Over a decade at the helm of the Arab world’s most populous country, there have been times when President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt looked like a man dangling from a ledge by the tips of his fingers.
There was the time 10 years ago, when the former general seized power by deploying the army to depose Egypt’s first freely elected president, a takeover capped by the killing of at least 800 anti-coup protesters in one day. The Rabaa massacre, as it became known, brought a storm of international condemnation down on el-Sissi’s head.
Or take the economic meltdown of the past 21 months, when the currency crashed, prices shot skyward and many Egyptians stopped being able to afford meat or their children’s school fees. Although the International Monetary Fund offered a bailout to help cover colossal debts run up by the president, lenders and Egyptians alike seemed to be losing patience with el-Sissi.
Yet, a decade later, he is still president — and back for six more years, as the results of this month’s presidential election confirm. Authorities said Monday that el-Sissi had won a third term with 89.6% of the vote.
No one doubted the outcome, given all the advantages of his authoritarian grip on the country. An extra edge came from the war next door in the Gaza Strip, which has allowed el-Sissi to cast himself as a strong leader at home and abroad, just as he did after conflicts in Libya, Sudan, Syria and beyond.
This is the turbulent map that is Middle East geopolitics, a multifront five-alarm fire that has made el-Sissi, in his obstinate way, look like a rock of stability.
If el-Sissi ever felt his grip slipping, he simply brazened it out, regional crises eroding any pressure on him to reform. Small concessions over economic policy and human rights never compromised his power or that of the military-security establishment that runs the country and dominates its economy.
His self-assurance came through in every public appearance.
If “you truly love Egypt,” he declared to a clapping audience in 2016, “I’m telling all Egyptians who are listening to me: Listen to my words only. Only mine.”
There were many Egyptians who seemed to do just that. After the turmoil of Egypt’s Arab Spring, when mass protests brought down authoritarian Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and the elections that followed, which brought to power an Islamist who was later widely reviled, the country greeted el-Sissi as a savior.
One actress praised his “bronzed, gold skin, as gold as the sun’s rays,” which “hides a keen, analytical fire within.”
The president made the most of his carte blanche, mainly by getting shovels in the ground. He set about remaking Egypt into a modern “new republic,” erecting a huge new capital city in the desert, building miles of roads and bridges and leveling slums for redevelopment in the style of the United Arab Emirates’ Dubai.
All of it was overseen by the military, where el-Sissi had spent his entire career before entering office in 2014. And much of it was paid for by new debt.
The new capital drew on ancient Egyptian symbolism, exemplifying what Robert Springborg, an expert on Egypt’s political economy, called el-Sissi’s brand of “Pharaonic nationalism.”
His vision of transformation was “to build ourselves and our country by dint of our hard labors and our sacrifice,” Springborg said. The president spent countless speeches exhorting Egyptians to have fewer children, work harder and eat healthier.
Lately, however, as the immense cost of his megaprojects helped send the economy into crisis, el-Sissi has taken to admonishing Egyptians simply to eat less.
“If the price of prosperity and progress for a nation is that it does not eat and drink,” he said this fall, announcing his bid for a third term, “then we don’t eat or drink.”
Sissi-mania had been cooling off for years as the middle class shrank and repression hardened.
Yet many Egyptians supported el-Sissi as a bulwark against terrorism and instability. Western countries also proved willing to overlook their distaste for his human-rights abuses and silencing of dissent to partner with him against violent extremism and migration.
Time and again, geography made the argument for him.
To Egypt’s west is Libya’s never-ending conflict, and to its south, Sudan’s internecine bloodshed. Israel’s attacks on Gaza are unfolding just across Egypt’s eastern border. North is the Mediterranean Sea, and just beyond that is Europe, whose leaders are panicked at the prospect of a new wave of migrants.