 So welcome to, to everyone. I'm Leila Halal, co-director of the Middle East Task Force at New America Foundation, and we are very pleased to be hosting this event on Egypt at such a momentous time in the country's history. We, you know, most of you probably are following Egypt very closely, and so you know that the country has just finished its first round of elections for the People's Assembly, and while there are two more rounds to occur over the next four weeks, we have a very good idea of the emerging powers and actors in in the new Egypt, although I hesitate to say new because it's constantly evolving, and I suppose it's anyone's guess as to where Egypt will end up, and it will be most likely quite a while before we we figure that out, but just I'm gonna provide a few details on the election results, the first round results in order to allow our distinguished panelists to focus more on on analysis, and I will introduce them individually, momentarily, but there there are, so we have, we know the percentages of, or we know the number of votes that have come in for the major parties. We have also had unofficial attempts at calculating the percentages of seats that the different parties will take in the People's Assembly. These are unofficial results because the procedures for translating votes into seats are still unclear, and there's been no official announcement as to how or what methodology will be used to calculate these seats, so everything is is preliminary at this point in time, but for those who may not have been able to to follow the news this morning, the unofficial calculations put out by some of the press following the vote is that the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, has taken 82 seats in the parliament. That will put them at 49%. The Salafist El-Nor Party is holding an unofficial tally of 33 seats with 20%. Now, of course, the El-Nor win, the Salafist win at such a high number is one of the major surprises of the elections emerging from the elections, and between El-Nor and Freedom and Justice that comes out to a 70% seating of Islamists at the table. But of course, as we will hear, El-Nor and Freedom and Justice are two different players and how they will relate to one another remains a question. The third major party to have taken seats in the parliament is the Egyptian block, a coalition of liberals led by a famous Coptic individual. This Egyptian block took a total of, again, unofficial 18 seats with 11% of the overall seats. El-Waft has 12 seats and Revolution continues, which is reflective of and inclusive of most of the youth parties, has five seats with 3% of the parliament. So that's just a general overall outline of what the people's assembly will look like. But of course, what powers are told and what that means is a question. So today, for our conversation, we have a distinguished panel of rule of law experts and political analysts on Egypt. Two of our panelists are lawyers, Renda Fahmi and Michael Wahid Hanna are both lawyers. Nathan Brown is an expert in constitutionalism in the Middle East. So we're hoping to have a very good discussion in terms of being able to map out who the different actors and their powers in Egypt and the political battles going forward. Renda Fahmi will speak first. She is currently vice president of the Egyptian American rule of law association, a group that seeks to provide Egyptian led support to reform efforts in the country post January 25th. She served in the George W. Bush administration and several energy and economic advisory positions, including as associate deputy secretary of energy. Nathan Brown obviously is well known to most of you. He's professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and a non resident senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And again, an established expert on constitutionalism in the Arab world as well as Islamist movements in the Middle East. Michael Wahid Hanna is a fellow at the Century Foundation. He is he's a was a Fulbright scholar in Cairo amongst his many affiliations, past affiliations. His expertise lies in international security, human rights and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He just returned from his seventh trip to Egypt since February 1st and was tweeting his observation. So perhaps many of you followed him. He also was quoted in the New York Times and what was I think a very salient quote describing the new parliament as perhaps an Islamist affair as liberal, conservative and moderate Islamist forces battle it out. So looking very forward to hearing Michael's impressions of his visit and the insights and analysis from our other panelists. Each will speak for about 10 minutes and then we will open it up for question and answers. Thank you. Thank you, Layla. And thank you to the New America Foundation for allowing the Egyptian American Rule of Law Association to co-sponsor this event with you and also to provide a little bit of information about Urla because we are a new organization. As Layla mentioned, we are a group of Egyptian American lawyers who believe that our intimate knowledge of the language, culture, history, religious background and a political landscape best suits us to provide legal expertise and advice to a variety of partners, individuals and organizations on the ground in Egypt. When we established Urla and it was only established a mere six months ago, our idea was that we would provide as a resource to provide technical assistance to these organizations on the ground who needed our help. Our idea was to provide advice and counsel for structural reforms if they wanted our advice on laws that were being drafted on any kind of particular issue that may touch upon the rule of law. We were there to serve as a guidepost if you will and an advice and counsel organization. We are not nor do we continue to be affiliated with any party or organization on the ground. We've purposely stayed away from any of the political ins and outs on the ground which is quite difficult these days. We believe in the rule of law and what is the rule of law? You know it's funny I hear many of our US government officials throwing around this terminology particularly when it comes to the Middle East but in particular when it comes to Egypt sort of a worrisome sort of thing that somehow a democratic election doesn't ensure rule of law and according to our principles at Urla and you can learn more about us by the way we do have a website it's e-a-r-l-a dot org that government officials are accountable under the law that the laws are clear publicized stable and fair and they protect fundamental rights including the security of persons and property that the process by which the laws are enacted and enforced is accessible fair and efficient and access to justice is provided by competent independent and ethical adjudicators attorneys and judicial officers who are sufficient in number have adequate resources and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve and so Urla our organization banded together a group of us who took two trips one in April and the most recent one in July our purpose for going over there was really to solidify our partners on the ground who was it that needed our help we did a little of outreach from here but we did a lot of it when we landed in Egypt and interestingly enough we went with the mission but a mission wasn't guided by us the mission was guided by many organizations on the ground who were already working on an issue and it's interesting what particular law they were working on it was freedom of information act FOIA law and many of you may say well why FOIA you know that seems so esoteric I was very excited about that jump that having served in the US government knowing what the ins and outs are of a FOIA law and how very important that is to rule of law transparency accountability and corruption if you will we took on that that that battle if you will and so when we went there in July we did solidify our partnerships with some very very well established old and and you know very respected non-governmental organizations human rights organizations media organizations because they have much at stake with respect to FOIA we did meet with political activists to get a sense women's groups while we were there of course we did stop in and see educational institutions we did meet with us ngo's on the ground including iri and ndi to get a sense of their activities we met with the presidential campaigns of three of the candidates we did meet with the Egyptian government we had a very long meeting with staff in the interior ministry in the foreign ministry we also were fortunate enough to meet with the US embassy folks there the ambassador was briefed on our our our our efforts there as well as the British ambassador and the private sector we also got a unique insight I would say from our families all of us that were on this delegation and there were five of us lawyers continually I think got a unique insight one of my colleagues is here today Khaled El-Gindy and everybody I think got more of a sense of what was going on there from our families than anything what what did we learn from this and how is this affecting what's going on now with the election well what we learned was to our great