The Hunt for the Muslim Brotherhood: What Next?

The clash with the Muslim Brothers carried out by the regime currently in power in Egypt is total. It is not merely a question of the numbers and the persistence of the repression, which gives no room for any hypothesis of reconciliation, or of partial resettlement. What is total, differently from what occurred from the middle of the 1950s onwards, is the participation of sectors of the Egyptian state that at that time were considered super partes, above all the judiciary. For the Muslim Brotherhood, which reached the summit of power after the Tahrir Square revolution, a new era of repression has begun, and, as from July 2013, a new opacity in its organisational structure towards the public has developed. It is not only, however, the military-backed regime which has put the Brotherhood in crisis, but also regional geopolitics, with the hard line espoused by the conservative front in the Arabian peninsula led by Saudi Arabia. In addition, the internal evolution of the Brotherhood, an evolution which began in 2005 and which stopped half-way, has also played a role.

Paper produced within the framework of the IAI project "Egypt in transition".