Four questions about a Sisi run for president of Egypt

On Jan. 27, two important developments took place in Cairo. The first was that interim President Adly Mansour promoted army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the rank of field marshal. Hours later, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which is headed by Sisi, officially convened to discuss the latest developments in the country as well as the issue of Sisi’s much debated and expected (and much demanded in some circles) nomination to the nation’s presidency.

While SCAF's resulting statement said that Egyptians will eventually make their will known through the ballot boxes, it did say that “SCAF could only look with respect and high regard to the will of the broad masses of Egypt’s great people in nominating Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to the presidency of the republic, and it considers this a [formal] commissioning and commitment.” The rest of the statement followed in the same tone, focusing on the voice of the public as being the main driving force behind this move. Sisi has yet to officially announce his candidacy, likely in part due to procedural issues including the necessity of his registration in the voters database, but it is largely seen right now as a foregone conclusion.

Obviously, a slew of commentary followed, mostly divided between those who proclaimed the prospects of a progressive civilian democracy in Egypt comatose and those proclaiming Sisi to be the man Egypt needs, the only one who could exercise real influence over Egypt’s Pandora’s box of state institutions, and even going so far as to suggest that he might even prove to be a reformer once he is officially in charge. But four main questions stood out:

1.  Why did he (at least officially) change his mind and run for office, considering all the previous statements and analyses that argued that it would be better for him to stay on as head of the military? To recap one chief argument of such an analysis, the upcoming president would be embroiled in the whirlpool of quotidian politics and will lose any buffer he once had from the merciless daily pressures of politics and economics. Thus, Sisi would be better off as the savior who returned to his post after intervening. Another argument reasoned that Sisi’s presidency, if not well performing, would negatively reflect on the military as a whole, something particularly unhelpful after SCAF’s unsuccessful turn at the helm in 2011-2012. A third major argument went that it would weaken the narrative that held the military intervened in July 2013 to “correct the nation’s democratic course” and not to take power. The question of why Sisi has seemingly decided to run becomes even more pertinent given the passage of the new constitution, which gives the SCAF veto power for two presidential terms over nominations for defense minister.