Egypt shows us that elections aren’t enough

Democracy and holding elections are not the same thing. There could be no better demonstration of this than the experience of Egypt. Protesters who two years ago gathered in Cairo to force a dictator out of office, and to win the right to replace him with an elected governmentS, are back — this time to demand the resignation of the president whom they elected.

The likely result is, by popular demand, a return to what preceded the Arab spring of 2011: a military dictatorship, for a period at least. From a western perspective this is inexplicable: why would people want to risk their lives to overthrow a military-backed president, only to come back two years later to reverse what they seemed to have achieved? But then the West sees the events in Egypt through the prism of societies where democracy has evolved over a much longer period — centuries, in the case of Britain and the US. The experience of young democracies is that they often do have sharp reversals. Hold an election in a country which lacks the traditions and institutions of an established democracy and the question can all too easily be: which dictator would you like next? As in Egypt, as in Russia: there are plenty who wonder what the revolution was all about.

The West needs to learn from Egypt because for the past two decades the US and its allies have been too keen to believe that a country is free when it holds elections. When we have intervened, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have tended to treat the first elections as a pivotal moment following which, excepting a few hiccups, the country will necessarily embark on an enlightened path to peace, stability and respect for human rights.