pleasure that these groups on the ground wanted our help that we were in this unique position of being Americans yet Egyptian Americans and so they were we were very much welcomed with open arms in a way I would say that other foreign influences were not welcome we learned that acceptance of US government money is a huge issue in Egypt right now particularly among the NGO and human human rights community and that's an issue that our organization struggles with because we are funded primarily by the Egyptian American community that they are that they are fearful of foreign influence and as a result of that if you do go on our website we have not and chosen to not list our partners by our certain decision within our organization but also at the request of our partners on the ground we have not listed them because there is continued harassment of these organizations and we certainly don't want to put them in any other danger now with respect to the FOIA focus I'll go into a little bit of detail about where it is right now and what how it might play out do the elections when we arrived there in July there were already what I would call three different drafts of a FOIA law that we felt that we could help with and work with one was drafted by the Center for International Private Enterprise many of you know Saip along with the United Group which is an NGO on the ground in Egypt another draft was drafted by the World Bank and the team there and there was also a third draft that had some input from a government institution in Egypt when we went there to meet with the folks to see how we can help they were in a variety of different stages with respect to the FOIA law and we were able frankly to give them some advice in particular about advocacy efforts so once you have a draft of this FOIA law how do you think you're going to get this FOIA law drafted or I'm sorry passed within parliament and nobody thought about the advocacy efforts that it takes it turns out now as a result of the election what has happened with these FOIA drafts if you will is that the place that they ran up against the obstacle was with supreme council of armed forces the national security exemption frankly not unlike some laws we have here in the united states from a legal perspective we're constantly bumping up against that national security exemption they are too and so now we have helped them kind of think through the process in advocating with it with respect to the new parliament helping them decide whether or not a FOIA law is going to be included in a bill of rights as a simple and basic statement or within the constitution itself and this is going to be very important because again the basic principles of transparency accountability anti-corruption it's the rock bed of what went on there that's where the security issue falls in there and of course the media right now there's a proliferation of new what I call new free media in Egypt as a result of the revolution but the question is how is the existing media going to be able to get access to information they need particularly in this time we see a role in the future in particular for our group to help these groups on the ground as I mentioned with advocacy you know it's a big thing I you notice I'll keep calling it advocacy and not lobbying because of the negative conversations of that but advocacy is a real area that people on the ground every group has told us they need and we're certainly some of us within or are very well equipped to serve in that role and to help with those efforts we've also had some tremendous meetings with our partners on the ground on independence of the judiciary something that we leaped at because that's really going to be a strong issue much much work has been done by many organizations but one organization in particular has done phenomenal work on independence of the judiciary it just needs to have its groundwork if you will and that's the constitution and bill of rights that ensures that again we were asked to help drafting in some of the presidential campaigns as well as the organizations are thinking about a bill of rights and they've asked us for our advice certainly advice on writing the constitution we think it's important for protection of minority rights citizenship training transitional justice these are the different areas that we hope to work with in the future now what do the elections mean as I mentioned you know now that we are in the midst of you know the first round going into the second round you know from our perspective and certainly this is a broader issue not necessarily having to do with earl but part of this is for the first time Egyptian expats including Egyptian expats here in the United States got to participate in the voting process it wasn't perfect but it got done in a matter of months which is absolutely unthinkable when you would look at the Egyptian bureaucracy but the people there felt that it was extremely important to have expatriate participation one issue that's going to come up that we're going to help is is this going to be a presidential or a parliamentary system we don't know you don't know nobody knows it depends on what happens in the next round of elections and what happens when who's selected to draft the constitution itself how can we help again on the technical drafting of that you know there's also an issue with Sharia law this has been the one that's been talked about the most particularly in the political context here in the United States and we feel that again our members and earl are uniquely positioned to help with that balance if you will of where they're going on Sharia law and how maybe to provide advice coming from a country in which transparency account to be rule of law protection of minority rights and freedom of speech is embedded here in our constitution while still able of course for everyone to be able to exercise their religious rights freely so finally i think i'll wrap up and handed over certainly to Nathan to talk a little bit more about the electoral elections itself but you know i would just follow up by saying look the success of our organization thus far is that we Egyptian Americans are uniquely you know position to help in the situation we've gained trust and confidence we're able to work with these coalitions on the ground and we're hoping to continue to help solidify that absolute strategic relationship between the United States and Egypt thank you thank you very much i think we got a very good idea that presentation sort of what has to happen on a legal and constitutional level i'm going to take a look really sort of at a political level and to sort of try and take a look and see what is happening on the ground that might help or hinder turning those those dreams into a reality over this past summer i was asked to write a blog piece about kind of general take on on egyptian political developments and i titled it don't worry be happy and it's now december it's about six months after i wrote that and i think i'd now retitle it something like you don't have to choose between being worried and being happy you should be both there's real reasons for concern about this transition process there's still some strong signs for optimism i'm going to focus on the on the reasons for concern and focus on what's happened very very recently and what's about to happen because i see two main causes for concerns one has to do with sort of the part the whole parliamentary election process and the likely outcome of that the strong showing of the muslim brotherhood led freedom and justice party the number of votes that they're able to turn out isn't necessarily a big surprise what maybe a little bit of a surprise is that though we don't know exactly how the three rounds of voting will turn out but it is quite conceivable that the freedom and justice party will wind up in the parliament with an absolute majority and the second big surprise has been the ability of the cellophies to turn out to vote that's not necessary i mean they're all kinds of of good and bad things about that i'm not a cellophie or i'm not a member of the muslim brotherhood so i guess i would say that in terms of their policy positions i'm not all that enthusiastic but for me the real problem is that this is such a strong showing on the part of these islamists that it really risks deepening a polarization among a civilian egyptian political forces and between the um uh a civilian parliament and a military leadership that is just not showing any uh or or showing some signs about nervousness about the entire process the odd thing is that the brotherhood knew it was running into this as a potential problem going in and and um it through the summer was trying to send signals essentially that it was whole going to hold back they didn't run a presidential candidate um and they still say actually up to this day that they are participating in this political process on their traditional slogan of participation not domination they don't necessarily want to win um and yet they're winning um and my own sense is that they will come to regret this other islamists in the arab world um are i mean uh when hanushi was in town last week he said this explicitly that that they may be setting themselves up for a problem it