I’m watching OnTV now, where Reem Magued is showing a report on the protests in front of the presidential palace. It’s amazing. Not just workers or civil servants, but almost everyone with a problem in this country, be it political, personal or economic, is descending on the presidential palace demanding to meet Morsi for a solution for their problems.
Expectations are rising and rising.
Not a single day that passes since his inauguration without labor protests in front of the presidential palace still primarily over economic demands, yet they start wading into clear political lines when the enemies include NDP businessmen and officials.
One group of workers come to protest, meet Morsi, some leave after promises, others continue to sit in as a new group of workers arrive to join the protests.
Elsewhere in the country, the industrial actions continue, and in cases workers are emboldened enough to start storming government buildings like what happened in Menoufiya yesterday.
The strike curve has already been going up. The Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, for example, put the number of labor protests and industrial actions in the first half of May: 137 labor protests and industrial actions. The figure went down in the second half of May to 69, thanks to the presidential elections. And continued sliding in the fist half of June to 38, only to start increasing again in the second half of June to 119.
This post is tackling briefly the labor situation, since I’m short of time. But you can add other factors that accelerate the critical situation Morsi is sliding into, including the MB dismal performance in Tahrir with the suspension of the sit-in, the scandalous inauguration in presence of Tantawi and the SCAF generals, his failure to secure the swift release of prisoners sentenced by military courts.
Morsi has inflated the expectations of the public, but in reality he will not be able to deliver, because of the continuation of SCAF control on the one hand, and the opportunistic politics of the MB leadership.
An hot industrial summer is already in the making. Follow @EgyStrikes for continuous updates on labor protests.
Adel el-Badri strikes again… This time he’s outright supporting General Ahmad Shafiq, the counterrevolution’s presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, Badri is still quoted by journalists and Western scholars as a “trade unionist”, rather than his real truth: an opportunist imposter with corrupt politics, whose “union” does not have any presence on the ground whatsoever.