The current situation in Egypt is highly worrying. With the army taking control over the government and supporters of Morsi taking the streets, there seems to be no clear solution in sight. I myself do not foresee the conflict calming down anytime soon either. What however I find very interesting that the current deadlock is the result of a situation that has already occurred once in history, namely in 1920’s Germany.
Similarly to Egypt, Germany had long been ruled by a dictator, in Germany’s case the ‘Kaiser’, and in Egypt we had Mubarak ruling the country with a tight grip. After the First World War Germany was defeated, or more precisely, the system of one leader ruling the country. The country was turned into a direct democracy, where the number of votes would directly correlate with the number of seats a party would get allocated. The system sounds good, but in practice it didn’t work as well. Not used to being able to express their opinion, Germans started to form their own parties which would represent their own view, resulting in many small parties with little cooperation between them. Sounds familiar? It should, because something very similar happened in Egypt after the revolution. Parties that were once banned were all of a sudden allowed to express their opinion, and people who were previously unable to form their own party, could now do so freely.
Of course coalitions were formed in both countries, and some parties with similar views would work together. Nevertheless, the system proved inefficient in Weimar Germany because no party had a clear majority. The result of this was an inefficient government. In Egypt it went a bit different, with a coalition of the Al-Nour Party and the Freedom and Justice Party creating a majority in parliament, thus making it easier to get laws passed.
Now this is where the comparison gets tricky. In Egypt the army took over recently, and now has full control over the government. It would seem that the army still somehow pledges a slight alliance to the old regime of Mubarak, similarly to the army in the Weimar Republic, which was led by Paul von Hindenburg (generally regarded as a supporter for the Kaiser). However, the army did not take over in Germany. It did not necessarily support the Weimar government, but stood to the side and did not interfere. One would argue that it should have at some point, to prevent the increasing power of the National Socialist Party.
Extremism is often a threat in new inefficient governments, as it is in Egypt. The ultra-conservative Al-Nour party quickly gained support in Egypt, and got 27.8% of the votes. If we were to draw a link between the Al-Nour Party and the National Socialists in Germany (disregarding the political differences for a moment, but looking purely at extremism) we can conclude that both parties similarly quickly gained support after a power vacuum. My personal reasoning for this is that citizens are simply not used to the freedom caused by a pure and free democracy, and therefore long back for a party with usually more authoritarian ideas, because it is a comfortable system for the citizens.
To put all these thoughts together into one clear statement, the recent interference of the army in Egypt was most likely not a bad thing at all, considering the threat of extremism in the new democracy of Egypt. Lessons can be learned from Weimar Germany, where extremism led to terrible events. Not to say that anything even closely related would happen in Egypt, but the threat is always there. This just shows how direct democracy is not always the best system. Even though under a dictator there is no clear control over the actions of certain branches of the government, it usually does create a stable situation in the country.
Sebastiaan Jansen's History blog 