After 6 years of his rule, how does Sisi evaluate the performance of the people?

At first glance, the question of how President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi assessed the performance of the Egyptian people after 6 years of the beginning of his rule of the country appears inverted and cynically, but the follower of the path of power management for many files and issues may find justification in this question.

Since the beginning of his rule in June 2014, Sisi has not ceased to blame the people as a major - if not lonely - component of the slow pace of what the Authority calls efforts of political, economic and social reform.

Thus, we find a stream of statements, whether by the president, government officials or media affiliated with the authority, that criticize what it calls the lack of popular awareness, the lack of perseverance, and the lack of entrepreneurship among Egyptians, as well as the great denunciator on which the economic crisis is attached: the population density resulting from the lack of identification Offspring.

In front of accusing the people of negligence or not doing what should be done towards urgent issues such as economic growth, or even non-urgent ones such as obesity and obesity, we find the president himself and those affiliated with his authority talking about the many achievements that the citizen of course did not have a role in achieving, as they are purely for their Sisi maker.

Thus, after 6 years of military rule, Egypt faces an artificial gap between presidential accomplishments that the citizen does not touch and popular laziness, which the president sees as an obstacle to the prosperity of the country. In this case, the ruler's assessment of the people's performance becomes something beyond the framework of ridicule to a reality experienced by the Egyptians.

Pre-judgment

It seems that putting the blame on the shoulders of the citizen was an approach to Sisi before he even opened the way for him to the presidency, so by returning to his statements at the time when he was the Minister of Defense during the era of the late President Mohamed Morsi, we find him justifying the failure and trying to cast his reasons on the people.

During the opening of a medical complex for the armed forces about a month before the military coup on July 3, 2013, Sisi said that the economic crisis was caused by the citizen, saying: "Because the Egyptian people want nothing but it is not his concern to know where these funds come from."

During the election campaign for his first candidacy, Sisi was distrusted by the people who would rule him shortly after. In his first television interview, in which he was supposed to talk about his electoral program, he said frankly, “I will not leave an opportunity for people to act on their own.”

Looking back a little, the general’s view of the people is very clear. Through a leaked recording from December 2012, Sisi spoke to a number of his comrades in the army saying, “The army is like a big brother, or a father who has a somewhat failed son, and he cannot understand the facts of life. .. Will the father kill the son? Or will he always be a haven for him ... I will be patient until my son understands the facts of life. "

Blame the people

"I did what I did, and you did not work on you ... I speak to you with taste, I do not want to upset you ... they failed a lot, which is the cause of the problem ... Your problem is that you will solve it, not me" .. This statement that Sisi made in January 2017 appears to summarize the man’s view For himself and the people.

Those who listen to this statement are prepared that the speaker is a scholar, preacher or human development expert, and the others are neglected and do not bear responsibility. Interestingly, when Sisi said this, he was responding to questions about the fate of a promise he made during his election campaign, that all the affairs of the country be improved in 6 months starting from the first day in office.

And the president added, "You said that you will be saved in 6 months ... all who asked of you did you do it, Egyptians? Two years, with delicacy and taste, so as not to disturb you. Population growth is one of the most important real obstacles in our progress."

The population increase was repeatedly presented as an obstacle to the achievements of the authority in many presidential talks, to the extent that Sisi equated them with the threat of terrorism, so he stated in July 2017 that "the two biggest dangers facing Egypt are terrorism and overpopulation, because the population increase reduces Egypt's chances that it appreciates aspiration To old. "

Al-Sisi was not satisfied with the performance of the people with regard to the austerity measures suffered by the citizen. In July 2018, he mocked the Egyptians' behavior and spending during Ramadan, saying, "Well, are you doing what? In Ramadan? This is a quarter of Eating Petermi."

He added, "It is not my desire to tire people out, taking into account I told you in the first, I will not be able to alone ... You said ok ... you will tire with me. You said ok ... and in the text of the railway you say no, no players."