reminds me very much of the situation uh uh conceivably of uh of hamas in the 2006 elections i tried to interview leaders of hamas and just ask them at what point did you realize that winning was a possibility and when did you decide to go ahead the first question i got all kinds of different answers to the second question i got no answer to there was no there was no decision on the part of hamas to decide whether or not they were going to actually pursue the electoral victory they just went forward i think something the brotherhood is being a little bit um intoxicated by its own success in ways that may come back to haunt it now why is that a problem for egypt um because the the problem is if they have this majority in parliament it will be in a sense other political forces not as islamist political forces i think will be frightened you know um uh to uh uh to their bones any ability of the parliament to sort of press the democratization liberalization uh uh program forward will be hampered and then you've got the very awkward fact that this parliament has very ambiguous powers in fact it has almost no exclusive powers it has one exclusive power it doesn't have an exclusive power over legislation when the constitutional declaration uh which is now governing egypt was written um it was written in a very very strange fashion essentially one the 1971 constitution which had been egypt's governing document until the revolution essentially one third of it is just kind of hot air and that was taken out you know all sorts of ideological and language and the importance of the of family values this kind of stuff that was sort of a lot of that was taken out um um some of the more authoritarian provisions were taken out but one of the things that was surgically removed was the ability of the power of the parliament to have any kind of of oversight of the executive and so it's not quite clear what the parliament's power is over say forming government over questioning ministers and that sort of thing it's not clear that it's completely absent either because one of the things that the constitutional declaration did was reaffirm pre-existing legislation so the parliament's farragatives are there in legislation they're just not in there in constitutional text and already the brotherhood and the scaffold kind of squaring off about what it is that this document actually means in ways that i think will you know you're already seeing some some some some uh positioning on that issue if both sides are true to past patterns they won't pursue this to full confrontation but uh and they probably will come to some kind of accommodation but it will be a little bit of a nervous one now there is one thing as i said that is unambiguous in the constitutional declaration is exclusively a parliamentary prerogative and that is naming the 100 people who will draft egypt's constitution and that is one thing that the military is making clear that doesn't really want them to do it wants basically this to be some kind of consultative process where people have brought in from different parts of egyptian society and essentially what the military seems to be trying to do is to hem in a right that they they early given to uh to the parliament perhaps as they see the shape that the parliament takes place and perhaps as they wake up to some of the implications of the document that they themselves wrote which they didn't seem to be paying enough attention to as they were writing it um the second cause for concern has to do with the sequence going forward and again what we have is a scaffold that i think was a little or and it's legislative draft so we're a little bit of a sleep at the switch when this when this document was written the document the constitutional declaration and and and the staff statements before the constitutional declaration implied a clear sequence you would have parliamentary elections you would then have presidential elections you would then have a constitutional referendum and what the staff tried to do as because well what the staff tried to do is to reverse those those last two stages and the reason was very very clear in the constitutional declaration i'm the only one on this panel who's not a lawyer but i'm going to get into some legal detail so stop me when i when i when i say something stupid but in the constitutional declaration um it basically has a scaffold assuming all the powers of a really souped up presidency and the egyptian presidency even prior to this constitutional declaration was not an unimpressive institution so it's got the powers of the presidency and then some until there are presidential elections at which point the supreme council of the armed forces becomes the supreme council of the armed forces what it always was essentially supreme body sort of overseeing the military it turns into a constitutional pumpkin at the day that the that the new president is inaugurated and that means that they lose control over the entire process so the last thing that seems that that they want to do is to have the constitution written after they've gone gone back to the barracks and so they they're basically trying to extend their own welcome a little and essentially play with the timetable that is implied although not required by the march constitutional declaration it is true that one of the with the one real concession that the demonstrations in tahir recently got was a pledge by the military to have presidential elections in march of 20 excuse me in june of 2012 but what they did not pledge was to do that before the constitution was written it's not clear that they've given up on their sequence the sequence as it is for writing the new constitution is incredibly rushed they're supposed to do it in six months and then present it to voters and the voters are supposed there's there's no opportunity for review or discussion basically you just go straight to the polls it seems that there is a possibility they will try to compress that process even more so that what you've got is perhaps another kind of you know possible train wreck in the making over the scarce attempt to dominate the constitution writing process so what we have essentially and here i'm going to try and put shift gradually back to my be happy hat what we have is a bad transition process that is being badly executed do those two cancel each other out does that what does a bad policy badly executed lead to good result i'm not sure but i i haven't given up hope let me talk about two kinds of developments that are sort of happening on the side that i think are worth paying attention to that may put at least a little bit of of a happier spin on things number one is that the egypt which this process is being played out in is just a different place than the egypt of pre-2011 and we have certainly seen that sort of the politics of public demonstrations and of huge masses mass rallies in tahrir square i think those days may be numbered if they haven't already gone but what we do have within egyptian society is a much more highly politicized and organized society not in any coherent way but a whole a whole series of groups within egyptian society that have for the first time found a political voice i shouldn't say for the first time it's been happening gradually over the last decade i think but increasingly since especially since january 2011 really found a way to be able to articulate their demands and they'll now have new venues in which to push they'll be able to demonstrate at the parliament they'll be able to demonstrate at the cabinet they'll be you my guess is you'll see workers labor unions lawyers and so on forcefully pushing for their demands and to try and put an authoritarian lid on this kind of new more politicized political system i think will be very difficult this is just a society it's going to be a little bit more difficult to dominate in the past and the second positive spin and here i may be grasping at straws and might may might might may tell me i should wake up but has to do with something involving the performance of sellefies in in in the election this is cause for concern domestically and it's cause for concern internationally and i think for good reason um but the but but there is something very interesting going on if you take a long-term perspective and what i'm going to do here is i mean switch from egypt to other places in the Arab world people talk about the sellefies never having been interested in politics before that's not quite true they did have some political agenda and it's also true that in other arab states you've had sellefies been being involved in politics and electoral politics for quite some time um the place where i've seen it the most is in kuwait and i realize i'm between two egyptian americans and sort of saying that egypt has something to learn from kuwait might be like telling an american you have something to learn from the guatemalan experience it just the sentence doesn't make sense so so i'll ask your patients for just a minute um but um in in kuwait where the sellefies have basically been involved in parliament and elections since the 1980s something very interesting has happened to them over the long term um and that is to say that they've become not simply you know there's a process