Who is president of Egypt? Not Hosni Mubarak, as of a few minutes ago. His speech last night had not done whatever work it was supposed to do—assuming it even resembled the speech that was planned. This morning, all sorts of Egyptian officials were scrambling to say that he hadn’t conveyed the real message: he would be president in name only, while other people would have the power. One even told the Times that Mubarak had “flubbed” his lines. But all that was beside the point: people didn’t want Mubarak as a powerless figurehead; they didn’t want him at all.
Why weren’t the protesters satisfied with letting Mubarak be the pretend president, while someone else had the actual power? Why the final, decisive push this morning? Maybe it’s not just that he was a symbol, or that it wasn’t quite what they had demanded. It was that they were being asked, once again, to live a lie, and to be complicit in it. They didn’t want to take part in yet another act in the theatre of the absurd; they wanted things to be called, for once, what they really were—for words, even the word “president,” to mean something. Mubarak talked, in his speech, about his “dignity”; Egyptians were no longer willing to sacrifice theirs.
And, of course, there were the practical matters. If someone who wasn’t president was acting as president, what would that say about the rule of law? How would they even know that Suleiman, rather than some generals, was the one making the decisions? That would move them farther from the goal of accountability, not closer. Why turn the presidency into a sham institution at precisely the moment when they wanted democratic institutions to have meaning? The resignation statement said that the military was in charge, which is another problem. But it’s a problem that has been laid out on the table.
The speech last night was more than a quarter of an hour and said nothing; the statement this morning, read by Suleiman, was less than a minute and said what had to be said. Mubarak is apparently at his vacation house on the Red Sea. Cairo is a mass celebration. Whatever drama comes next—and as complicated or dangerous, even disappointing as it may be—it won’t be the same old farce.
Photograph: Reuters/Suhaib Salem.
Read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.
