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Secular political parties in Egypt have always been caught between an overbearing state and a largely Islamist opposition. The brief, chaotic political opening from 2011 to 2013 offered them unprecedented opportunities, but the violence and intense polarization that followed the military coup have put them under more pressure than ever. Formal politics in Egypt is now a tightly controlled game in which no real independence is allowed, but some secular parties might reemerge as contenders should there be another opportunity for free competition.

State Pressure

• In classifying Egypt’s secular political parties, the usual right-to-left spectrum is not particularly useful. It is more instructive to arrange parties based on their relationship with the state—from those formed only to support the state to those that continue to vigorously oppose the state.
• Many secular parties were founded with the goal of being true political competitors but have lost their independence along the way.
• The state has long been undermining secular parties with assiduous campaigns to discredit, co-opt, corrupt, or internally divide them. Such efforts occurred throughout the presidency of Hosni Mubarak and resumed after the 2013 coup.
• Today, even secular parties that supported the coup and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi have come under attack after trying to preserve any modicum of independence, such as resisting joining the pro-Sisi bloc in Parliament.

Desperate Measures

• Secular parties have done at least as much harm to themselves by taking desperate and often unprincipled actions to merely survive.
• Between 2011 and 2013, secular parties were so concerned about pushing back against the seemingly unstoppable electoral victories of Islamists that they invited the military to intervene in politics, ending the brief democratic opening.
• Several secular parties applauded the 2013 coup and have remained silent about the mass killings that followed, abandoning any pretense of defending the values they claimed to represent. Even still, they are being pressured to show blind allegiance to the state.
• Other parties have criticized human rights abuses and military rule and have boycotted formal politics since the coup.
• Despite the many ways in which secular parties have been discredited—and have discredited themselves—in the eyes of citizens, some of them still hold enough ideological appeal and organizational vigor to potentially share power should Egypt experience another political opening.

Introduction

Throughout Egypt’s modern history, political parties have struggled to project clear identities and maintain their independence while operating in environments dominated by fervent rulers. Since the partial democratic framework was abolished in the 1950s following the country’s first military coup, Egyptian parties representing different ideological platforms have faced legal and political constraints. This has been particularly true for secular parties, and to analyze their present and future political relevance, a historical understanding of these struggles is needed. However, one must first consider what it means to be a secular party in Egypt and how identity and the political environment have shaped the parties’ evolution. How secular parties have identified and defined themselves has had—and will continue to have—a direct impact on their capacity to mobilize support and participate in policymaking.

Regarding identity at its most basic level, merely uttering the phrase “secular political party” in Egypt can ignite a debate. What does secular mean in this context? Does it mean the party is atheistic, that it advocates the removal of all mention of God or religion from the constitution, or simply that its doctrine is not based on a religious philosophy? In answering these questions, Merriam-Webster’s definition of secular helps as a starting point: “not overtly or specifically religious.”¹ In applying this definition, secular parties’ defining characteristic is that they are not based on a religious ideology. Not all of them call for a state whose defining documents make no mention of religious principles—and, of course, many members of such parties are personally religious—but religion is not among the pillars of their platforms. For example, the mission of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, founded in March 2011, is to build “a civil, democratic, and modern state . . . whose people are the source of sovereignty.”² Religion is not mentioned in the party’s founding statement. In contrast, while expressing support for democracy, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, founded in April 2011, called for “a civil state with an Islamic frame of reference” and for “the application of sharia (Islamic Law) in all walks of life, as it is the source of wisdom and divine mercy.”³ Recognizing that even core identity issues are complex, for ease of discussion here, a party is identified as secular if religion is not a pillar of its declared identity or mission.

Moving beyond basic identity questions, what specific challenges do secular parties face in carving out their political role? Since their inception, secular parties have operated under exceedingly difficult conditions. Unlike Islamist parties, they have been unable to benefit from the use of facilities and personnel associated with religious institutions (for example, to organize and collect funds inside mosques). And unlike state-affiliated parties, they have been unable to benefit from the use of state-owned facilities or state-controlled media or from the ability to mobilize bureaucrats. These conditions have generally pushed secular parties toward one of the dominant power centers: the military-dominated state or the Islamist opposition—the former generally much stronger than the latter.

Caught in the crossfire between a state dominated by the military/security apparatus and an opposition dominated by Islamists, secular parties have struggled to define coherent identities as well as to build bases of support and funding.