of of of winning some seats in parliament make you more enamored of democracy you become more democratic when people start to vote for you that that that i think has happened but it also means that in order to get anything done you've got to learn to work with other people which has never been the sellefies strong suit and it leads to some interesting religious debates within the sellefies the first time you had a woman cabinet minister in kuwait the first time you had women parliamentarians in kuwait the sellefies had to deal with the fact that they that that if they went by their religious teachings these women should not have positions of public authority on the other hand they were sitting there in the parliament and what the what were they supposed to do if they wanted to question the minister of education they would have to they don't have to look the minister in the eye but they at least have to talk to her and it actually led to some to some ideological and religious development on their part the last time i was in kuwait i interviewed two of the members women members of parliament i just asked them point blank what's it like working with sellefies will they look you in the eye will they shake your hand will they do shaking the hand was out of the question but looking them in the eye was not and actually trying to reach for across the gender divide on specific pieces of legislation was not either this is a process of politicization of the of the sellefies that if it takes place over the long term i think will be a healthy development for a part of egyptian society that as i said was really operating as as a as a society apart from the main society over the long term that's good the only question is whether anybody has any ability to focus on the long term at a at a time of short-term crises thanks thanks i might just take a moment to step back to have a look at sort of how we got here because i think it's important to understand what these elections mean and i think we have to go back to january february in march to understand how this roadmap came about and what elections mean for the process going forward and the reason i say that is because it was at that point in time when what looked like an uprising that could have been a revolution was diverted along the way and i think that's partly due because there was a real crisis of political leadership in egypt and it's one that that remains with us and it ran both ways it ran first and foremost from the protest movement and those who mobilized in the streets uh who events a constant distrust of authority and and their revolution being hijacked and that made things very problematic in terms of translating mass political demands on the street into political action and and it manifested itself continually in terms of the staff not having an interlocutor to deal with or feeling that they did not and so that's one aspect of it the other aspect of it is a lot of these political groups now come out of what are what is a discredited political milieu and there was never an ability of political leadership to marry their own views with those in the street we saw attempts by various people to do this and it never worked and so what we had was a process that got diverted into electoral politics at a time when revolutionary goals were not met and this suited staff they are stability stability oriented organization and they think along authoritarian lines radical change is not on their agenda that being said they don't control the agenda as well and when faced with consistent opposition political force united they've backed down repeatedly that didn't happen mainly because the process shifted very quickly to politics which is fine in terms of wanting to see the establishment of a democratic political process but what that did was abort the possibility for very far-reaching quick change we're now looking at democratic politics over the long haul perhaps making some of the changes that might have been possible at a much earlier stage and I and and part of that part of the fault here I will say very explicitly does lie with the Muslim brotherhood Nathan talked about when they decided that they could win elections and I think it was much I think it was conscious they did slip into it but they at a very early stage after the constitutional declaration that Nathan described after that referendum process they made a pretty clear decision that emergency law military trials security sector reform huge issues that had animated the protest movement were secondary concerns what mattered to them was the elections now they will defend themselves and say this was the quickest path to transition and there is some truth to that but what it did was diverted attention to a different type of process and so that's that's sort of the background of how we are here I would have expected at a transitional moment in a country's history which come about very rarely that political leaders might have thought slightly more than and broader than institutional self-interest and I think that didn't happen in Egypt and I think it's a recurring problem and one that will stick with us now we look at the results now I just came back from Egypt yesterday and obviously Nathan touched on the Salafis and I think the brotherhood is at expectations they shot for 40% they're going to be above that because these next two rounds they will perform better they're less hospitable territory for some of the liberal parties so I think we will see Islamist numbers going up in these next two rounds but it's the Salafis and Nathan touched on this as well but their performance in the list vote in the very for before individual candidates brought them a little bit back down to earth they were at 25% vote and that includes Cairo which is should be the sort of the sort of best electoral district for for liberal parties and so the Salafis have created quite a bit of concern and shock and it does now raise the prospect again about what are the Muslim Brotherhood's intentions they have a very clear hold on where parliamentary politics and the electoral and political discourse goes they don't need liberals to govern and if they so chose they can now order politics around a what is essentially an intra Islamist affair and I think that would be very bad for Egypt and I hope that that's not the decision they make they have made some noises in recent days that they will not align with in a coalition with the Salafis and I think that's hopeful but it doesn't necessarily tell us about what they will do going forward they have coordinated with the Salafis in these election campaigns they've tried to split up some districts it's been a somewhat acrimonious relationship they've had a long time suspicion Salafis has long had suspicion for the MB because of their dedication to the political process which was seen by some of them as a corruption of their of their religious ethos so this this is a key dynamic what what does the Muslim Brotherhood choose to do does it choose to ally with Salafis even tactically and some of this might be driven by what are the really insoluble issues facing Egypt when faced with really big problems a lot of times politics gets pushed to culture if you need quick wins and this parliament will eventually need that my big concern is that we see culture issues rise to the fore so people can actually say we've done xx and x you voted for us and we've been able to do something Egypt's economy is in desperate trouble and in those circumstances one could see a turn to populism and easy culture war issues go back one more step and looking at the liberal parties they didn't do particularly well it wasn't a complete disaster but they don't have the wellsprings of organizational infrastructure to fall back on that the Islamist parties do so to some extent it was always going to be very difficult this has been exacerbated by liberal infighting a lack of coordination a lack of tactical sophistication in terms of how to approach and exploit the political system and so we've seen some of those problems manifesting themselves in very selectural districts where I think liberals cannibalize their vote ran too many candidates and it's a function of what has been really dysfunctional politics on that side that side the liberal parties will also now I think be faced with a very distasteful prospect which is what their position will be with respect to the former NDP the former ruling regime party and talking to former NDP folks in Egypt they've always had a very sanguine position about their future and thinking that these liberal parties will come back to us because they will be stuck between the military and Islamists and coordination and cooperation with us is going to make too much sense and so this is something that has been very controversial for liberal parties and was part of the fragmentation I think in terms of forming these electoral lists in terms of inclusion of former NDP figures but it's something that we will see again on the agenda going forward and of course these sorts of divisions that we see help the staff they help the military the military can then triangulate between liberal parties and Islamist parties and offer each side inducements and I think continuing the fragmentation