So, it looks like Egypt isn't going to be getting a smooth transition into a democratic government. The military reimposed marital law yesterday.CAIRO — Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that the Islamist-led Parliament must be immediately dissolved, while also blessing the right of Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister to run for president, escalating a battle for power between the remnants of the toppled order and rising Islamists.
The high court, packed with sympathizers of the ousted president, appeared to be engaged in a frontal legal assault on the Muslim Brotherhood, the once-outlawed organization whose members swept to power in Parliament this spring and whose candidate was the front-runner for the presidency as well.
“Egypt just witnessed the smoothest military coup,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, wrote in a Twitter post. “We’d be outraged if we weren’t so exhausted.”
The ruling threw into doubt the status of the presidential election runoff, originally set for Saturday and Sunday, and means that whoever is eventually elected will take power without the check of a sitting Parliament and could even exercise some influence over the election of a future Parliament. It also raises questions about the governing military council’s commitment to democracy, and makes uncertain the future of a constitutional assembly recently formed by Parliament as well.
The decision, which dissolves the first freely elected Parliament in Egypt in decades, supercharges a building conflict between the court, which is increasingly presenting itself as a check on Islamists’ power, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
What are the chances that Egypt's Congress will refuse the order? At this point I'm wondering how much the Muslim Brotherhood will feel like continuing to work with a government that is clearly doing all it can to prevent their rise to power.
Edit: Looking more into the actual decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the members who ran in the winner-take-all individual elections could not run as members of a party. This massively hurts the power of the Muslim Brotherhood, where a significant number of their winners came from.