On May 25, more than two weeks before the swearing in of General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi as President of Egypt on June 7, the Independent wrote:
“The same Western governments that hailed the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 as a new dawn only a few years down the line clearly feel mightily relieved that the new dawn is over. It’s not just the Americans and their European allies who discretely welcome this return to the status quo ante in Egypt, of rule by a father-of-the-nation figure. Most of the Gulf monarchies feel likewise. All got their fingers burnt in the so-called Arab Spring and have no regrets that a messy experiment with democracy has been put aside.”
Eric Koch’s new book, New Beginnings, was launched on September 20. The book is available from 
But are there not some who would argue that his rise to power was itself an excercise in democracy? After all, the enthusiastic voters said not only “SI” but SISI”
How many ‘messy’ experiments with democracy does it take to realize that time and again the amorphous ‘geopolitical reality’ overruns, in the last analysis, any normative, socially constructed ‘fiction’.
Egypt and other places demonstrate that a ‘democracy’ will flourish only where the culture supports it. Where it doesn’t, then it runs into problems - like widespread rape in Egypt, and disorder of other kinds. Democracy depends on democratic habits of behaviour among the (self-)governed. That takes time to develop and is not guaranteed to develop even with time.