It would be difficult, at the moment, to predict what the nature of the regime in Egypt will come down to in the wake of President Hosni Mubarak's resignation. Nevertheless, what the Egyptians have done in 17 days is a historical achievement in the Arab region. Indeed, a population, with its various segments, was able to cripple the machine of repression consecrated by regimes resulting from coups in our region since the late 1940s. In this sense, the slogan of overthrowing Mubarak did not target the practices engaged in by the Egyptian government throughout the 30 years during which the former President had ruled Egypt, but rather the regime established by the 1952 coup. Indeed, this regime had preserved, with both Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, its fundamental characteristics, most importantly that of being a military regime that abhors and combats diversity and represses public freedoms, establishing the theory of the leading party (the Arab Socialist Union under Abdel Nasser), which turned into the ruling party (the National Democratic Party under Sadat when launching the appearance of diversity) later inherited by Mubarak – with all that this involves in terms of client relationships with civilian segments of society, allowing for all forms of financial and political corruption. Following the model of the Egyptian coup, all the protagonists of Arab military coups worked on the theory of the leading or ruling party, as a façade for their rule, which retained the same characteristics as the regime Egyptians sought to overthrow with Mubarak. This happened in Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Sudan. And these are countries that witnessed open or latent civil wars, without being able to breach the core of these regimes, all of which resorted to Sadat's method of embellishing the military's monopoly of power and politics. In this sense, the Egyptian protest movement has rammed a wedge into that wall raised by coup-based Arab regimes in the face of their peoples. Or at least it revealed that, no matter how much such regimes try to embellish themselves, through the appearance of diversity and establishing oppositions affiliated with their apparatus and elections rigged in advance, their core remains the same. The Egyptian protest movement succeeded at ramming such a wedge in Egypt, and before that in Tunisia, by virtue of two fundamental factors: the first was that the apparatus of repression in both countries had become old and decrepit, as a result of being used intensively, affecting the majority of the population; the second was the tactic of concentrated gatherings of protesters in a single place, which left the authorities with the option of either using raw bloody repression, with the results this could have in terms of completely exposing them, or retreating. They thus retreated by virtue of their weakness and poor performance. And if similar movements have failed in the past, in other places, it is due to the fierceness of the repression they faced, which was expressed in the form of civil wars as took place in Algeria, Yemen and Sudan, or in that of inviting violent foreign intervention as took place in Iraq. In other words, coup-based regimes faced constant popular objection, which took the form of social demands at times and of political demands at others. These regimes resorted to stifling freedoms and strengthening repression, as well as placing economic activity in the hands of generals and their civilian clients. They succeeded at keeping popular objection in check, to such an extent as to bring about despair from the possibility of any objection succeeding at facing them, and pessimism regarding any popular movement – knowing that during the periods of civilian rule that preceded the military coups, nearly seven decades ago, a popular protest had the ability to topple governments or introduce changes to government policies. In this sense, the Egyptian protest movement, and before it that of Tunisia, turned back the clock to seven decades past, to the time before the military coups, when manifestations of popular public opinion used to affect the decisions of those in power.
