A Moment of Rebirth and Reason in Egypt

The sequence of political events in Egypt in the last two weeks has been an important step on the long road to the reconfiguration of governance and politics in the country. It has highlighted the legitimacy of several critical actors who will long remain in some form of peaceful political confrontation. Within a matter of days we witnessed dramatic events: The elected president was declared to be Mohammad Mursi, who symbolically took the oath of office in front of a large crowd of supporters in Tahrir Square, then more formally repeated the same oath before the Constitutional Court. After that, he called the disbanded Parliament into a single brief session. Members demanded a review of Parliament’s dismissal by the Constitutional Court and the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, only to have the court and SCAF affirm that the Parliament was disbanded and could not meet, which Mursi acknowledged and accepted as the law of the land.