This week commemorates a wide-range of demonstrations, which started in late June 2013 and ended up with President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, then defence minister, declaring on 3 July the isolation of former Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi.
This day was neither planned nor coincidental; it was the natural result of the popular movement which preceded it, according to Morsi Attallah in state-owned Al-Ahram. To him, the army picked up the signal from the people that they needed to preserve their country’s identity from the Muslim brotherhood’s “religious fascism.”
Protests against the brotherhood on 30 June were meant to stop them from pushing the country into relapse, wrote Al-Ahram’s Gamal Zaida. “It wasn’t easy to stand in face of a religious group’s control over a modern state,” he added, saying that today, people should not remain in the nostalgia phase, but rather work on developing the country through production, education, and boosting investment in tourism and new technologies sectors.
For his part, editor-in-chief of the private Al-Shorouk newspaper, noted that the situation nowadays is that most people are unsatisfied with the burden of economic reform polices undertaken by the government. However, their discontent is not turned into a movement on the streets, despite the deployment of security forces earlier in the week in coincidence with the political events commemoration. Emad El-Din Hussein opinionated that although people are not eager to take risks at the moment, their silence should not be misunderstood by the regime as an agreement to its practices.
On a different note, the World Cup and national team problems remain a widely discussed topic in the Egyptian media.
In the privately-owned Al-Masry Al-Youm, Abdul Moneim Emara argued that football star Mohamed Salah’s problem seem to be about politics and not sports, as he complained from being taken advantage to by the Egyptian Football Association, saying that’s what at stake here is his patriotic feeling.
Also reflecting on the political side of things, Mohamed Aboul Ghar wrote in Al-Masry Al-Youm that things went from just disappointment over defeat to public anger, accusations of corruption, and even treason. Aboul Ghar demanded more transparency regarding the claims, criticising what he described as “openly corrupt” people who are making public appearance and presenting themselves as supporters of the president.
As for Al-Ahram’s Adel Sabry, the World Cup revealed how much interests come on top of pointing out to how media and advertising took advantage of the events and how fans had to pay, in order to be able to watch the games, further accusing the competition of being politicised and referees being unfair to the benefit of interests.