Caught in the crossfire between a state dominated by the military/security apparatus and an opposition dominated by Islamists (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood), secular parties have struggled to define coherent identities as well as to build bases of support and funding. Their challenges—leading them to support, oppose, compromise with, or be compromised by the state—have profoundly shaped the parties and their relationships with citizens. Since the 2013 military coup, even those parties that agreed to participate in politics under the once-again-emerging authoritarian framework have been systematically marginalized and have seen their space of autonomous action shrink as the grip of the military/security apparatus over political and economic power has tightened. The ideological and organizational tactics they have used in their struggles offer some indication as to which parties might be more viable than others should a new political opening come along.

The Taxonomy of Secular Parties

While Egyptians know instinctively which party stands for what in domestic politics, for outside observers, taking an inventory can be bewildering. In describing Egypt’s secular scene, the usual right-to-left spectrum is not particularly useful. Some parties lean toward social conservatism and others toward liberalism, while some lean toward free market economic ideas and others toward a state-driven economy. Yet, trying to understand the place of secular parties in Egyptian political life in terms of such distinctions would be misleading. In the mid-1970s, then president Anwar Sadat split the Arab Socialist Union (the ruling party established by his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser) into three wings, thereby creating the left-leaning Unionist (Tagammu) and right-leaning Liberals (Ahrar) to flank the ruling party (first called the Arab Socialist Egypt Party and later the National Democratic Party). This was an artificial construction that left the pro-military elite conveniently centered in political life. Developments since then have been just as confusing to observers; some parties that appear to be ideologically close to the Egyptian state are in fact those that oppose the state most strongly, while others that seem ideologically distinct from the state are in fact behind-the-scenes state supporters. Figure 1 shows an inventory of secular political parties active between 2011 and 2017.

Another way of classifying Egyptian parties would be according to the era in which they were founded. One party currently operating in Egypt—Wafd—was founded nearly a century ago (1919) during the country’s partially democratic era before the 1952 Free Officers’ coup; it thus has had the experience of relatively free elections and an active parliamentary life—albeit one constrained by a monarchy and colonial power. The Free Officers banned political parties in 1953 and Nasser enshrined a single-party rule so no new parties were founded during that time. Presidents Sadat and Hosni Mubarak (1970–1981 and 1981–2011, respectively) restored limited pluralist politics and allowed the reemergence of political parties. The New Wafd (Delegation) Party was founded in 1978, along with other parties. But both Sadat and Mubarak were master manipulators, and thus the parties founded during their eras were shaped by repression and co-optation efforts and less by competition.⁴

Many more parties were born during Egypt’s brief post-Mubarak political opening (2011–2013), and a few more were founded after the military coup of 2013. While the founding circumstances and historical experiences of parties are instructive—those founded during eras of political openness and relative competition generally tend to retain more vitality today than those founded during restrictive eras—they do not reveal enough about the actual function of the parties still standing today.

For the purposes of this analysis, a different taxonomy of Egyptian secular political parties was chosen: a scale of proximity to the state—not ideological proximity but proximity in terms of political behavior. In other words, does the party actually aspire to come to power via electoral competition and to lead the state someday, or does it aspire only to support the state and thereby derive patronage?

The answer might seem obvious in some contexts: of course those who form political parties aspire to come into government via elections—why else would they do all the work involved? But it is not obvious in a country with a long and tenacious authoritarian tradition. What many Egyptians found most remarkable during the brief political opening was the changed atmosphere; suddenly citizens who had long been apathetic were politically aware and interested and were applying that awareness in places such as work, schools, and neighborhoods. But for decades before 2011, politics was a highly corrupted domain for Egyptians—and has become one again since the brutal crackdown began in 2013. Some parties were basically hollow shells from the beginning, apparently existing to help authoritarian governments create the illusion of pluralism while in reality offering no competition of any kind.

