“Aljazeera is reporting the following”:http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/20112452027527827.html:
bq. In an important move, Mohammed Al-Beltagi, a leading member of Muslim Brotherhood, told Al Jazeera on Friday that his organisation has no ambitions to run for the presidency.
I think this is “important” for two reasons. First, Egypt current has a president, and I have seen absolutely no discussion to date about the possibility of abandoning the institution of the presidency and moving to a parliamentary system of government in a post-Mubarak democratic Egypt. From a political science perspective, one of the fundamental differences between presidential and parliamentary systems of government is that the a presidency, almost by definition is “winner take all”; as long as there is only one president, only one party/force gets to control the presidency. In the Egyptian scenario, the Muslim Brotherhood reminds me a little bit of the various communist parties as communism collapsed across Eastern Europe in 1989. Not, obviously, as the party of the old regime, but rather because the Muslim Brotherhood, at this moment, is probably at least one of the two best organized political forces in the country today and therefore best equipped to actually contest an election in the immediate future. Moreover, as “was discussed in a post here yesterday”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/02/how_large_is_egypts_potential_.html, support for the Muslim Brotherhood could reach levels where the organization could capture the presidency. Thus without this guarantee, the prospect that a free presidential election could lead to a government controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood alone would be a real one.
But such a “guarantee” raises a larger question: how does anyone actually hold opposition forces to promises made during a transition period? And this is especially crucial if we think that in order for someone like Mubarak to give up power, he has to be convinced that the opposition will honor promises it makes during “negotiation to remove him from office”:http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/04/egypt.protests/index.html?hpt=T1 (such as, for example, not to throw him in jail.) There is a large literature stemming from “Latin American transitions”:http://www.amazon.com/Transitions-Authoritarian-Rule-Conclusions-Democracies/dp/0801826829/ref=pd_sim_b_1 on the importance of what came to be known as “pacts”, or deals between the regime and the opposition during an actual transition. However, it remains an open question how exactly these “pacts” can be enforced at a later date.
I invite anyone with research on these topics to either comment below this post, or else email me directly at joshua dot tucker at nyu dot edu about the possibility of a guest post on the topic.