Dr.Yaron Friedman, the Middle East commentator at Yedioth Ahronoth, said that Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is afraid of being excluded by the super powers as occurred previously with former leaders in Egypt, reported AL-Jazeera.
He added, “This is the biggest nightmare that al-Sisi is trying to avoid at any price.”
Friedman said in his article at the Israeli newspaper that al-Sisi is trying to search for a safeguard tool to face the hostile militant groups although the country’s economic condition is the main obstacle facing al-Sisi three years after he reached power, but, in fact, he failed in dealing with this crucial mission.
Friedman -a professor for Islamic Studies in several Israeli universities- said that after three years of al-Sisi’s reign, he is still under scrutiny and he has not succeeded until now in finding solutions for Egypt’ economic problems.
Friedman believes that if al-Sisi succeeded to decrease the prices of food products, facilitate the residential apartments’ purchase, provide job opportunities for thousands of the unemployed, this might help in making the Egyptian people forgive his (al-Sisi) mistakes and human rights violations, according to the Israeli writer.
He stressed that al-Sisi’s era showed how much the Egyptian people endured bitter economic distress, the economic gaps between the rich and the poor are widening over the time, the stock market is falling apart, and the prices of goods are rising.
He also listed the aspects of Egypt’s economic deterioration in al-Sisi’s era as the unemployment rate that reached 12%, the inflation that reached 14%, quarter of Egypt’s 90 million population live in poor conditions, the price of the country’s national currency has declined in an unprecedented way to 12 pounds per US dollar.
Yaron Friedman ended his article saying that since the Egyptian revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the military coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi in 2013, tourism has been passing by hard times in the land of pharaohs and the Nile River. Accordingly, Friedman believes that if the economic conditions continued in their deterioration this will constitute a great hope for the Muslim Brotherhood to return to power.