In devising a spectrum of Egyptian secular political parties—from those closest to the state to those who most vigorously oppose it—one can imagine several principal points:

• Some secular political parties, while claiming no affiliation with the state, appear to have been formed with the main objective (declared or undeclared) of supporting the state. This applies to most of the parties formed since the 2013 coup, such as the Nation’s Future (Mostaqbal Watan) Party, which won fifty-three seats in the 2015 parliamentary elections.⁵ While the pro-state political spectrum was in chaos after the 2011 dissolution of the National Democratic Party, a few parties were formed even in the immediate postrevolutionary period and expanded their operations after the 2013 coup (for example, the Republican People’s [al-Sha’b al-Gumhuri] Party, which gained thirteen seats in the 2015 elections).
• Other secular political parties gave, or tried to give, vigorous political competition to the state when they were first formed, but later became partially co-opted or compromised by the state. The venerable Wafd Party—which dominated parliamentary political life and the national independence movement from the end of World War I until the 1952 Free Officers’ coup—has exemplified such a party since its second founding (as New Wafd) in 1978. The Free Egyptians Party (al-Misriyyin al-Ahrar), formed after the 2011 revolution as a secular party of businesspeople, is a more recent example. These two parties now have enough seats in Parliament to be useful partners within a larger bloc (Wafd has thirty-five seats in the current House of Representatives and Free Egyptians has sixty-five), but they have been weakened from within by state-inspired leadership struggles and corruption scandals.
• There are a few secular parties—most of them formed post-2011—that continue to try to offer strong ideological or political competition to the state even under the extremely difficult circumstances since 2013. Almost all of these parties won seats in the 2011 parliamentary elections, but most of them either boycotted the 2015 elections or competed at a sharp disadvantage with the pro-coup parties. The largest is the Social Democratic Party, which won fourteen seats in 2011 and four in 2015. Others—such as the Constitution (Dustour) Party and Strong Egypt (Misr al-Qawiya) Party, founded by former presidential candidates Mohamed ElBaradei and Abdel Moneim Aboul Foutuh, respectively—were formed too late to compete in 2011 and boycotted the elections in 2015. They have never held seats but are still considered relevant politically due to their perceived support among young people and their activism on university campuses. All of the parties in this category have been under intense state pressure since the 2013 coup, although some of them sided with the military in the beginning.

Figure 2 shows secular political parties arranged on a spectrum from those closest to the state to those most in opposition to it.

How the State Has Compromised Secular Parties

Using its wide arsenal of tools extending from co-optation to repression, the Egyptian state has long been a major player in shaping the political party landscape. As a result, the role of political parties has been greatly influenced by the state’s behavior. Since the mid-1950s, Egypt’s political parties have faced significant legal and extralegal constraints, hampering them organizationally, financially, and ideologically. During the presidency of Nasser (1956–1970), no political parties were allowed besides the ruling party—the National Union from 1956 to 1961 and the Arab Socialist Union from 1962 to 1970. His successor, Sadat (1970–1981), only allowed a limited, artificial party life starting in 1976, and Mubarak (1981–2011) created a party licensing structure so tight that only the most toothless groups could get approval.⁶ That all changed with the brief and chaotic political opening from February 2011 to July 2013, when the floodgates were opened and dozens of political parties of all kinds were officially registered.

However, after the 2013 coup, the largest Islamist party (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party) was banned, and most other Islamist parties (except the Salafi Light Party, which supported the coup) continue to be harassed to prevent them from fully participating in political life—for example, their leaders have been imprisoned and their legal status has been subject to lawsuits. While non-Islamist parties are not suffering such a harsh fate, the post-2013 political environment has been corrosive for them as well.

Except during the brief political opening from 2011 to 2013, when parties formed and operated with significantly more freedom, the Egyptian state has often taken legal or extralegal steps to compromise secular political parties. During the Mubarak era, there was a complicated legal regime for party licensing controlled by the largely appointed upper house of Parliament, which de facto meant that the ruling National Democratic Party decided which of its potential competitors should be licensed. Beyond the initial gateway of licensing, there were a number of cases in which state actors secretly fostered splits within parties, likely because those parties were perceived to have transgressed unwritten limits on acceptable opposition activity.

One such case was the Socialist Labor Party, formed originally in 1978 as part of Sadat’s controlled restoration of limited pluralist politics. In 1990, however, the leftist party formed a surprising electoral alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. While the original intention of the Laborites might have been to push the Brotherhood in a socialist direction, it seemed that the opposite occurred. By 2000, the Socialist Labor Party and its newspaper al-Sha’b were leading the call for the application of sharia in Egypt and voicing charges against writers viewed as blasphemous. The state fostered a leadership split within the party and then used the restrictive parties’ law to suspend the party and its newspaper in May 2000.⁷

Beyond the initial gateway of licensing, there were a number of cases in which state actors secretly fostered splits within parties, likely because those parties were perceived to have transgressed unwritten limits on acceptable opposition activity.

