Divided Politics, Creaky Economy Put Egypt On Edge

Divided Politics, Creaky Economy Put Egypt On Edge

by STEVE INSKEEP
June 14, 2012
NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is nearing the end of his Revolutionary Road Trip, a journey of some 2,500 miles across North Africa to see how the countries that staged revolutions last year are remaking themselves. Steve and his team have traveled from Tunisia's ancient city of Carthage across the deserts of Libya and have now reached the third and final country, Egypt.

On the road eastward from the Libyan border, the Egyptian desert became a blur. Then we started to run low on fuel.



We stopped at an auto-repair shop that had a gas pump out back, an ancient analog machine with numbers on wheels. We could see the gears because the cover was gone. An attendant came over but couldn't make it work. We drove on.

Miles later, when we reached a filling station at dusk, the attendants declined to sell us fuel. They said they were out of it. Then a man who was standing around in the parking lot told our driver he had fuel for sale, and that we should follow him.

A few hundred yards along in the desert, he stepped into a miserable old shack and emerged with two plastic containers, about five gallons each, full of gasoline that he siphoned into our car. It seemed that he was a gasoline bootlegger who had obtained his supply from the same filling station that had none for us.

It was hard to understand how this made any sense, but we reached Alexandria, that day's destination, just the same.

Egypt's economy may be a corroded and rusted machine, only partially modernized during the rule of the last president, Hosni Mubarak, but people find ways to make it work.

Since Egypt's revolution, however, many people have had a harder and harder time getting by. And while Egypt's first genuine presidential election is fundamentally about political freedom, many people are thinking of their pocketbooks as they vote.

We asked about this once we reached Cairo, the great metropolis of the Arab world, whose old city has now become a vast market, where, in better times, tourists would flock. But in the year and a half since the revolution, business has been bad.

"Very, very bad," says restaurant owner Hassan El Halwagy.

We found him sitting at one of his outdoor tables, watching tourists not pass by.
An Election With A Stark Choice

The presidential election on Saturday and Sunday doesn't reassure him. Especially because one of the final two candidates comes from the party linked with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

"They are stupid, ignorant, uneducated, everything," he says. "They are talking about religion. They cannot do a proper work to control a country."

And he fears that if the brotherhood wins power, they'll never give it up.

The brotherhood has already won the parliamentary elections, held back in December and January. And the first round of Egypt's presidential election, held last month, left voters with a stark choice: a candidate from the brotherhood, Mohammed Morsi, and a former prime minister linked to ex-president Hosni Mubarak and Egypt's powerful army, Ahmed Shafiq.

Many business owners here favor the military's man, who promises to get tough, restore order and give business something to celebrate.

We passed women in this market celebrating the purchase of a wedding ring, as men hammered out designs in metal plates.

We walked through carved-stone archways, gates in centuries-old city walls, which people once relied on to keep out trouble.

Medieval rulers built walls within the walls, turning each neighborhood into a gated community.

The farther we moved, the narrower the streets became, until they felt like hallways, where men waited for a chance to sell string instruments called ouds, or killed time on plastic chairs watching soccer on TV.