Along the same path, Sisi removed from himself the crisis of high prices, blaming individual people for responsibility, and he considered, in a televised speech to him in March 2019, the traders the main reason for raising the price of the commodity, calling on citizens to refrain from buying anything that raises its price.

In the case of confronting terrorism, media outlets supporting the authority and security experts considered responsible for failing to interfere with citizens to report suspects involved in terrorist acts, or even not to arrest terrorists before they started carrying out their attacks, as happened in the Badrashin ambush.

Al-Sisi's evaluation of the Egyptians went beyond political and economic problems, as he began talking about their weight, and his statements about weight gain and the necessity of a healthy diet were repeated.

The first time that President Sisi talked about increasing weights was in November 2018, when he commented on the weight of college students, saying, "Boys and girls at the university must have less weight ... the countries of my boys, and I want my children to look at them in Lebanon, the text of weight I want to faint."

AlNahda dam

In addition to all the crises that the country suffers from, the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam file emerges as an issue that goes to the disaster’s borders in the event that Addis Ababa starts filling the dam, which will result in a decrease in Egypt's share of water.

Although Sisi signed the Principles Agreement in March 2015, under which Egypt ceded its historical rights to the waters of the Nile, we find that during his November November 2017 talks about the Renaissance Dam negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, he blames Parliament and the government, He did not forget to ask the people to conserve water.

And recently, as negotiations with Addis Ababa reached a dead end, pro-Authority media began to remember a group of people who had been absent, the opposition, to assess their role in solving the dam crisis.

The journalist Ahmed Moussa asked, "On my responsibility," about the role of those he called the corrupt elite, and he said, "Why did ElBaradei and his associates not talk about the water crisis? Where is the corrupt elite? The Ethiopian media mobilizes public opinion to defend his country, and the Brotherhood's media practices militarization against us."

Thoughtful planning

Al-Sisi's delinquency to assess the people is not a random matter but rather a plan, according to the opinion of the director of the Egyptian Center for Media and Public Opinion Mustafa Khodari, since the president relied on receiving periodic recommendations for managing and reorienting public opinion, from the Gutman Center for Public Opinion of the Israeli Institute for Democracy, on He said.

Khudari added to Al Jazeera Net that these recommendations drive the use of several strategies, the most important of which is the strategy of manipulating emotions such as spreading fear, hope and emotion, the distraction and projection strategy, and the strategy of gradualism in decisions.

Another strategy, according to Khudari, is the childish public opinion, in which a childish, populist discourse is used that draws the public to irrational spaces of dialogue, in which he can convince a segment of society that another sector is responsible for its suffering.

On the impact of this approach on citizens, the public opinion expert saw that everything that Sisi did in previous years did not affect the largest segment of society, indicating the failure of the system to mobilize the voters for any of the electoral events that he held.

According to the latest field studies carried out by the Egyptian Center for Media and Public Opinion Studies, Sisi’s support rate in Egyptian society has not exceeded 3%.

Al-Sisi disavows

Khudari pointed out that Sisi had lost since the events of September 2019 his ability to fully control the reins of government, and sovereign institutions became partners in the decision, especially regarding the crucial decisions, and therefore Sisi sought to use some private institutions to try to return to his first position.

"This was evident in the intensity of media posts and his attempt to export the problems resulting from his old policies to the civil side of his regime, as an attempt to evade the effects of his rule in the previous period."

Regarding the possibility of holding Al-Sisi accountable, despite his repudiation of his being the cause of the failure, the director of the Egyptian Center said that the president's supporters and external advisers have consistently recommended him to export legal responsibility to others.

He added that he threw the most important decisions on the parliament, such as the maritime demarcation agreements that he abandoned the islands of Tiran and Sanafir and gas reserves in the Mediterranean.

But at the same time he fell into some grave mistakes, such as signing agreements that excessive the right of Egypt to the Nile water in favor of Ethiopia. Khudari expected that the day would come when Al-Sisi was legally held accountable for all his decisions, the most important of which was to drop the democratic experience in Egypt and seize power as crimes that do not fall under the statute of limitations according to international laws, as well as the neglect of Egypt and the impoverishment of its people.