Looking back at a decade of revolution, authoritarian coups and lessons for U.S. democracy

Ten years ago this week, the direction of Egypt’s history took a sharp turn toward democracy, for a time. The year of the Arab Spring was 2011. January 25 was the day it reached Egypt.

Rippling across the Middle East from the Maghreb region of northern Africa, the Arab Spring seemed to have a domino effect: Protests in Tunisia toppled an authoritarian president and paved the way to democratization. In Egypt, pro-democratic protests kicked off in Cairo’s Tahrir Square against despotic President Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for nearly three decades. By February 11, his government was toppled and Egypt seemed to be going the way of Tunisia. Neighboring Libya’s tyrant Muammar Gaddafi was about to face an armed revolution and a surge of democratic energy seemed to be rippling out across the region. But things didn’t fit that easy cause and effect narrative of revolution then democracy for Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.

2010-2020: A Tunisian Prologue

In 2010, a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and later died. His suicide kicked off popular protests and, ultimately, led to the Arab Spring – a region-wide pro-democracy movement.

Approaching the 10-year anniversary of the Bouazizi’s death and the start of the popular uprising, GroundTruth James W. Foley Middle East Fellow Nicole Tung traveled to Tunisia and documented the hope and frustration felt by young people in the North African country today. 

While Tunisia’s pro-democracy movement was arguably the most successful, leading to the ouster of the autocratic President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the issues that sparked the Tunisian Revolution – high unemployment and corruption – persist as stumbling blocks for the republic nearly a decade later. Amid the seeming uncertainty about the future, more and more young people are self-immolating, often as a form of protest.

“The hope is that death in protest will at least mean something, when living seems to mean nothing,” Tung explains.

2011: Inside the Muslim Brotherhood

Through two weeks of reporting in Tahrir Square and inside the Muslim Brotherhood, FRONTLINE journeyed behind the lines with The GroundTruth Project to gain rare access inside the Brotherhood’s largely invisible but pivotal role in the Egyptian revolution.

2012: The Army, The People

Just before Egypt’s President Mubarak was toppled, protesters called the military to their side: The side of history.

2012: Egypt's Revolutionary Women

When Bothaina Kamel began gathering signatures for her campaign to be not only Egypt’s first democratically elected president, but also its first female leader in centuries, just about everyone knew the campaign wouldn’t succeed.

But that wasn’t the point. As Kamel said during the run-up to the presidential elections in May, “We have to dream.”

The women of Egypt, Kamel included, are certainly dreamers. They dreamt of a government free from tyranny when they held hands with their brethren in Tahrir Square in 2011. They dreamt of a future free from harassment, as report after report of rape and assault by both their men and their military continued to surface.

And while some see the deck stacked too high against Egyptian women, ticking off a new list of obstacles every day, from government surveillance to sexual assault to public derision to exile, many women still dream of being equitably represented in their government and will not stop until they have a decisive say in the future of the country.

2012: EGYPT VOTES

As Egypt’s presidential election presents extraordinary challenges, The GroundTruth Project offers this continuing series to shed light on how the country will move forward under its first-ever civilian head of state and how the soon-to-be-drafted constitution will protect civil rights in a new Egypt.

2013: The Fall of the Arab Spring

The year 2013 marked a turning point for the Arab Spring protests across the region. In Saudi Arabia, the government reacted quickly in 2011. It pumped $130 billion into the economy, including hiring 300,000 new state workers and raising salaries. It also brutally cracked down on dissent, in some cases breaking up peaceful protests with live ammunition. Such violent crackdowns was the government backlash for protests across the region.

For our special report "In the Land of Cain and Abel," reporting fellows explored the Shia-Sunni divide in the Middle East, and how this more than a thousand-year split influenced the revolutionary epoch. While the carrot and stick approach worked in some Saudi cities, the Shia Muslims in the Eastern Province continued to protest. Shia make up some 10-15% of the Saudi population and long rebelled against discrimination and political exclusion.

2013: Egypt in Crisis

Less than three years after the popular uprising that led to President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, and just one year after Egypt’s first free and fair elections, the democratically elected government has been overthrown and the Egyptian military is running the state.

And the Muslim Brotherhood—the secretive, long-outlawed Islamist group that came out of the shadows to win the presidency in June 2012—is once again being driven underground, its members killed and arrested in an army-led campaign to wipe it off the map.

Were the Brothers ever really in charge? Or was the Egyptian “deep state”—embedded remnants of Mubarak’s police force, Supreme Court and, most of all, military—in control all along?

In Egypt in Crisis, which aired Sept. 17, 2013 on PBS, FRONTLINE and GroundTruth’s Charles Sennott go inside the Egyptian revolution, tracing how what began as a youth movement to topple a dictator evolved into an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to seemingly find the political foothold it had sought for decades—and then why it all fell apart.

2016: Tahrir Revisited

At the five year anniversary of the uprising, GroundTruth returned to Tahrir Square to see what had become of the Egyptian revolution, and where the country might be headed now.

2015-2016: Lessons on Partisanship from Egypt to US

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, GroundTruth Fellows Mohamed Abdelfattah and Jenny Montasir listened to voters at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

Abdelfattah, an Egyptian journalist who reported on the 2011 Arab Spring revolution from Tahrir Square, received mixed responses from both parties’ followers – but the chants of Trump supporters were predictably the most accosting.

2018: el-Sisi and Egypt's present authoritarianism

By 2018, the country became almost unrecognizable since the days of what was then called the revolution. After the ousting of Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohammed Morsi in a military coup with popular support. But the coup's leader-turned-Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ushered in the same level of authoritarianism that led protesters to the streets in 2011. On the eve of his reelection, GroundTruth fellow Lauren Bohn spoke to some of the leaders of the 2011 revolution in Egypt, left with a forlorn sense of uncertainty for the country's future.