that we've seen and limiting the ability of these forces to work together now to do what is very important which is to dislodge the military from the political process and so you know can these political parties set aside some of these very big substantive differences to work on this also very important agenda and I think that's yet to be seen frankly and I'm fairly skeptical of the ability of the parties to do that one last thing I would just point out I think there's three very important things that we will see very quickly and will give us an indication about I think the Brotherhood's intentions and how they think about this transitional period Nathan mentioned some of them but government formation the staff has made very clear that the parliament does not have the ability to appoint this next government the MB has said that they the parliament should be able to do this second is the constitutional assembly the same sort of dynamic is at work and so I think it's going to be very important to see whether the Brotherhood takes an approach of frontal confrontation with the staff which they have not done to this point they have eschewed that and instead sought to work with them or whether they go back to negotiate and I think we will get a sense of how the MB thinks about its position in the transition I think from its approach to these two issues and of course lastly is the Constitution they've been very coy about what they want from the Constitution they've rejected what have been called these super constitutional principles ostensibly on the basis that the military has no right to intervene in such affairs and that this is the prerogative of the parliament what they haven't been clear about is what they want the Constitution to look like and I think what we don't know is what if the Brotherhood remains a conservative committed movement that sees itself primarily in broad social terms in terms of an incremental social project and whether that's still that's still an accurate description for how they want to see their transformation of Egyptian society that's the case they'll take a somewhat different approach to the Constitution and article two which says that the Sharia is the main source of legislation in Egypt will be enough but we don't know if that's the approach they're going to take or if they have more nakedly Islamist ambitions for the document and so I think that's another one of these things that we will see very early on that will give us an indication I think of how the Brotherhood wants to play its role in this transition and I emphasize the Brotherhood because frankly they are the pivotal player in this along with the military and so their decisions have outsized weight going forward okay before opening to the floor for questions I want to make one comment observation um what I you know we had these major revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt where people took to the streets and all of us watched in excitement and shock as authoritarian regimes that were very entrenched fell and the excitement of that moment was really that you had people that were just ordinary people claiming power for themselves and in that moment um there was a sense that what was at stake was um not um perhaps what we're discussing now but perhaps um you know prospects and uh demands for dignity uh social justice and inclusion um and instead of talking about how to sort of reform social contracts in Tunisia in Egypt we're now talking about um what will the Islamists do and what what are the politics around um the the Brotherhood around and and I I just want to make a comment that I find this um a rather unfortunate um development I think both Anata and uh the Brotherhood were accidental beneficiaries of these revolutions um they were able to be successful um because people of course trusted their their morality and trying to overcome the um the corruption of the prior regimes people I think probably felt the Brotherhood Anata these Islamist parties will bring ethical principles to the table but they were also very effective in um taking advantage of the competitive uh vote um Michelle Dunn I heard her speak recently she was an official observer of the elections in Egypt she said that um what she notices that people when they went to vote um they didn't know who to vote for um and the campaigning which was supposed to have stopped prior to 48 hours prior to to the vote um continued and people were the you had aggressive campaigning um while people were at the polls I I think that um the point of this is to say that you know while we are engaged in a discussion of the Brotherhood and the Islamist and and power grab um in fact there's an underlying agenda at play in these societies um that that have been led by the revolutionary forces and I don't think that those that their agenda will die out but the question is how will it be articulated and will this uh the struggle between uh secularism and Islam overcome that agenda um and I want to ask a question which uh Nathan sort of um provoked um Nathan you said that the the optimism is that there are all these vocal forces the labor movements uh uh NGOs um syndicates that will continue to force their agenda um but who will they force it towards um what what uh what is the mechanism now and who is the counterpart to to demand change is the only option to go back to Tahir and and demand a full and complete revolution um and then the second question is for all the panelists and that's related to US foreign policy the US provides uh 1.3 billion um annual 1.2 billion in annual average average annual military assistance to Egypt um the US is a major power in uh in in Egypt and um it's so far been relatively quiet in addressing SCAF's continued hold and assertion of of power long term it made a statement calling for a transfer to civilian rule but it hasn't really specified um what its policy is and SCAF hasn't specified the date for its transfer of uh for the holding of presidential elections so given you know this vague and messy scenario and the US important role you know what what should the US policy be going forward thank you um if i can before i take that question if i can talk about um just the accountability and sort of who you or where Egyptians can focus their efforts towards i think on the you know Nathan Brown's optimism is SCAF is interestingly um amenable to what i would say suggestions or changes and two of those examples certainly are with respect to the latest protests in Tahir Square and solidifying the presidential elections but the other one that i have personal experiences is these right of Egyptian expats to vote i mean we lobbied and lobbied and lobbied including the SCAF and they were amenable to those changes based upon public pressure i also think SCAF and the parliament you know and if it is the brotherhood that's the dominant force there and it will be probably are going to be amenable to these types of activities and now that the media is free they can go out and write what they want they're going to be sensitive to that in parliament uh again the protests in Tahir Square nobody can stop that you know nobody can stop the power of 90 million Egyptian citizens and also this at the advocacy efforts that's why what i was talking about advocacy and advocating on behalf of what their interests are in front of parliament is going to have to become a new found profession if you will in Egypt um back to with the US policy well you know as we all know with respect to US government assistance it's not just the administration who has the purse strings i know from having worked in congress it is congress and you know i think congress is probably just as curiously lost as the administration is on this um you know congress is often driven by political motivations and all they know right now is that some scary islamist parties may be in power in Egypt without really knowing and really wanting to know anything further about what those policies are and they probably don't because the brotherhood doesn't know how they're going to govern um and so i think we're i think that congress is in a wait and see attitude that they're purposefully withholding the appropriate aid before they see what happens whatever what happens is and that the obama administration is really in serious talks about where they're going with this having to be very careful by the way because frankly a lot of folks in egypt think that the obama administration is speaking out of both sides of their mouth you know on one hand they were really really sitting on the fence when the revolution first occurred and supporting a longtime 30 40 year ally and yet on the other hand they talked about freedom of democracy and obama gave this great speech in Cairo and you know when i talk to a lot of the youth what they said to me is we don't think obama is any different than george bush is i mean a lot of that uh opinion is permeating and so i see a lot of this frankly talking out of both sides of their mouth on this issue and that's you know i'm not in power right now but that's a real difficult position to be in uh person also i want to sort of respond i i agree with all of the analysis that i've heard so far but i want to push back actually a little bit on on tone