms. Ghobashy faulted Mr. Morsi for not explaining himself to the public. She argued that in a moment of crisis, Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Islamist bloc in Parliament, had regressed to an older mode of leadership.
“It is an old style of politics: ‘Just let the big guys do the work, and we will tell you why later,’ ” Ms. Ghobashy said, noting that Mr. Morsi had issued his decree temporarily giving himself power above judicial review without sending his spokesman to explain it to the public.
“I felt all over again like a nobody, the way Mubarak made 80 million Egyptians feel,” she said. “It is profoundly insulting.”
Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University and a delegate in the constitutional assembly, said that even after all the liberals and Christians had walked out of the assembly the Islamists had remained firmly “pro-democracy,” honoring commitments to the former delegates and worrying about democratic accountability.
But they assumed they would win fair elections, he said, “so the depth of the commitment to democracy remains to be seen.”
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.
In a one-week blitz, Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood cast aside two years of cautious pragmatism in an effort to seize full control of Egypt’s political transition. Mr. Morsi decreed himself above the reach of the courts until completion of a new constitution. He went around the laws to install his own public prosecutor in a stated drive to go after those who abused power or reaped profits under the old government. And his Islamist allies in the constitutional assembly rammed through a charter over the objections of their secular opposition and the Coptic Christian Church.
As hundreds of thousands of their supporters rallied on Saturday in Cairo, this flash of authoritarianism in Egypt’s Islamist leaders has aroused a new debate here about their stated commitment to democracy and pluralism at a time when they dominate political life.
Mr. Morsi’s advisers call the tactics a regrettable but necessary response to genuine threats to the political transition from the vestiges of the autocracy of former President Hosni Mubarak, what they call the deep state, especially in the news media and the judiciary. But his critics say they hear a familiar paranoia in Mr. Morsi’s new tone that reminds them of talk of the “hidden hands” and foreign plots that Mr. Mubarak once used to justify his authoritarianism.
“I have sent warnings to many people who know who they are, who may be committing crimes against the homeland,” Mr. Morsi declared in an interview with state television on Thursday night, referring repeatedly to secret information about a “conspiracy” and “real and imminent threats” that he would not disclose. “If anybody tries to derail the transition, I will not allow them,” he said.
In a speech to supporters that unveiled his new push to seize control of the transition’s end, Mr. Morsi was even more zealous. “To the corrupters who hide under respectable cover, I say, ‘Never imagine that I can’t see you,’ ” he declared. “I’m on the lookout for them and will never let them go.”
“We can’t allow corrupt funds collected under a criminal regime to pay thugs to attack institutions,” he added, promising “serious law enforcement now that there are clear facts.”
As judges across the country walked off the job to protest Mr. Morsi’s attempts to limit judicial power over the transition, his party’s newspaper reported that lawyers filed complaints asking prosecutors to charge the Mubarak-appointed judge who led the call for the strike with “inciting to topple the regime,” and to ban travel by the Mubarak-appointed public prosecutor Mr. Morsi sought to remove.
At Saturday’s rally at Cairo University, Islamists chanted for legal action against both men and denounced opponents as remnants of the old government in disguise.
The Brotherhood has adopted a tone of “open threats and intimidation,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Liberal critics note that the Brotherhood has already broken its pledges not to take more than a third of the parliamentary seats, run a presidential candidate or monopolize power.
Mr. Morsi’s supporters say that revolution means breaking the old order, and that his extralegal measures are necessary to remove the grip of the old government so Egypt can build a stable constitutional democracy.
They point in particular to the Mubarak-appointed judges of Egypt’s top courts. The courts have already dissolved Egypt’s first freely elected Parliament in more than six decades as well as a first constitutional assembly. On Sunday, the Supreme Constitutional Court is expected to issue a ruling that could dissolve the current assembly as well. The court “spearheads a scheme for the demolition of the Egyptian state,” an Alexandria judge linked to the Brotherhood declared in the Brotherhood’s newspaper and on its Web site.
In an interview, Bakinam El-Sharkawy, an assistant to Mr. Morsi for political affairs, called it a virtual counterrevolution. “All the new democratic institutions that have been built have been under attack all the time, and ironically the old institutions continue,” she said, arguing that some judges “still intellectually belong to the old way of thinking and to the old ideas, and maybe the revolution is not very appealing to them.”
The Morsi team marveled to see figures from the old government re-emerge in the secular or “revolutionary” political groups, “reintegrated with almost no resistance,” she said. Most gallingly, they watched many secular liberal or leftist leaders gravitate to Mr. Morsi’s rival in the June presidential runoff, Ahmed Shafik, who was Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister and campaigned as a new strongman who could keep back the Islamists.
It was a very clear indication, Ms. Sharkawy said, that Egyptian politics was not longer about “a process of ‘democratic forces against despotic forces,’ or ‘revolutionary against antirevolutionary — it is purely partisan political conflict.”
“In this very important moment you need the public prosecutor to neutralize the antirevolutionary forces, the corrupted forces,” she argued, justifying Mr. Morsi’s move to replace the Mubarak-appointed prosecutor as crucial to safeguarding the political process. “You can’t just have a partial measure and wait to be attacked by everyone. You need to put down the road map and secure it.”
Some more detached observers say Mr. Morsi’s worries are well justified, noting the pattern of judicial rulings and the military’s reluctance to cede power.
“There are serious fears of vested authoritarian enclaves in the state trying to undermine the elected institutions and trying to torpedo the constitutional assembly,” said Mona El-Ghobashy, an Egyptian political scientist who teaches at Barnard College in New York. Some members of the former governing elite, she said, are trying to fire up opposition among more sincere “revolutionaries” who distrust the Islamists and “fence-sitting politicians” who see opportunity if the Islamists fail.
Still, Ms. Ghobashy faulted Mr. Morsi for not explaining himself to the public. She argued that in a moment of crisis, Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Islamist bloc in Parliament, had regressed to an older mode of leadership.
“It is an old style of politics: ‘Just let the big guys do the work, and we will tell you why later,’ ” Ms. Ghobashy said, noting that Mr. Morsi had issued his decree temporarily giving himself power above judicial review without sending his spokesman to explain it to the public.
“I felt all over again like a nobody, the way Mubarak made 80 million Egyptians feel,” she said. “It is profoundly insulting.”
Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at Cairo University and a delegate in the constitutional assembly, said that even after all the liberals and Christians had walked out of the assembly the Islamists had remained firmly “pro-democracy,” honoring commitments to the former delegates and worrying about democratic accountability.
But they assumed they would win fair elections, he said, “so the depth of the commitment to democracy remains to be seen.”
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.