More famous was the state-inspired split of the Tomorrow (Ghad) Party, formed in 2004 by Ayman Nour, a young member of Parliament from Wafd who had emerged at that time as a leading voice for liberalism. Why Tomorrow was licensed—at a time when only the tamest groups could get permission to form parties—was a bit mysterious, but it might be that the Mubarak regime underestimated how seriously Nour planned to take his role as a new force within the opposition. While Nour was soundly defeated in his challenge to Mubarak in the country’s first multicandidate presidential election in September 2005, his sharp public criticism of Mubarak still apparently resonated with many Egyptians and irritated the regime.⁸ Nour was imprisoned on forgery charges in December 2005, and a leadership split emerged within Tomorrow that smacked of state involvement. Although Nour was released on health grounds in 2009, the party remained mired in court cases related to the leadership split. Eventually Nour founded a new party, Tomorrow of the Revolution (Ghad al-Thawra), after Mubarak’s removal, but he was later forced into exile after opposing the 2013 coup.⁹

State manipulation of parties abated during the chaotic political opening but then reemerged strongly after the coup. Parties that strongly opposed the coup were repressed openly and harshly: the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party was banned outright in 2014, most other Islamist parties became entangled in lawsuits and arrests of their leaders, and smaller secular parties such as the Justice (‘Adl) Party and Egypt Freedom (Misr al-Hurriya) Party were nearly hounded out of existence.¹⁰

State manipulation of parties abated during the chaotic political opening but then reemerged strongly after the coup.

As time passed and the post-coup authoritarianism increased, even some of the secular parties that initially supported the coup were subjected to subversion by the state. The first major secular party targeted was the Constitution Party, founded by former International Atomic Energy Agency director general Mohamed ElBaradei. Although ElBaradei was a leading spokesman for liberal democracy, he at first supported the coup against then president Mohamed Morsi and agreed to serve as interim vice president in July 2013; this lent significant credibility to the military’s initial claim that the coup would restore democracy. After the mass killing at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square on August 14, 2013, ElBaradei abruptly resigned and left the country, leaving his party leaderless. The party has since struggled, wracked by leadership conflicts. Its first leader elected after ElBaradei left, Hala Shukrallah (the first woman and Christian to head a party in the country), complained that she was unable to operate the party according to the preferences of its mostly youthful constituents due to persistent interference from senior members with links to the state.¹¹

A similar phenomenon emerged within the Social Democratic Party in 2015 and 2016, when those who had founded the party in 2011—political liberals with a center-left economic orientation—began to face competition and controversy from members who wanted to bring the party more into a complete alliance with the post-coup state. The Social Democrats had supported the coup and enjoyed a strong representation in the post-coup cabinet, as well as in the Constituent Assembly formed in 2013 to draft the country’s new constitution. In light of the growing repressive policies implemented by the military/security apparatus, several politically liberal members of the party distanced themselves from the post-coup state—including the party’s former chairman, Mohamed Abou El Ghar, and former vice prime minister, Ziad Bahaa Eldin. However, other members—some of whom were post-2013 newcomers, whose outlook was decidedly more conservative and pro-state than that of its founders—pushed in the opposite direction.¹² Right-leaning and left-leaning members of the party struggled openly for leadership, weakening the party and tarnishing its reputation as one of the more viable, broad-based post-2011 parties.

The Free Egyptians Party, with significant support in the business and Christian communities, suffered an even more dramatic fate in late 2016 and early 2017. Formed in 2011 by Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian and one of the country’s most prominent business leaders, the well-funded party won seventeen seats in the 2011 parliamentary elections. Vocal opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Free Egyptians enthusiastically supported the coup and won sixty-five seats—the most of any single party—in the 2015 elections. Although generally supportive of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s policies and apologist for massive human rights abuses since the 2013 coup, the party declined to join the pro-regime bloc within Parliament in favor of maintaining a modicum of independence. Before long, an alternative leadership began to emerge within the party, pushing for strong support of the state, reducing party membership to those deemed loyal to the new pro-state leaders, and expelling two female parliamentary deputies (Nadia Henry and Mai Mahmoud) who insisted on opposing state policies seen as anti-liberal.¹³ Party founder Sawiris’ relations with the state became more and more contentious, and he was reportedly forced to sell off ONtv, the popular satellite television channel that had been an important asset to the party.¹⁴ By early 2017, Sawiris was voted out of the party leadership and later expelled from the party. In a single year, the Free Egyptians had lost their founder, some major funding sources, a television channel, numerous members and supporters, and two parliamentary deputies, leaving the party rudderless and adrift.

