CAIRO (AP) – Inside the glitzy Nile Ritz-Carlton hotel off Tahrir Square, Cairo’s business elite were eager to put years of tumult and lost opportunities behind them.
Hundreds gathered this week for an event organized by the American Chamber of Commerce, chaperoned by a State Department official and aiming to show support for Egypt’s government as it readies austerity measures and economic reforms. While the moves are a much-needed salve to years of state excess, they’re also likely to bring at least short-term pain on the street.
Most observers and assume the government will go through with it – the question is when. With Egypt deep in debt and no more easy money coming from Gulf Arab benefactors, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has little choice but to unleash market forces. The steps will be painful: dramatically devaluing the currency, collecting more taxes and cutting fuel subsidies, all necessary to gain a bailout by the International Monetary Fund and a seal of approval that should encourage foreign investors.
But fears are growing over a possible backlash from a public already straining under high inflation and unemployment, threatening to undermine the tenuous stability el-Sissi has forged over the past two years with a heavy hand.
Talk in social media of street demonstrations on Nov. 11 prompted the Interior Ministry to warn that its forces are ready to respond decisively to any “conspiracies to incite chaos,” code words for what it describes as rabble-rousing by the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, whose Mohammed Morsi briefly ran the country before el-Sissi overthrew him as army chief in 2013.