The true nature of a leader’s political power is crucially tested when he is confronted with a popular uprising. Hosni Mubarak has been careful not to show his hand, or even to show his face much in public, apart from a televised message. This caution shows that Mubarak, as might be expected, is a canny observer, mindful of the lessons of history and of the habits of his own people. For the autocrat facing public challenges to his authority, modern historical precedent offers a list of dos and don’ts:
Don’t show weakness. When the crowd gathered in Bucharest’s Revolution Square on December 21, 1989, grew unexpectedly disrespectful, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, in his balcony above, let his discomfort show. It was a fatal mistake. At the sight of their dictator of twenty-four years and his powerful wife shrinking from their own people, the crowd suddenly lost its fear. Four days later, the first couple was shot to death by a firing squad.
The devil is in the details. Popular uprisings are often sparked by small incidents that ignite long-suppressed frustrations. The events that led to Ceausescu’s overthrow were set in motion by authorities’ ham-fisted attempt to evict an ethnic Hungarian pastor from his apartment in the city of Timisoara. In Tunisia, it was the self-immolation of a young street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire to protest his mistreatment by an abusive local official. His action triggered sympathetic demonstrations in Tunisia, and then morphed into anti-government riots there and across the Arab world.
In an effort to demonstrate his compassion, Tunisia’s dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital, where he lay dying. But then, as the demonstrations against his rule escalated, Ben Ali ignored lesson No. 1; he signalled his vulnerability by ordering a state of emergency and then, almost simultaneously, caving in to the protestors’ demands for new elections. Once Ben Ali was seen to be ceding ground, his people’s fear of him turned to contempt. Soon after, he and his wife snuck out of the country by helicopter.
- Retire quietly. Mubarak is older and perhaps wiser than Ceausescu and Ben Ali. He, too, will probably have to relinquish power, but thus far he has avoided their particular mistakes. He appears to be hoping to be able to vacate his palace in the style of the Indonesian leader Suharto, who stepped down after thirty-two years in 1998, amid violent demonstrations that erupted after the police killed four student protesters.
After handing over power to a newly appointed vice-president, Suharto retired to his well-guarded home, and stayed inside it—avoiding prosecution for many criminal offenses—until he died of old age, in 2008. He and his family managed to hang onto much of their allegedly ill-gotten gains, including vast real-estate holdings and an estimated fifteen billion dollars in secret overseas bank accounts.
Despite the offensiveness of Suharto’s painless exit, Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic nation, has emerged as a relatively stable, functioning democracy. Egypt, too, may have a chance at emerging stronger and fairer from this traumatic breakup with its dictator. And if Mubarak plays his cards right, he may, like Suharto, also be able to live out his days in his own home. But uprisings tend to mutate over time, and the longer the standoff in Cairo goes on, the likelier it is that that canniness will not protect him.
Read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.
Photograph: Ceausescu flees Bucharest by helicopter, December 22, 1989. Via Tudor Hulubei.
