Policy Paper – October 2011

In this in-depth report, Andrea Teti and Benjamin Zeibig outline Egypt’s political landscape in the run-up to Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. As Egypt approaches its first post-revolutionary parliamentary elections, the political landscape appears highly fluid, with a broad range of political parties attempting to maximize their chances for representation in the first post-Mubarak parliament, not least through engaging in electoral alliances. The principal actors remain the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Salafi Nour Party, and the Egyptian Bloc. These groups, however, which are certainly the best-funded and organizationally the strongest by some considerable margin, represent socially, politically and economically conservative forces which display a considerable degree of policy continuity with the previous regime, especially at the level of economic policy. This Policy Paper reviews the key questions in Egyptian politics and the policy stances of all main political actors, considering their ability to respond to the kinds of demands made by a large portion of the Egyptian population during the January-February Uprising.