The 30-year anniversary of the January 18-19 1977 bread riots comes at a moment charged with speculations about the possibility of their recurrence.
Will there be a similar widespread riot as a result of the growing social crisis and the massive strikes which reached record highs last year?Diverse groups are posing this question; some more anxiously than others.
Some believe that this would be the only hope for real socio-economic change; the kind of change they’ve been dreaming of, which naturally puts them in opposition to the current ruling regime.
Yet at the same time, those who are uneasy about the possibility of such riots taking place are not necessarily proponents or supporters of the regime. While some are worried about their own interests, others are wary about the rampant destruction that may result from a social explosion combined with blind anger, which would ultimately lead to limitless violence.
There’s a missing link between the logic of those who dream of change without heeding the way this change will happen, and those who fear the kind of destruction that could make tomorrow worse than today.
This missing link could be decisive in the debate around the possibility of the recurrence of another similar intifada, considering that Egypt’s social structures and the prevailing patterns of interaction between its various classes do not portent the possibility of such large-scale riots.
We must, however, remember that the 1977 riots had started in factories in Helwan and from there spread like wildfire to Cairo, Giza, Alexandria and finally Beheira. They only ended after the decision to hike bread prices was reversed and infantry units and military police troops were dispersed all over the country.
It is unlikely however, that anything on that scale will happen today, even if the number of strikes and protests increases, as it most certainly will. But Egyptian society today is very different from what it was 30 years ago.
Mechanically linking these protests with the possibility of the outbreak of massive riots has no basis in our current social reality, which is more fragmented than ever before. The overriding feature of contemporary Egypt is the disintegration of interests, not only between the various social groups, but also within each group.
There can never be mass action without one unifying cause to bring together large numbers of people from various social classes. The price hikes 30 years ago was this kind of rallying cause which created a common ground between all sectors, the majority of which relied entirely on a fixed salary, most probably in the public sector.
This is no longer the case for most Egyptians and so the price hikes don’t have the same effect they had 30 years ago.
If the objective of growing protest is merely to secure specific financial gains and not to confront the effects of general price increases, then none of these stances indicate that this issue will become a massive, unifying cause.
Dr Waheed Abdel Meguidis an expert at Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
