Lessons from Mahalla, Paris: what future for Egypt’s fractured revolution?

When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, the post-modern era of skepticism and pessimism in relation to positive, progressive political change was broken, albeit momentarily. The sight of thousands of people on the streets, demonstrating against corrupt politicians and their own exclusion from the system, filled many across the globe with intense optimism for the battlefield of politics in the 21st century. Not since the fall of the Soviet bloc had observers looked so rosily to the future, and many drew grand comparisons between the strikes that erupted in the Mahalla region of Egypt and the prolonged strikes led by Solidarność (Solidarity) in Poland in the 1980s. Egypt has long been politically diverse and articulate, from the Nasserite era of Pan-Arabism to the neoliberal cronyism of Mubarak, and so of all the sites of the Arab Spring, it has attracted the grandest hyperbole in relation to real tangible political ‘change’. But who were the people on the streets chanting and demanding change? Was this a united group of unspecified ‘liberals’, brought together by an abstract desire for ‘freedom’? Or was the uprising, in fact, a very divided and diverse set of forces uniting behind a single objective for that purpose […]