Timothy Kaldas

What were the three main pillars that he promised? Stability, economic growth and security and he has failed on all three counts, so they are doubling down... If they can get away with expanding their repression against high-level targets and keep people in line, why wouldn't they?

Nobody is going to twist Egypt's arm about this now. No one cares. They think it is the best they will get right now, another thing that helps them is that the population has had two uprisings, in their eyes anyway, and after both the situation did not improve. On the contrary, it deteriorated.

The policy of import substitution was popular during the period of decolonization ... It's one of those policies that looks good on paper but doesn't work, lots of things are imported because there is no alternative but also because they are cheaper than domestic alternatives. There are many imports poor people depend on. Even if in theory local production could pick up the slack it would take time and in the meantime we could see a sharp reduction in employment.

There is a high level of paranoia on the part of the government. It is an inadvertent admission that there have been a number of failures.