CAIRO (AP) - Egypt’s president on Wednesday gave a thinly veiled but stern warning to opposition politicians calling for a boycott of presidential elections in March, saying he would die first before allowing anyone to disrupt security and stability and threatening to take unspecified measures against anyone attempting to lead the nation to “doom.”
A clearly furious Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a general-turned-president, spoke a day after a coalition of opposition parties and public figures called for a boycott of the March 26-28 vote, which they described as a farce. Earlier this week, five opposition figures, including a 2012 presidential candidate and two top campaign aides for a now-arrested presidential hopeful, also called for a boycott and urged Egyptians not to recognize the vote’s outcome.
Their action has been expected to draw a harsh and swift response from authorities who have shown little or no tolerance for dissent under el-Sissi and because it was likely to encourage more expressions of discontent over what critics see as the president’s increasingly authoritarian ways.
El-Sissi is virtually certain to win a second, four-year term. A face-saving candidate’s last-minute entry spared the government the embarrassment of a one-candidate election but drew criticism and mockery on social media. A string of would-be challengers were arrested, forced out or quit the race. One of them, former lawmaker Mohammed Anwar Sadat, has separately called on opposition leaders to stage a peaceful march on the presidential palace to present el-Sissi with “demands” pertaining to the country’s political future.
Without directly mentioning the boycott call or the March vote, el-Sissi - grim faced and occasionally yelling - ominously threatened that if attempts to destabilize the nation continue, he would call on Egyptians to give him “another mandate” to counter what he called the evil people.
“There will be other measures against anyone who believes he can mess with its (Egypt’s) security … I fear no one but God,” he said.
El-Sissi asked for a popular mandate to fight “violence and possible terrorism” in July 2013, less than a month after, as defense minister, he led the military’s ouster of the Islamist Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president whose one year in office proved divisive. Millions took to the streets in response to his call, and el-Sissi then began what is believed to be the largest and harshest crackdown on dissent in the country’s living memory.
A long-running insurgency by Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula has grown deadlier and more emboldened after Morsi’s ouster. Now led by a local affiliate of the Islamic State group, the militants continue to trouble security forces, which have succeeded in denying them control of significant territory in the vast peninsula.
In another thinly veiled reference to the 2011 uprising that forced autocrat Hosni Mubarak to step down, el-Sissi said: “Be warned, what happened seven or eight years ago will not be repeated. … You seem not to know me well enough. No, by God, the price of Egypt’s stability and security is my life and the life of the army,” he said, directing an intense gaze at Defense Minister Sidki Sobhi, seated to his left in a ceremony marking the production of a giant offshore gas field.
“I don’t want anyone to mess with us (el-Sissi and the army), because I am not a politician who just talks.”
The president’s implicit reference to the 2011 uprising was the closest he came to publicly echoing the almost daily demonization by pro-government media of the uprising as a foreign plot carried out by paid agents. Many of the uprising’s key figures are either in jail, live in exile or quietly moved to the sidelines, but it is Islamists who have borne the brunt of the crackdown on dissent, with thousands of them in jail.
El-Sissi has consistently cited security and economic recovery as top priorities that take precedence over freedoms, arguing that the welfare of the country’s 100 million people were his foremost concern.
He often speaks of the political turmoil of the years that followed the 2011 uprising, scaring investors away and battering the vital tourism sector. He often boasts of his track record in office, frequently citing mega infrastructure projects, security on the streets and ambitious reforms that stopped the country from sliding into bankruptcy but sent prices soaring beyond the reach of a majority of Egyptians.
“Stability and security means where we are now, anything else is doom. Please, don’t let anyone lead (the nation) to doom,” he warned Wednesday.
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