Political Regimes in an Egyptian Mirror

For the past 13 years, Egypt has been ruled by the personalist-cum-military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. In 2013, El-Sisi seized power after overthrowing the first freely elected civilian president in Egypt’s history, Mohamed Morsi, and has since undertaken a sweeping reconfiguration of Egypt’s political economy. He narrowed the ruling coalition to privilege military, intelligence, and police officers while demoting and surveilling civilian state elites such as judges and parliamentarians. The praetorian ruling clique is kept intact by unbroken streams of foreign financing. Recipient of an annual $1.3 billion of military aid from the United States since 1979, the military is now also the beneficiary of some of the largest arms transfers in its history; Egypt was the world’s eighth-largest arms importer between 2020 and 2024. Another income stream is the military’s extensive enterprises in the civilian economy; they pay no taxes, control public land, and enjoy the free labor of conscripts. Intelligence agencies own media companies that produce agitprop valorizing El-Sisi as a handsome visionary, as satirized in the thriller Eagles of the Republic (dir. Tarik Saleh) that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025.