“Drunkenness bygone and thoughtfulness begun” was the status of Muhammad Nour Farhat, a legal expert, on his Facebook page after the statement issued by the spokesmen of the armed forces, endorsing Al-Sisi to run for president.

“Drunkenness bygone and thoughtfulness begun” was the status of Muhammad Nour Farhat, a legal expert, on his Facebook page after the statement issued by the spokesmen of the armed forces, endorsing Al-Sisi to run for president.

Farhat further explained his post saying: “I think that drunkenness is bygone and thoughtfulness needed to begin when the people of Egypt approved the new Constitution, which lays the foundation of a new state. Many believe that this state will be a state of revolution because many elites believe that the new Constitution is the Constitution of the revolution. However, the revolutionaries do not share with them the same beliefs. 

In case al-Sisi nominates himself for the presidency, there will be many possible scenarios. First, Egypt might be under direct military rule although Al-Sisi will nominate himself as a civilian. It will mean the return of the Hosni Mubarak rule but under other names, given that those who loudly support al-Sisi now are from among the symbols of the Mubarak regime although they couldn’t until now associate themselves with him for only one reason: the ambiguity of al-Sisi himself.

The scene, which began with the third anniversary of the January 25 revolution’s celebrations, carries with it a lot of confusion about this issue. There are those who believe that people who were present in the yards are ordinary people. They went there to ask al-Sisi to nominate himself because they believe that he is capable of realizing their dream of “state control” after three years of lawlessness, which has had its repercussions on the economic and living conditions of the people. These people, given that they are not politicized, considered that any person who may have contradicting opinions is hostile to the state before being hostile to their candidate: Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Their mere presence in the celebrations of the revolution’s anniversary is a gain, regardless of the motives that made these people come out. It means that although they are not politicized, they believed that the revolution took place and that it carried certain demands, which they believe that al-Sisi is capable of realizing. This means too that they are no longer helpless. They have become politicized and their interests contradict with the interests of another sector of the society, the businessmen who want to control the government in the same way they did during the era of Mubarak.

This means that the popular base of al-Sisi is full of contradictions and this will make him align himself with certain parties to ease these contradictions or to open the door for new conflicts.  This is a positive development because it opens the door for the political forces to enter into political deals with him that may have political, economic, and democratic, human rights and other implications. 

Al-Sisi, with his sense of security, realizes that his bias to businessmen or the rich classes may anger the popular sectors and this may reflect on the stability of his rule. Those who came out to support Al-Sisi on January 25 are people who are trying out politics for the first time in their lives. No one can predict what these people will do if they see that their dreams of the “saviour” do not come true. 

Most of al-Sisi’s quoted statements indicate that there is an upper limit and this limit is that he will deal with the January 25 revolution as one of the sources of his legitimacy. By saying this, he is talking about the army’s protection of the revolution and his role in ending the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood who tried to steal it.

The minimum limit is that he needs segments of the revolution’s youth, not all of them, in order to calm down the street. These limits can be useful and can be utilized especially because most of the people believe that the real competitor of al-Sisi, who is capable of winning in the presidential elections, is Ahmad Shafiq, who will bring back to the forefront the policies of Mubarak and his men once again. All these issues show how thoughtfulness has started and how the civil, political and revolutionary forces have to face complicated challenges, which should immediately be resolved or otherwise they will find themselves out of the equation.

Drunkenness bygone and thoughtfulness have begun because the revolution is now facing difficult choices and complicated conditions which those who believe in it have to deal with them. Each choice to be made has its cost, and its negative or positive impact.  Taking into consideration the mood of the society today, a new revolution is not on the table in the short run. Thus thoughtfulness is now politics and nothing else until the realities change and these realities will change, because the challenges facing the government are very huge. It will not be easy to deal with these challenges without having victims and this will gradually lead to the decline in the popularity of the government and increase the margins of popular anger with the passage of time.