because i think there's something that that i do disagree with in tone much less in substance with what mike said with with your comment because it almost sets up sort of a principled revolutionaries versus power politicking brotherhood and i don't think that's the best way to look at it it's not not because i mean you know my own political sympathies would be far more worth the revolutionaries than with the brotherhood but the brotherhood has its clear principles as well it's there they're acting in in in a principle as well as a purely political manner and the revolutionary i mean i talked to plenty of people on the liberal and secular side of the of the spectrum are people who were involved in the revolution who said point blank that their major concern for instance about moving to elections very quickly was um that it would basically lead to an islamist victory so everybody was playing pretty hard politics from the beginning um the um um and everybody had their principles as well i mean i don't see a way to distinguish among the various groups that way in terms of where these groups go it to position themselves in the or to press their demand one of the big problems about the the the uh current uh egypt's current political status is in a sense authorities kind of unclear is it's clear that the staff has ultimate decision-making power it's not quite clear what the cabinet can do what individual ministries can do this consortia government which you know is supposed to be you know given given some additional uh constitutional authority with an amendment of the constitutional declaration um and that's going to be a problem for these groups i suspect we'll see some evolution in this it has been the case that if you could if you could get everybody together in tafri or you could probably push the staff it's also true that if you had kind of a non-security related demand you could probably push the staff a little bit um but there will be a new venue and that'll be the parliament and the parliament it does not have exclusive right over legislation but it does have an it will be able to write laws and i suspect that an awful lot of the groups have been focusing their attention so far on how it is that they want the legal framework for their sector of society to be governed so the parliament will be i i suspect i mean it was even under the old um rubber stamp parliament to place for people to hold demonstrations in the last years of the mubarak regime and so i suspect you'll see basically various groups you know having sort of a menu of choices um um and uh and you know they can they can demonstrate the cabinet they can demonstrate at the parliament if they're really gutsy they can go straight to the staff but that's kind of that can be kind of uh uh dangerous in terms of foreign policy i mean i agree kind of with what you said about how we're perceived perceived in egypt to me the real question for the obama administration is not simply how to have a dialogue with the scap and what to say but where to say it and what we've seen i think very recently is a willingness to move uh a couple things that were expressed privately into the public realm um and and the statement essentially on the transition to civilian rule was fairly tough message to send um at least to um at least to the scap i don't know if it was heard by the broad egyptian public that way it may have been kind of a little bit subtle to communicate in terms of public diplomacy but to me it's sort of the question is not simply you know as i say where you push uh but but how hard you push and how publicly you push to touch on scap i mean i i would never talk about scap being amenable to anything because they're not um scap is uh terrified of street protests they understand that they can't they actually have it's a sort of wizard of awe scenario they can't control security in the country police aren't back out in force they fear foreign agendas is what is stirring up what is non islamist mobilization mobilization to them and in mass terms can only be an islamist phenomenon and so their alarm bells go off when there are hundreds of thousands of people in the street and the islamists aren't involved um and we've seen that yes they will change tack but they only do so when again hundreds of thousands of people are out in the street and the entire opposition and political class is unified that doesn't happen very often um when those things happen sure they do they they they're bad authoritarians they change their mind all the time they they have trial balloons they change their mind in three days and come out with three different positions um they're pretty incoherent their roadmap has been incoherent but um they only respond to that and that's a difficult place to put your politics and it affected how the transition played out because people were suspended between politics of a normal's variety and protest and you saw this tension and particularly among some of the liberal groups with people saying why are you doing this go organize you're getting beaten up by the brotherhood you're going to lose these elections and yet the only way for course corrections to happen was by this very public form of protest so that dynamic i don't know that it's finished i i think it's not i mean i think it's it's it's uh there's too much at stake still and unknown in the transition and this is clearly been a way to change this gaff's mind so i imagine that i i don't think tahir is dead in the sense that i think we will see further uh public protest um the other thing about tahir to remember it was always a minority movement it was a minority movement on february 11th and it was a minority movement on february 12th state media is hugely yes there's free media state media mass bureau is hugely influential and can move minds uh and can rally support behind institutional governmental positions um the side the so-called silent majority is important but it is i think it's it's it's important one to realize that it is a majority i think but two that a committed minority who's willing to organize and be out on the streets does have outsized influence so that's an it's an important dynamic one to realize where tahir and the protest movement fits in the bigger picture um but also that i don't it's not it still is not a majority position there's a lot of fatigue with protest lastly on on us foreign policy i think part of it as an athon was alluding to was who and how they were addressing uh the issues and part of that was a theory of the case the case was we have strong ties with scoff they're the only party able to bring about a transition we need to hold them close at a time of instability uh and if we do not if we go out in public with this uh then we give scoff and out to talk about foreign meddling that has been the theory of the case um one problem with that is it looks like mobaric redux it looks like we are signed off on whatever scoff wants to do and so even from a perception standpoint i think that's a problematic place to be and so i think shifting a little bit and making clear what our red lines are is important and not so much i think even because i think it can change policy i think scoff is pretty dead set they're not budging on military trials they're not budging on emergency law but at the very least to create some defense for the accusation of outright hypocrisy that we are now we've learned nothing from the past 10 months and that we're simply taking position as we were before mobaric fell and so i think it's important to note what our red lines are now that brings back brings out another question about what what happens when those red lines are crossed and i think that's a much more difficult issue because straight up conditionality is is a very blunt tool to use in terms of what is an important relationship okay thank you um we we have just a short amount of time 15 minutes for questions so i'm gonna take uh several at one time um we'll start in the back of the room here um anna hi i'm anna newbie with the project on middle east democracy my question is for professor brown um you wrote an interesting article last week sort of arguing that the muslim brotherhood kind of succumbed to temptation by seeking additional parliamentary seats um but that in the meantime they may have sort of acquired too much power for their own good um looking ahead to presidential elections the brotherhood is sort of repeatedly insisted that they're not seeking the presidency but at this point it's kind of anyone's guess um what would it mean for egyptian politics if the brotherhood fielded a candidate for the presidency okay um gentlemen in the back in the red jack warner thinks too sustainable power is it too early now to start to identify really key individuals in these parties in the military in the parliament that are going to lead the fight for the constitution and are actually going to be you know become you know through the election process you know in power either as president or in very critical positions i mean we're talking parties but let's start finding out are there are key individuals now that are emerging that we can really identify okay and just a side note irony is on the association if you're doing for you and you're doing a transparency