Businessmen and authoritarianism in Egypt

The main concern of this thesis is to examine how the Mubarak authoritarian regime survived for three decades, especially after the introduction of economic liberalization. I argue that the Mubarak regime created a new constituency of businessmen who benefited from economic reform and in return provided support to the regime. Based on interviews with Egyptian businessmen and political activists, this thesis examines the different institutional mechanisms used by the regime to co-opt businessmen and based on predation of public and private resources. Extending the literature on clientelism, I create a typology of regime-businessmen relations in terms of authoritarian clientelism, semi-clientelism, patron-broker client relationships, and mutual dependency. The thesis further examines how the regime dealt with an opposition that refused to enter into its clientelisitic chain. I demonstrate how the regime weakened this opposition by creating among them a divided political environment on different levels (i.e., among the legal and illegal opposition, inside the legal opposition, and among the illegal opposition). This thesis demonstrates that there are businessmen who are supportive of authoritarianism; however, they may also oppose authoritarian regimes, not for their own business interests but rather for their own political/ideological stance. This thesis concludes that the 25th of January Revolution showed the failure of Mubarak‘s political economy of authoritarianism based on predation and co-opting businessmen