Smiling is not an option: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has ruled Egypt for 28 of his 81 years, not quite happily for the Egyptian people. It shows. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s autocratic president since October 1981, is one of the world’s longest-serving presidents. His iron grip on every level of Egyptian society has kept the Arab world’s most populous nation stable, but at a price. It has exacerbated economic inequalities, kept most of Egypt’s 80 million people in poverty, abetted brutality and torture by police and in the nation’s prisons, and stoked resentment and Islamist fervor against the regime. Those are ingredients of revolution. With his health failing and his succession unclear, Mubarak’s hold on power is overshadowing Egypt’s want of reform.
Mubarak has survived by aiming lower and achieving less. He’s been a caretaker president, content to let Egypt’s many and fundamental problems be a successor’s headaches. As a result, problems have festered, resentments have swelled, and talk of revolution is rife in Egyptian streets, where the atmosphere is often compared to the days before the July 1952 revolution that brought an end to King Farouk’s dynasty. It hasn’t helped that Mubarak has been unwilling to appoint a vice president or establish a clear line of succession, though his son Gamal is the heir apparent.
As Hamdi Qandil, an Egyptian journalist and critic of Mubarak’s regime, wrote, “This regime is clinically dead and we merely await its funeral. All paths for peaceful and gradual change are blocked. The only course left is civil disobedience.”
Read my complete new profile of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak.
See Also:
- Egypt: Country Profile
- Profile of Egypt's Anwar el Sadat
- Egyptian Jokes and Humor
- The Statue of Liberty's Egyptian Origins
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