and you can't identify your own partners it's not good you can't use the cup you can't use the cover of safety and so thank you out there working we got the point thank you um we we're going to come to the front of the room here we have one gentleman here hi um i'm russia shihab a former ndi uh... employee and also juli from iraq my question is what do we expect from this um new government is officially the parliament in terms of their filing policy either in the arab's middle east countries and internationally uh can put it a little bit specific what is is are we expect any change in terms of egypt israel relation also i would add what is um gonna be the relation with iran thank you okay and uh we had one up here yeah mark johnson fellowship of reconciliation i'm interested in the assessment of the emerging world structurally for um civil society organizations out april 6th etc what's their role in this political process might okay no that's uh the panelist answer okay um i'll take the question on identifying of key individuals who will probably emerge to um be in this council if you will of 100 folks um i think there are individuals uh where we can certainly focus our work on that will probably emerge to be individuals who will sit on that council um some of it will come of course from the existing political parties who are victorious others and we've certainly heard this from scoff uh who's in control the process right now may not be later but that there will be individuals from the outside and what does that mean the outside means groups in civil society uh ngos leaders this is not a new field there have been individuals that have been doing this work for 10 15 20 years some of them frankly who sat a lot of time in jail as a result of their activities and so the these are individuals that are well known to the Egyptian society and community and have a reputation and long-standing history for doing this kind of work and i don't think it would be any big secret i don't think anybody's out there nor are we ready to identify those individuals but a lot of that work is being done behind the scenes as far as transparency and accountability yeah we wish we could identify our partners but the reality is in this environment right now and maybe it will become better after the presidential elections and things become clearer we're happy to idea our partners but our partners suffer things that we don't suffer sitting here in the united states and have for many years and we don't want to put them under any jeopardy i don't think it's giving anybody any knowledge or basis to say who these partners all all we have to know is that they've agreed to work with us and that we're providing with advice and counsel that has been extraordinarily valuable to them for their work on the ground um let me focus most my response on the question about presidential elections um the brotherhood's position is that they will not run a candidate they've said that over and over they've never said that they wouldn't support a candidate however and i think that it's that that is probably most likely going to be their position if you look at it from the brotherhood's perspective um it seems to me what they what we know now is that they perhaps in a uh you know can can turn out you know something like a third of the egyptian electorate um that doesn't mean that they can elect a candidate on their own especially if everybody else is allied against them but it does mean that they can be kingmaker and that's a very attractive position and it's actually something that they've done for instance in professional association elections at times and say we'll take the board we'll have the head of the professional association be somebody from outside the movement but we'll who will be elected with our support so that's the pattern that i would still expect to be repeated but the question was what would it mean if they actually did succumb to temptation or as i said get become intoxicated these aren't great great metaphors for an Islamist movement but but but let's just say that they did um yeah intoxicate on too much juice yes um i think it would further the polarization very very deeply and my hunch is it would make the rest of the political system and perhaps even you know um um the uh uh scoff itself swing or swing behind another presidential candidate i don't know that um but but you know that might bring the rest of the in a sense we've never had an election in Egypt in which sort of the state apparatus was neutral and if basically the state apparatus swung in support of a of somebody other than a brotherhood candidate it would be hard for me to see that brotherhood candidate winning so um but that's you know i'm just sort of playing this out that's my guess is what would happen and i but it's also important to to remember that we don't really know what this presidency is post revolution even in the constitutional declaration it's not quite clear exactly what the authority of the presidency is so it's not clear how much of a prize this is to be uh to be won very quickly the question about foreign policy in the new parliament i expect that there won't be won right because the parliament has very uncertain legislative authority to begin with to try and legislate i mean our congress tries to legislate foreign policy and usually has does kind of a clumsy job i don't expect a new parliament to be able to do so easily i expect that there will be plenty of thunder from the parliament with the sort of like uh Hannah talked about sort of going to cultural politics yes and going to foreign policy will also be fun to give kind of all sorts of speeches on on on these kinds of issues but i don't expect them to have at least over the short term much impact on on the actual policy of the country yeah like Nathan i think i would be shocked if the brotherhood field to the candidate i think that's an institutional red line that they are simply not going to cross i think they understand that that would be a real shock to the system in a way that would be really detrimental in terms of key individuals i think the presidential candidates are one pole of power in that field i still think amon musa is very well positioned to to win elections i think you know they they still see themselves as a frontrunner i think uh there are a constellation of other individuals like and some of the other presidential contenders that i think there are some key political leaders emerging but it's also it's a very it's a very difficult process egypt is a very hierarchical rigid society there's a huge generation gap and this is something that i think we'll see play out over the next years and decades really it's a huge generation gap across the board in all egyptian institutions we do see it in egypt's politics and it's one of the reasons why i think there's been a disconnect between some younger people who led some of the street protests and the political parties and political institutions like nathan i don't think we will see huge shifts in foreign policy positions i don't think camp david nothing is going to happen to it the military is going to have regardless of how it plays out military will have a very important saying how inform policy decisions we're not going to see a brough strategic shifts but what we have seen already is that public opinion in egypt now matters and if you're israel that's a really different calculation to make you used to be able to take for granted that the mubarak government would support your your positions cast led in post uprising egypt that's a very different reaction and i think something that that israel will have to take into consideration in terms of civil society there's a lot of civil society groups now some of them are oscillating between wanting to be political groups and we've seen people from april 6 running for office some people want to be grassroots organizations so i think there's going to be and of course there's some of the older established groups so i think there's going to be something of a sifting i think they've got an important role but it's somewhat unclear at the moment because you do have people who have different inclinations some want to be directly involved in politics some want to be involved in grassroots somewhat to be involved in politics from a remove endorsing candidates only as opposed to fielding so i think that's something that's in flux and i emerge in the in the coming months and years okay we'll take two more questions phallid yeah i can comment i'll just say one comment on iran i think when the revolution first occurred scalf came out and there was this outreach if you will to iran pretty public outreach to iran and then what did you see the united states going ballistic on it and particularly now we're seeing a lot of sanctions on the banking industry and full force core press on iran would you see backpedal backpedal to the point now where but on that point that was nabil arabi it was a foreign minister it wasn't scalf and that's an important distinction to note scalf is very stability oriented they're not going to be making sudden movements nabil arabi came in uh said he was going to open gaza up said he wanted official relations with iran you know he's been kicked upstairs to