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Beginning with the 2011 Egyptian revolution, through the parliamentary election, the presidential election, and the unsettled situation that followed, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had been the main force contesting, at times reluctantly, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and other established centers of the former Hosni Mubarak regime for political power in Egypt. The Supreme Council made a series of moves aimed at minimizing the Brotherhood's influence and depriving it of its newly acquired institutional power base. The post-Mubarak ruling establishment, attempting to thwart the Brotherhood's claim to governing, went as far as nullifying the outcome of the national parliamentary election under a legal pretext. However, one of the Brotherhood's leaders, Mohamed Morsi, was recognized as the winner of the presidential election that followed and assumed office on June 30, 2012. Morsi became the first democratically elected and first civilian President of Egypt. At the outset of his presidency, numerous critical issues were unresolved, including the status of the disbanded parliament and the sweeping powers granted by the military council to itself. The Brotherhood was formulating its response and working on a strategy for protecting its electoral gains in a new situation, when one of their own holds the highest elected office. Having come to power as a revolutionary force, but being historically pragmatic and moderately conservative, they now had a stake also in protecting the constitutional and legal continuity of the state. The Muslim Brotherhood, successful in getting Egyptian votes, is often criticized by other leaders and factions of the Egyptian revolution and is generally presented with misgivings by Western media, which, in their coverage of the Arab Spring, tend to favor the more secular and Westernized elements. A power struggle and contest of wills have been taking place between the Muslim Brotherhood and the "old elite" and increasingly other segments of Egyptian society, including many leaders and activists of the recent Egyptian revolution. The remaining centers of power of the former authoritarian regime, determined to block a Brotherhood-led government, sought to subordinate and silence, through military intimidation and pseudo-legal pronouncements, the only nationally representative governmental bodies: the parliament and then the president. Parliament created the Constituent Assembly of Egypt, to prepare a constitution to be approved in a referendum. The panel was agreed-on in negotiations involving the various political forces. On August 12, 2012, in a highly unexpected development, President Morsi forced into retirement senior SCAF generals, led by Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and Sami Hafez Anan, who had been ruling the country since the deposition of President Mubarak. Morsi also invalidated a "constitutional declaration" previously imposed by the military council to expand the military leaders' own powers and reduce those of the presidency and to claim legislative and other authority. Morsi afterwards functioned in his presidential capacities, while the issues of the new constitution and parliament were being contested. In November 2012, Morsi was credited for arranging a truce in the escalating Palestinian armed conflict between Gaza's Hamas governing faction and Israel. On October 23, 2012, the Administrative Court referred the case of the Constituent Assembly to the Supreme Constitutional Court, further delaying and putting in doubt the resolution of the Assembly's controversy. The Constituent Assembly was plagued by continuous disagreements and protest-resignations of many of its non-Islamist members. Confronted by a possible gridlock caused by the likely Mubarak-era's judiciary invalidation of the Constituent Assembly, President Morsi issued on November 22, 2012, his second major constitutional declaration. The President assumed sweeping additional powers that he deemed necessary for the completion of the democratization process, granting the Constituent Assembly additional two months to finish their work on the new constitution and protecting the body from any judicial interference. Morsi's hand may have been forced by the confluence of interests and practical alliance of the Mubarak regime-appointed establishment with secular revolutionaries, which culminated for the second time (after the dissolution of parliament) in the fight over a new constitution, and threatened the Islamists with practical elimination of their electoral gains. The presidential decree galvanized the already ongoing street demonstrations and made further confrontations between the Muslim Brotherhood and their former reluctant allies in the uprising all but certain. Given the genuine national division over the constitution and more generally over a possible Islamist rule (nearly half of the presidential poll electorate voted for Ahmed Shafik, a politician connected to the old regime), the judicial establishment and their new secular allies, coming typically from the more affluent strata of Egypt's society, constituted for the Islamists a formidable opposition front. The anti-Islamist opposition engaged in large-scale street demonstrations and other protests, aimed at destabilizing Morsi's government. The Constituent Assembly, reduced by the withdrawal of its non-Islamist members, hurriedly completed the constitution proposal and on November 29, 2012, submitted it to President Morsi for approval and for the scheduling of national referendum vote on the document. On December 1, the President announced December 15 to be the date of the referendum. In the following days, violent clashes between Morsi's supporters and opponents, who did not want the constitution vote to take place, resulted in a number of fatalities. Many in Egyptian media waged partisan, anti-Brotherhood and anti-Morsi campaigns. Brotherhood offices, generally not protected by the security forces throughout the period, were burned at a number of locations. On December 8, the President voided his constitutional declaration but not the previously announced constitution referendum. The referendum on the new constitution took place on December 15 and December 22. The official results, announced on December 25, gave the constitution the support of 63.8% of the total votes cast (32.9% turnout). Critiques said that the constitution did not mention social justice and the tax system was still unfair. It would not solve the social and economical problems of the people that caused the revolution. The passage of the charter appeared to had paved the way for a parliamentary election, announced to begin in April 2013, but the process had soon gotten bogged down in court challenges. Egypt remained highly unstable. The second anniversary of the revolution brought renewed mass street demonstrations and violence in late January 2013, with a number of fatalities; further numerous fatalities occurred after the court multiple death sentence in a football riot case. The volatility contributed to the deepening of the country's economic crisis. President Morsi declared a limited state of emergency, but Egypt was being increasingly overtaken by "chaos and lawlessness". Secular activists who helped defeat dictatorship, then helped defeat elected parliament, rejected a constitution referendum vote and now wanted the elected president removed. The Muslim Brotherhood and the fledgling Egyptian democracy faced the problem of an assertive minority bent on defying the majority rule. Violent demonstrations, clashes with the Brotherhood supporters and attacks against Brotherhood offices continued in March, prompting President Morsi to issue a warning directed at the perpetrators of violence. Egypt's prosecutor general ordered arrests of several opposition activists accused of inciting attacks. A court-ruled reinstatement of the previous top prosecutor, removed by Morsi, was an expression of the continuing feud between the President and his supporters on the one hand, and the judiciary and secular opponents on the other. Renewed mass demonstrations took place on President Morsi's first anniversary in office. The demonstrators demanded his resignation or removal. Morsi refused to step down, but his elected government was overthrown in a military coup led by the Minister of Defense General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi on July 3, 2013. After weeks of tense pro-Morsi sit-in demonstrations in Cairo, the new regime's security forces violently moved in to disperse the large encampments on August 14. With new fighting reported throughout the country, a month-long nationwide state of emergency was declared. ==Muslim Brotherhood in Mubarak's Egypt== During the long-lasting presidency of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood went through different stages of social and political development and activity, becoming a formal participant in the political process, being a banned and persecuted opposition group, or both. During the later period of Mubarak's rule, the movement had been persecuted in a number of ways and candidates for offices associated with the Brotherhood were subjected by the government and the National Democratic Party to electoral fraud, causing the Brotherhood to boycott, together with other opposition parties, the second round of the parliamentary election of 2010. Under President Mubarak, the government waged decades of psychological warfare against the Brotherhood and presented the Islamists as a dire threat to the country, using them as a justification for its own heavy-handed one-party rule and frequently imprisoning the movement's members. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Muslim Brotherhood in post-Mubarak electoral politics of Egypt」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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