Egypt – round 2 (of …?)
So Mubarak appears to have lost the support of the military for indefinite continued rule – which combined with pressure from the White House to bring him to the conclusion yesterday that he would not seek re-election this coming fall. Clearly not good enough for the protesters, who remain out in force – but enough to prolong the dynamics of this situation. With Mubarak supporters now taking to the streets as well (whether government directed or spontaneous is hard to tell) the situation enters a new phase of complexity. Anyone who claims to know what will happen next is probably full of it – all we can hope for is some kind of smooth, stable transition, whether now or in October.
Keep an eye now on Jordan…
EDIT: In Defense of Joe Hewitt
Some people voiced concern yesterday that the Instability Ledger put out by CIDCM’s Joseph Hewitt failed to rank either Egypt or Tunesia as particularly unstable. A brief – if frustratingly technical explanation: the factors that are considered in coming up with the Instability Ledger rankings are those which statistically correlate to the likelihood of a humanitarian disaster related to instability. It is pretty clear that Tunesia has actually remained stable so far.Coups are considered in the ledger but the voluntary departure of elected leaders under popular pressure would not make it unless that pressure also involved events that led to the deaths of more than 1,000 people. Hopefully neither of these situations will come to that – although Egypt is still VERY much up in the air.
In general, however, autocratic regimes have historically been predictors of stability, and the rare instances in which they are swept from power under spontaneous, popular pressure (and they are rare) without other factors also changing tend to defy all the predictive models social science has come up with so far. This is an area that definitely warrants further serious study.
