Variation in the Regime: The Struggle for Internal Political Legitimacy in Egypt, 2013-2019.

This study centres on the July 2013 coup in Egypt, framed by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces as a popularly-supported counter-revolution which overthrew the government of the Freedom and Justice Party, accused of having attempted to impose religious authoritarianism. The coup has been approached in this work both as a critical juncture and a moment of structural departure which created a legitimacy crisis. This thesis aims to document the ensuing struggle for internal political legitimacy in Egypt from 2013 until 2019. The work has been driven by the need to fill a two-fold gap, both in the existing academic literature on non-democratic regimes, and in the transformation of Egyptian politics. It therefore proposes a re-engagement with theories of authoritarianism and studies on Egyptian politics, in order to understand how the collapse of pre-existing political-institutional structures and the consequent need of establishing bases of legitimacy, may also ultimately determine a variation in the regime in a country undergoing social, structural and political transformation, such as Egypt after 2013. This study does not take a standpoint as to the political legitimacy of the post-2013 authorities, but rather intends to achieve an independent and scholarly historical-political understanding of the process of legitimation, approached as a transformative activity in a fixed and concluded timeframe. The breakdown of Egypt’s former state structures as result of the 2011 uprising, and then the 2013 coup, has indirectly impacted on the mechanisms of legitimation and relations between domestic actors (e.g. Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the army). This research posits that the absence of scholarly contributions investigating transformations in leadership and the struggle for legitimation, constitutes a gap in the growing body of academic literature on authoritarianisms and sub-transformations of states and institutions in the Middle East. Therefore, this thesis seeks to capture Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s contested struggle for internal legitimacy against a background of political and economic change. The theoretical framework is situated in a modified Weberian conception of political legitimacy in combination of the theory of omnibalancing (David, 1991), an adaptation of Waltz’s (1979) balance of power theory on internal realignments, plus Easton’s (1975) and Gerschewski’s (2013) theories explaining the dynamics of specific and internal support as basis for political legitimacy. This provides a proper intellectual approach for understanding the internal legitimation of political authority, and how this can determine internal variation within a political system. The combination of omnibalancing with theories of specific and internal support enables an understanding of domestic political behaviour, and why a political authority may decide to realign with and gain the specific support of what it perceives as a second-class internal threat, to counter what is perceived as the main domestic threat towards its authority and legitimacy. Methodologically, the work is based on a themes-based discourse analysis, combined with a framing analysis of primary sources. The methodology of this work lies in capturing and contextualising, from a political and state-structural perspective, the frames emerging from the analysis: the rule of law, charisma, internal religious alliances, and performance, identified as the four phases of legitimation in the 2013-2019 timeframe. The work additionally combines quantitative secondary sources and (to bypass the limitations posed by written texts), selected integrative interviews. Through this, new empirical data has been provided. The findings will prove a valuable addition to the broader existing literature on theories of political legitimacy and the functioning of upgraded regimes with specific focus on personalist regimes, which remain an understudied sub-category in the field of non-democratic regime types. In addition, findings from this study will prove valuable to scholars and international political state and non-state actors concerned with the state of democracy and stability in the Mediterranean region. The findings emerging from this work thus go beyond the case study of Egyptian politics, and may be introduced into new venues of research more oriented towards questioning democratisation. In addition, the study’s findings may serve as stepping-stones for future research on the functioning of regimes, and military and diplomatic cooperation, as well as having implications for the study of elites and democratisation in the Mediterranean area