Egypt Continues to Protest.

Well in a country of 74 million people about 750,000 are protesting. With the Muslim Brotherhood withdrawing their support for the demonstrations on Monday (21/11/11) Tuesday's protest was largely organised by the Egyptian Revolutionary Youth Movement an organisation remarkably similar to the Libyan Youth Movement or Britain's Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Sadly the situation now seems to have become self-perpetuating. Sections of the protesters keep trying to violently attack government buildings surrounding Tahrir Square including the Interior Ministry. This forces the military to equally violently stop them. In turn the succession of injured protesters being brought back into Tahrir Square for medical treatment encourages more protesters to attack government buildings. There is also a strong suspicion that some of the protesters are armed with handguns and are shooting other protesters in order to increase the level of anger towards the military.

So at the moment I think the main demand from both the military and the protesters is simply, "Please stop attacking us."

Beyond that the protesters are demanding that Egypt's interim military leaders set out a timetable for when they will hand over power to a civilian President. I have to say that this makes no sense to me because there is already a timetable in place for that handover. It starts on Monday (28/11/11) with the first round of Parliamentary elections for the Peoples Assembly (lower house). Assuming that there are no problems this will complete on December 5th (5/12/11). The second round of voting will begin on December 14th (14/12/11) and assuming there are no problems will end on December 21st (21/12/11). The third round of voting will begin on January 3rd (3/1/12) and assuming there are no problems will end on January 10th (10/1/12). Voting for the Shura Council (upper house) will begin on January 22nd and is expected to last until around mid-February.

Once they've been elected Egypt's new elected representatives will break off to form committees to work on the best way to re-write the constitution, get the economy back on track, reform the police and criminal justice system and all the other boring things government's do. This committee stage is expected to last for six months meaning that the earliest Presidential elections can be held is late-August 2012. However I'm hesitant to put a firm date on it for the simple reason that no-one in Egypt has ever done this before so there really is no way of knowing what will happen in the future. For example we don't know if all the elected representatives are all going to agree on every issue which in itself is not healthy for democracy or if a block of the representatives are going to slow everybody down by simply saying no to every suggestion much like the Republicans are currently doing in the US House/Senate. Likewise we don't know what is going to happen in the region. For example when Mubarak fell no-one - not even the people who planned it - knew that Libya was going to descend into eight months of civil war and we still don't know if Israel is going to attack Iran.

At the moment though the biggest threat to the democratic handover of power are the protests themselves. Roads are blocked, the authorities are over stretched, people are getting injured so cannot vote and people are getting scared to leave their homes. Under these circumstances even the most liberal government would be forced to ask if elections can go ahead. To their credit Egypt's interim military leadership are resolute that the elections will go ahead as planned no matter how violent the protests become. This is because whether people believe it or not the military want to hand power over to a civilian authority just as soon as possible. As for the protesters I'm not so sure.