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Egypt braces as actor calls for millions to take to the streets against Sisi's rule
In the shadows of Mahmoud Bassiouny Street, out of the baking Cairo sun, the men from the Central Security Forces adjust their riot gear and grasp their shotguns.
A few hundred yards down the road more men in grey uniforms sit in armoured vehicles at Talaat Harb Square. Their riot vans are wrapped in steel wire netting in case any young person is brave - or foolish - enough to throw a rock.
Policemen in white stand guard outside government buildings while plainclothes intelligence officers sit among the tea drinkers and shisha smokers at downtown cafés, ears straining to catch murmurs of dissent.
Egypt’s government is bracing for a repeat of last Friday’s protests when hundreds of people took to the streets in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other cities, to demand the overthrow of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The sudden eruption of street protests were the most serious public challenge to Mr Sisi’s authority since he came to power in a military coup in 2013 and are all the more remarkable given the enormous risks for anyone caught defying the government.
At least 1,500 people have been arrested in a vast crackdown in the last seven days. Authorities have blocked major websites like the BBC’s Arabic service and flooded social media with pro-government hashtags in an effort to head off any more demonstrations.
And yet many expect the protesters will return again today, either after noon prayers at the mosque or waiting until darkness falls, and fill the streets with the revolutionary call now rarely uttered in public: “the people demand the fall of the regime”.
“You have a situation in Egypt where there is a comprehensive dictatorship with complete control over the media and yet you also have unprecedented levels of public anger,” said Amin el-Mahdy, an Egyptian writer and political analyst. “It’s hard to predict the outcome of that. All possibilities are open.”
The roots of the public’s anger are in rising prices and falling subsidies that have left a third of Egyptians living in poverty on less than £1.17 a day. The poverty rate has doubled since 2000, according to government figures, while Egypt’s population has surged to 100 million.
But the spark for last week’s protests came from an unlikely source: a wealthy former government contractor and part-time actor named Mohamed Ali. In a series of videos from Spain, where he is living in exile, the 45-year-old railed against Mr Sisi and detailed what he says are examples of rampant corruption within his government.
“Why are we eating from the garbage when Sisi and the rich people are throwing away enough food to feed an entire nation?” he thundered in a recent video, speaking in the colloquial Arabic of working-class Egyptians. Mr Sisi called the accusations “lies and slander”.
Mr Ali has explicitly called for the people to rise up against the government on Friday and demanded that soldiers and police officers step aside to let it happen. “Imagine if people in 28 governorates demonstrated all at the same time. The army and the police will not be able to confront them all,” he said.
Mr Ali styles himself as a plain-speaking son of Egypt who is holding the powerful to account. In a video on Wednesday, he claimed Egyptian intelligence officers had come to the Hotel Miramar in Barcelona where he was staying to try to intimidate him into stopping his videos.
But others have questioned whether Mr Ali, who made millions on building contracts for the government before turning against it, may be a player in some internal power struggle within the opaque Egyptian state, where others may be vying to replace Mr Sisi.
“The regime is not one bloc, it’s many people with competing interests,” said Mr Mahdy, the writer. Mr Sisi reshuffled his top intelligence and military officials last year, in what may have been a sign that he was both consolidating power and anxious about internal rivals.
Police responded to last week’s protests with tear gas, rubber bullets, and some live fire but no fatalities were reported. Human rights groups fear that if the government feels seriously threatened it will turn to lethal violence of the kind it deployed in August 2013, when troops killed a thousand people in a single day while breaking up Islamist sit-ins.
“We are very concerned that the government might resort to brute force to crush peaceful protests,” said Mohamed Lotfy, executive director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms.
Mr Sisi has blamed the demonstrations on “political Islam”, implying they were the work of the Muslim Brotherhood. Donald Trump, who reportedly described Mr Sisi as “my favourite dictator”, offered the Egyptian president his full backing during a meeting in New York this week.
“He’s highly respected. He’s brought order,” Mr Trump said. “Everybody has demonstrations.
The argument that Mr Sisi’s rule may be authoritarian but at least it prevents chaos is a potent one to many Egyptians. Even if they are frustrated by the economic situation, they fear that another revolution would plunge their country into civil war like Syria or Libya.
“Overthrowing the government isn’t the way change should happen. Why do you want to go back to killing and hate?” said Mohammed, a 22-year-old, who asked that his last name not be revealed.
Authorities arrested hundreds on the streets last Friday but the crackdown continued in the days afterwards as police raided the homes of people uninvolved in the protests, including a prominent academic and a leading human rights lawyer.
Many of the young people who occupied Tahrir Square during Egypt’s 2011 revolution were committed activists affiliated with political groups. Eight years later, today’s protesters appear to be working-class youth who have risen up spontaneously with no clear political leadership.
“They have no hard-held ideology,” said Mr Lotfy, the human rights activist. “They are just average Egyptians trying to make ends meet who have got to a level of frustration where enough is enough.”
Additional reporting: Freddie Hayward