three years ago, to the surprise of both Arab intellectuals locked in their ivory towers that Western experts expected the passivity of the masses and their little desire for change and democracy, the Egyptian people following that of Tunisia, went to the streets and placed low in a fortnight a dictatorship that seemed unshakable. The peaceful nature of transformations - albeit with martyrs, but large-scale massacres - stunned the world.
Three years later, skepticism and disappointment have taken over. The overthrow of the first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, and the establishment of an authoritarian regime in the shadow of the military using mass arrests and systematic torture, worry.
With hindsight, even on how to understand what really happened in Egypt in early 2011? Was it a revolution? The ease with which President Hosni Mubarak's party has created illusions. Because if the president left the scene without too much difficulty, but also because most of the ruling class knew he had to sacrifice to keep its privileges. Large fortunes and businessmen, often corrupt, the "deep state", including police, senior bureaucracy are resigned to accept the resignation of a dictator become annoying to try to keep their sinecures, to avoid revolution of greater magnitude.
In the land of the Nile, the victory represented by the departure of Mubarak did not mark the demise of the former state. The reform of it, first of Ministry of Interior, the answer to the aspirations of social justice of the population (as we remember the power of workers strikes 2006-2009) required a vision short and medium term. But the opposition forces have been unable to formulate a realistic plan and a strategy of gradual transformation of the state apparatus that would have averted the principal officials of the former regime. It was one of the strengths and weaknesses of the movement of January-February 2011: they had no definite program.
If we compare what happened in the Arab world revolutions known to the twentieth century, it should be noted that there did not exist (and it still does not exist) a political party or ideology capable of mobilizing the masses (as in Russia in 1917 or Iran in 1978-1979) to break the old state apparatus and build a new one, "to make a clean sweep of the past." This observation, with some regret that others rejoice, does not change in the years to come. Arab revolutions look more like a process, with their progress and setbacks, to a major upheaval marked by the "big night."
In this process, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who participated in the demonstrations of January-February 2011, behaved in conservative force, trying to find a compromise with the old regime, whether the direction of the army or the police. It is ironic (and tragic) that is the interior minister appointed by ousted President Morsi orchestrating the bloody repression against the Brotherhood. Finally, by their errors and sectarianism, they even managed to restore the old regime in the eyes of many Egyptians, who finally found the intervention of the army justified.
But despite the support given to departing the military, despite the repression (or because of it), the new government, simple facade of the high command of the army, will struggle to consolidate its position. in the economic and social field (the country now lives thanks to the Saudi aid and the Gulf), nor of the freedoms the power meets the demands of the movement for January-February 2011.
In a famous book, Infantile Disorder communism ("leftism") (1920), Vladimir Lenin defined a revolutionary situation: "It is only when" those below "do not want and that" those of above "can not continue to live in the old way, it is only then that the revolution can triumph. "If we stick to these criteria, the situation in Egypt and the Arab world is revolutionary, but the path will be a different transformation pathway of the twentieth century.