As time passed and the post-coup authoritarianism increased, even some of the secular parties that initially supported the coup were subjected to subversion by the state.

In the undermining of the Free Egyptians—a party supporting Sisi but with enough funding and organizational capacity to have pretensions to power—Egyptian observers saw proof of the state’s determination to prevent a pluralist environment, even one that excluded most Islamists. In noting the use of political infiltrators as a well-known tactic from the Mubarak era to undermine opposition parties, analyst Mohamed el-Agaty remarked that targeting the Free Egyptians went beyond that, showing that the regime would accept no less than “blind obedience” from its political partners.¹⁵ The anonymous political commentator “Newton,” writing in the al-Masry al-Youm newspaper just after Sawiris’ ouster from the party, bemoaned that the Free Egyptians were meeting “the end of every party,” as had many before them.¹⁶ The commentator warned that relentless state efforts to discredit and undermine secular parties delivered the political field to Islamists.

How Secular Parties Have Compromised Themselves

It is not only the state that has compromised secular parties. During the Sadat and Mubarak eras of limited political freedom, Egypt’s secular parties were often criticized as being elitist, internally undemocratic, financially corrupt, and unwilling to do the hard work of building real constituencies outside the country’s major cities. Once politics opened up after 2011, secular parties also took actions that undermined their credibility and the democratic opening they claimed to prize.

A Rough Ride From 2011 to 2013

Old and new secular parties adapted differently to the chaotic political opening of 2011 to 2013. Thosefounded with the principal objective of supporting the state and creating a fake image of party pluralism were caught off balance, not knowing how to fulfil their mission in a changing environment.

The resignation of Mubarak on February 11, 2011, after an eighteen-day popular uprising was followed by the ascendency of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to the top echelons of executive power.¹⁷ The former ruling party, the National Democratic Party (NDP), was banned.¹⁸ The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups of different ideological convictions—from Salafis to former members of the Brotherhood—were founding parties.¹⁹ New secular parties were also licensed and permitted to operate relatively freely.²⁰ The SCAF seemed for a while to accept democratic competition and the rotation of power as the pillars of post-Mubarak politics.

Those [secular parties] founded with the principal objective of supporting the state and creating a fake image of party pluralism were caught off balance, not knowing how to fulfil their mission in a changing environment.

This was a disorienting change for pro-state secular parties formed before 2011, which were generally small and lacked a popular base. Between 2011 and 2013, their principal objective became to survive. Some of them, such as the Democratic Generation Party (al-Geel al-Dimuqrati), joined the electoral coalition led by the Muslim Brotherhood’s party in 2011–2012 and landed one seat in the Consultative Council (upper house of Parliament, partially elected and partially appointed).²¹ Other pro-state parties—mainly newly established parties such as the Egypt National (Misr al-Qawmi) Party, Freedom (al-Hurriya) Party, and Egyptian Citizen (al-Muwatin al-Misri) Party—ran former NDP members in the parliamentary elections and won a few seats.²²

Older secular parties with some pretensions of independence—including the Wafd, National Progressive Unionist (Tagammu), and Democratic Front parties that had partially competed with and partially been co-opted by the state—were eager to participate more freely in post-2011 politics. Their ideological and policy preferences charted the course, and various organizational and financial assets defined their fortunes. Under the chairmanship of ElSayed Elbadawy, Wafd opted first for building a grand electoral alliance with the Muslim Brothers, named the Democratic Alliance for Egypt.²³ The alliance, which was announced to contest the 2011 parliamentary elections, included several small Islamist parties such as the Civilization (Hadara) Party, as well as secular parties including the Nasserist Dignity (Karama) Party and Tomorrow of the Revolution Party (both of which were licensed only after Mubarak’s removal) and the Democratic Front Party.²⁴ However, differences between Wafd and the Brotherhood regarding the total number of candidates fielded by each of them and regarding the place of religion in the election platform led to the failure of the alliance.²⁵ Wafd pulled out, along with most secular parties, including the Democratic Front. The Dignity and Tomorrow of the Revolution parties, however, continued to coordinate with the Brotherhood and ended up fielding a few candidates on its electoral list.²⁶

After leaving the Democratic Alliance, Wafd decided to run its candidates independently in the parliamentary elections. The party’s well-developed organizational apparatus—with branches in most Egyp