Nathan Brown has a nice analysis of the Landmines in Egypt’s Constitutional Roadmap over at Carnegie Endowment website. His basic theme is that the current timetable, by potentially holding presidential elections after the process of drafting the constitution, will allow the military to be able to control the latter process.
I have two questions about the analysis. First is the grand normative one of whether a Turkish model is really so bad for Egypt. Will a military dominated constitutional order be worse for Egyptians than one dominated by a Salafist-controlled parliament? I’m no expert on the country or region but this strikes me as the ultimate question for policy-makers to consider, and one for which sound arguments exist on both sides. Second, a process produced under a civilian president with a new mandate is likely to succumb to the same concerns of self-interest and entrenchment as one produced by a military which knows it must ultimately return to the barracks.
–TG