Egypt: El-Sisi being pushed to run for president as media bolsters his image - Replacing One Radical With Another?

Speculation on rise General to run in July vote; campaign reportedly underway to to gather 30 million signatures endorsing him.

Jerusalem Post - Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi is emerging as a likely front runner in the Egyptian presidential elections planned for next year, though he has not announced whether he will be running for the office.

Since the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood on July 3 which brought him to power, Sisi has enjoyed positive media coverage and public support, and according to a report in the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm this month, a campaign is underway to gather 30 million signatures endorsing him for president.

Eric Trager, an expert on Egypt and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Jerusalem Post that Sisi’s plans are as yet unknown, “but one thing that might propel him to run is the fact that every new Egyptian president since Anwar Sadat has ultimately fired the defense minister as a way of removing a potential political threat.”   Read More

Back in July, Robert Springborg, in Foreign Affairs, wrote:

Although he has vowed to lead Egypt through a democratic transition, there are plenty of indications that he is less than enthusiastic about democracy and that he intends to hold on to political power himself. But that’s not to say that he envisions a return to the secular authoritarianism of Egypt’s recent past. Given the details of Sisi’s biography and the content of his only published work, a thesis he wrote in 2006 while studying at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, it seems possible that he might have something altogether different in mind: a hybrid regime that would combine Islamism with militarism. To judge from the ideas about governance that he put forward in his thesis, Sisi might see himself less as a custodian of Egypt’s democratic future than as an Egyptian version of Muhammed Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani general who seized power in 1977 and set about to “Islamicize” state and society in Pakistan.

For more information on El-Sisi's background, click here

To view the thesis, click here