Empty minds and vacant squares: Secret behind Brotherhood’s repeated failure to demonstrate

Sarah Rashad

The Brotherhood is always urging protest and revolution, despite the fact it fails every time to attract anyone to respond to its calls, which it repeats on every occasion in complete disregard to people ignoring them.

The Brotherhood’s usual stupidity embodied the tenth anniversary of Egypt’s January 25 revolution, as the terrorist group mobilized its weapons to attack the Egyptian state and motivate people to demonstrate, but no one responded. The same thing was repeated many times in the past, as people used to ignore the group’s rhetoric, while the group addresses the international community, specifically American and Western media, which provides wide spaces for its calls for demonstrations and presents them as if they are serious calls that will find responses.

Western media aims to put pressure on the Egyptian state and claim that the conditions for demonstrations are repeatable, in order to extort Cairo. At the same time, the Brotherhood finds the opportunity achieve its goals in the West, which is still using the group in a game with the regimes of the Arab region and the Middle East.

On the other hand, the Brotherhood also addresses its supporters and members through these calls in an attempt to hide the group’s decline and delude them that there is hope it has a chance to return.

This has brought the return of the hashtag “The Brotherhood is a lie and has ended” that spread on social media following the failure of the protest calls launched by fugitive contractor Mohamed Ali in September 2020.

At that time, the squares were vacant, which prompted the contractor to “retire from political work,” as he claimed at the time, in opposition to what he considered to be the “people’s lack of desire for freedom.”

The first failed call to demonstrate was the “18 days” call by the group to demonstrate across Egypt on the first January 25th anniversary following their ouster. The calls were for a repeat of the revolution in which citizens demonstrated for 18 days to bring down the regime, but the people ignored the calls and the squares remained empty of any demonstrators.

The next failed calls that came were on June 30, 2014, coinciding with the fall of the Brotherhood’s rule. Analysts said at the time that the group did not want to believe that it had become a pariah in the street.

The group also took advantage of the difficult living conditions to start a civil disobedience from within the home, which was embodied in refraining from paying utility bills such as water, electricity and gas, but that also did not find a real response.

On November 11, 2016, a new call appeared that the Brotherhood leaders called to demonstrate in protest against decisions taken by the government of Sherif Ismail at the time, as part of a package of economic reforms that it was working to implement, to denounce the low supply and increased prices of sugar and rice, which they sought to call the “revolution of the poor”.

Then, in light of the failure of calls by Moataz Matar, a program presenter close to the group, analysts described the group as “bankrupt and delirious”.

This was followed by the repeated calls for demonstrations launched by Mohamed Ali and then calls for demonstrations in January.