CAIRO — The release of Ahmed Ezz — steel tycoon and one of the most prominent figures in the [former President Hosni] Mubarak regime — sparked another round of lamentations by the Jan. 25 revolutionaries that the old state is making a comeback. Those lamentations are mostly incorrect for four distinct reasons:

1. Given the conditions of the country and the unprecedented state of repression it has been experiencing, its fair to say that we are currently seeing an attempt at creating a new state that makes the Mubarak state look like a pack of harmless puppies. 
2. The release of those businessmen and the attempts of reconciliation with them was jump-started back during the [deposed President Mohammed] Morsi presidency, so this is not new. 
3. Ahmed Ezz was not declared innocent, but rather was released because he had hit the legal limit of being in jail while being tried. He still has a number of court cases against him and no one wants to be associated with him.
4. There is already a secret tug of war between the old regime backers and the supporters of the new order.

For the Jan. 25 revolutionaries, the feloul, or old regime backers, are a monolithic entity that is simplistic and inaccurate. Their representatives may be their elite, which is why they are usually framed in the context of an unholy alliance of interests of Egypt’s businessmen, tribal leaders and prominent families, but such analysis ignores their large voter base, which is none of those things. The quick and dirty political definition for the feloul would be social conservatives, even though that’s not completely accurate either. While the majority of these are regressive in their mindset and beliefs, they do have a progressive minority that is both their face and their brain, many of whom were the faces of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Ahmed Nazif government during the latter years of the Mubarak era. It is an alliance that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Republican Party in the US: Social conservatives make up the majority of the base, while the leadership and strategists are more libertarian-leaning than anything.

The leadership, since the late 1990s, had been plagued with the notion of then-President Mubarak’s mortality: They understood that their interests were very much tied to him, and they eyed his advanced age with nervousness. Mubarak’s death, with no clear vice president to succeed him, would have meant a new president with a military background, whose interests and mindset might not have meshed well with theirs. They viewed the military’s expanding economic empire with a silent mixture of envy and dismay, given the military’s control over sectors that they would rather see properly developed by the private sector, and how inefficiently run those military-owned companies were. They saw a need to remove the military from the equation of power in Egypt, and they viewed Mubarak’s son Gamal as their solution.

For the feloul, Gamal Mubarak offered a way out of successive military dictatorships, and a means to expand their power in the country to sectors they couldn’t touch. By having Gamal ascend to power, they would effectively have the first Egyptian civilian president of Egypt since 1952, and break the cycle of the military hold over power. Slowly but surely the NDP’s old guard (most of whom were sons of the military state) were being replaced by the new guard of young oligarchs like Ahmed Ezz, and Gamal was getting thrust further and further into the lime light, until Jan. 25 happened and all of those plans turned to dust.