Sisi victory deals 'deadly blow' to revolutionary youth movement
The leaders of Egypt’s revolutionary youth movements anticipate a long-term struggle to regain some sense of unity.
CAIRO — As Egypt's military strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was declared president with a landslide 96.9% of the vote, and as the ailing nation prepares an inauguration ceremony that will cost millions, the revolutionary youth are contemplating a grim political future wherever they are — in jail, in exile or occupying opposition seats expected to be extremely vulnerable to the highly anticipated wave of oppression.
Egypt's revolutionary youths who represent different ideologies, political parties and movements have gone from a fragile coalition to an opposition front torn by internal divisions, and finally agreed — for the first time since January 2011 — that the revolutionary front "has been dealt a deadly blow by Sisi's rise to the presidency in Egypt." Yet, that agreement does not mean they learned from their past failures, or became united.
Bassem Kamel, a high-level officer of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, and one of a few revolutionary youth who scored a seat in the dissolved 2012 parliament, believes that the "near future will be a difficult time but it still is far better than Hosni Mubarak's pre-2011 days."
"We have political parties, we speak to the public through the media and we have popular support, while under Mubarak we used to celebrate whenever one person joins our efforts through the opposition campaign led by Mohamed ElBaradei. Back then, having only one more person aboard was a victory," Kamel told Al-Monitor at his office in Cairo.