the arab league now and i think that's not a coincidence so again with with with this new government in egypt you'll see less overt hostility to iran you won't get the mubarak policy but it will be a different it will be somewhat different but it's not going to be a warm relationship because egypt and iran are strategic competitors in the end and in the end the us helps parse strings on the money and that's where it's that's where it's focused in the end it's all about the money okay halled that that mic that you mentioned and and that that i tend to think might be a key variable to in in going forward in how things may end up the the the brotherhood youth that broke with the brotherhood early on in this process didn't seem to have much of an impact on on yeah it seems it didn't seem to have much of an impact on the brotherhood's performance on election day and at the same time those youth who went informed i think was the current the current party they didn't seem to do terribly well on the other hand i guess my question is given the role that the youth have played in general and their potential numbers as a as a force politically potentially do you believe does anyone do any of you believe that that their kind of shunning of the electoral process as a whole although clearly there were exceptions um did that have an impact on the liberals performance or on the the other groups would they would they have done better um had there been a much more you know active involvement by the youth at least as the foot soldiers for example of some of these campaigns one more question gentleman in the back here can you wait for the mic hi i'm um michael davis with universal human rights network and my question really is to the rule of law group i i know that you're serving as advisors to various groups there but i wonder if you're also doing anything to educate legislators here i think so many in our congress view egypt only through the prism of their relationship with israel and don't have a notion of the aspiration of the egyptian people so i'd like to know that thank you okay let the panelists make closing remarks and response great um on your answer uh no urla the egyptian american rule of law associations mandate is not to lobby the united states congress but i will tell you that there is an organization in the works of egyptian americans whose purpose will be that particular purpose will be educate lawmakers on that um halled your question certainly is a good one um and i pose this to one of the groups on the ground on sunday uh the shunning of electoral process did that have an impact um by and large uh his his particular opinion was no that you have to remember the brotherhood the salafists were well organized for a very long time okay whether it was in education social aspects they kept running and running and running and through false sham elections kept losing but remember they had practice um what happened after uh after the revolution in february you remember the us rushed in there with our democracy organizations trying to help the youth organize and it became difficult because purely we ran out of time there was no time to teach people how to organize how to get a party platform together how to put up candidates and what they had they felt like they ran out of time at this point so um i just think it was even if they decided to vote i just think they were in such a disadvantage they were not able to put people forward and win the seats they did the ones that they they did win they did okay on but remember too one thing we're forgetting i mean there's going to be term limits here there's going to be you know parliament's going to serve i think right now the way it's written what four years or something or five years yeah so you know what it's just going to be like here if they don't do their job they're not going to be elected again and you know that's the beauty a democratic or not of elections you don't do your job people don't vote for you so maybe in the five years we can help work on the liberal aspects we can help the youth organize five years is a long time to teach them how to organize and get into political campaigns um on the youth question i would i would answer somewhat similarly that essentially you know electoral politics is all about organization getting your people out to vote brotherhood youth the kind of the comparative liberal and were always i mean they were frank about this they were a minority within the brotherhood itself a small minority within the brotherhood itself and that wasn't what they were about so so the the idea that they were kind of going to be you know sort of taking over the brotherhood no they were they were dealt with fairly firmly some of them kicked out of the organization others of them brought to heal some of them some of them leaving that was never going to make the organization remake the organization short term and again with with youth in other organizations the idea that you could sort of instantly create some kind of national political network i mean i'm not sure it couldn't have been done but done but it would have been very very difficult to do and my hunch is it probably could have only been done by linking up with strong already organized constituencies and the only one that i saw that was available at the time was labor and nobody did that nobody there was no egyptian labor party that really arose out of this that would have been the one possibility people who basically had numbers in organization nationwide so when that didn't happen essentially um um uh no you go to the you go to the old existing organizations and then there's two essentially the cellophane networks and and and and the brotherhood they're the only ones that are able to make the transition that said um that doesn't mean youth don't make a difference and i would go uh what to what mike said earlier um at at the level of electoral politics no there's no real immediate effect of kind of a youth revolution at a cultural level my impression and this is just raw impression from you know quick from three quick trips to egypt is again this is a different country there is the kind of of of deference um that that you talked about is really fraying um and you've got younger generations within each egyptian organization or institution who feel basically that they're living within kind of sometimes within a mini-mubarak regime and i think there's real pressure for change within the society you're going to see this expressed not necessarily in the next election but over the next five or ten years yeah and i think it's important part of the problem is our frame of reference i mean we're still in 2011 you know you the the the tayaran mastery the the current i think it's it's a very important thing i mean it's uh it's a uh you know the brotherhood can still uh count on many cadres who will not question a thing but there are really important voices that have been purged uh that have left the left the organization um and you see that bottom up pressure uh with people not willing to tolerate internal authoritarianism you know top-down uh answers no democratic institutions within the party and i think that's something that's going to play out over time and some of the people that have left are important figures and i think um it's just important to realize that i think this is going to take some time as this whole transition is and and frankly in the end not that many people boycotted elections and if i can make one last point on the muslim brotherhood i do as opposed to nathan i do put a lot of emphasis on the brothers and i don't think it's unfair they are by far the most coherent political force in egypt they've long wanted these responsibilities they've groomed themselves through these responsibilities their performance in the transition has been disappointing uh and i think um and that's a problem uh they were the first party to choose i think politics over unified political demands and i think that set in motion a lot of the fragmentation that we saw afterward um their tone on sectarian issues if you are the main islamist party wanting to introduce more religion into egyptian public life you don't have the opportunity to just take a pass when sectarian strife spikes when churches are being burnt down you don't get to say yes foreign hands and that's it you have a higher responsibility you're a major political player and if you want it to be treated as such you have to act it and and i think that's a reasonable position to take not scare mongering um not sort of rampant fear about the beards but looking at what they do in egyptian society and judging them by their political positions uh and are they really committed to pluralism i want to see they say they are and and we'll see in the next months but um i don't think it's it's a scare tactics to wonder about that i think it's an open question okay um well i think obviously we have a lot more to look forward to in terms of seeing how things unfold in egypt i want to thank everyone for coming today and i want to thank our panelists for shedding light on the situation and and hope we can continue having discussions um as things you know looking forward to um 2015 and beyond in terms of egypt's transition thank you very much