Morsi’s decree draws dissent from own gov’t

CAIRO—Cracks appeared on Sunday in the government of President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt, facing mounting pressure over his sweeping decree seeking to elevate his edicts above the reach of any court until a new constitution is approved.

Morsi’s justice minister began arguing publicly for a retreat. At least three other senior advisers resigned over the measure. And it has prompted widening street protests and cries from opponents that Morsi, who already governs without a legislature, was moving to inaugurate a new autocracy in Egypt, less than two years after the ouster of the strongman Hosni Mubarak.

With a threatened strike by the nation’s judges, a plunge in the country’s stock market and more street protests looming, Morsi’s administration sent mixed messages on Sunday over whether it was willing to consider a compromise. A spokesman for the president’s party insisted there would be no change in his edict, but a statement from the party indicated for the first time a willingness to give political opponents “guarantees against monopolizing the fateful decisions of the homeland in the absence of the Parliament.”

And the justice minister, Ahmed Mekki, the influential leader of a judicial independent movement under Mubarak and one of Morsi’s closest aides, was actively trying to broker a deal with top jurists to resolve the crisis.

It is the most acute test to date of the ability and willingness of Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president and a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, to engage in the kind of give and take that democratic government requires. But he also must contend with real doubts about the willingness of his antiIslamist opponents to join him in compromise. Each side is mired in deep suspicion of the other, a legacy of the decades when the Brotherhood survived here only as an insular secret soci- ety, demonized as dangerous radicals by most of the Egyptian elite.

“There is a deep mistrust,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo who studies the Brotherhood. “It is an ugly round of partisan politics,” he said, “a bone-crushing phase.”

The scale of the backlash against the decree appeared to catch Morsi’s government by surprise. “In his head, the president thought that this would push us forward, but then it was met with all this inflammation,” Mekki said. He faulted the president for failing to consult with his opponents before issuing it, but he also faulted the opponents for their own unwillingness to come to the table: “I blame all of Egypt, because they do not know how to talk to each other.”

Government and party officials maintained that Morsi was forced to claim the expansive new powers to protect the process of writing the country’s new constitution, and that the decree would be in effect only until the charter was in place. A court of judges appointed under the Mubarak government was widely rumored to be about to dissolve the elected constitutional assembly, which is dominated by Morsi’s Islamist allies—just as the same court had previously cast out the newly elected Islamist-led Parliament—and the decree issued by Morsi on Thursday gave him the power to stop it.

“I see with all of you, clearly, that the court verdict is announced two or three weeks before the court session,” Morsi told his supporters on Friday, referring to the pervasive rumors about the court’s impending action in a fiery speech defending his decree. “We will dissolve the entire homeland, as it seems! How is that? How? Those waywards must be held accountable.”

He said corrupt Mubarak loyalists were “hiding under the cover of the judiciary” and declared, “I will uncover them!”

But instead of rallying the public to his side and speeding the country’s political transition, as Morsi evidently hoped, his decree has unleashed new instability across the country. On Sunday, the first day of business here since the decree was issued, the Egyptian stock market fell about 9.5 percent, erasing more than $4 billion of value.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s political offshoot, the Freedom & Justice Party, faced the ire of protesters. Nader Omran, a spokesman for the party, said on Sunday that as many as 13 of its offices around the country had been burned or ransacked, and he blamed the attacks on an organized conspiracy.

The most significant sign of the growing pressure on Morsi, though, may have been the apparent efforts of Mekki, the justice minister, to address the crisis by finding a way to scale back the decree.

Beginning in two television interviews on late Saturday, Mekki said he trusted the sincerity of the president’s intention to quickly end Egypt’s tortured political transition, bring back a Parliament and turn over to it much of the vast power he currently holds. But Mekki said the text of Morsi’s decree was much too sweeping, and that he could never have signed it himself because it “violates my core convictions.”

“The means, the tools and the wording caused exactly the opposite of what was required,” he said.

He publicly urged Morsi to amend the decree so that it would no longer place all the president’s future edicts above judicial scrutiny—the provision that aroused the loudest outcry—but instead would protect only edicts related to the functions of the constituent assembly and upper house of Parliament.