The protestors think they have won. But they haven't.
In a brilliant counter-intuitive bit of propaganda, government ministers are trying to give the impression that the revolutionaries have prevailed – while remaining firmly in control.
Egyptians seem to think they won the 1973 war with Israel. It’s been portrayed on state TV as a great victory, and one young man earnestly told me today this was proved by the fact that Israel no longer occupies any Egyptian territory.
Similarly many of the protestors in Tahrir Square seem to think they’ve won what they’re calling the Nile Revolution. But they haven’t. In a brilliant counter-intuitive bit of propaganda, government ministers are trying to give the impression that the revolutionaries have prevailed – while remaining firmly in control. The Foreign Minister yesterday told Channel 4 News how he admired the protestors, how the young people had woken everyone up. Thanks, he seemed to be saying. Now go home and stop bothering us. We’ve got a country to run.
President Mubarak was shown on state TV chairing a cabinet meeting today – looking very much in charge. The regime’s American sponsors marched almost all the way to the top of the hill and then marched back down again – they suggested that President Mubarak must go, and then changed their minds.
Tahrir Square is becoming like a larger, more exuberent version of Parliament Square, with bivouacs and tarpaulins, a scruffy encampment of malcontents, shouting to themselves while the world carries on around them. Traffic is almost as bad as it used to be, the banks are open, even the Cairo stock exchange is expected to reopen tomorrow. The presence of tanks is ambivalent – they’re there to both protect and contain the protestors. I suspect the government hopes that the numbers will just dwindle away.
For 30 years, the Egyptian government has locked up those who criticise it, fearing that any opposition, secular or Islamist, would destabilise the system. They may have just found out how wrong they were. Such is their reach, so entrenched the institutions, they may survive this revolution, with the much talked of “transition” leaving the pillars of the state scarred but intact.