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Egypt's professional syndicates: opinion aggregators or captured institutions?
Abstract
After voting in the elections at the Engineers’ Syndicate in November 2011, Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat al-Shater announced to the press that the elections in the professional union were among ‘the fruits’ of the January 25th Revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood expanded its role in Engineers’ syndicate, but in other professional syndicates, notably the Doctors’, Journalists’ and Lawyers’ Syndicates, candidates with allegiances other than the Brotherhood did well. This apparent split in the political orientation of the professional syndicates led to much discussion in the Egyptian media. At various moments in history scholars have also looked to the professional syndicates sites of politics in Egypt. In the 1970s and 1980s they were discussed as the last bastion for leftist politics after Sadat shifted the Egyptian economic toward the outside world. In the 1990s and 2000s scholars looked to see the ways in which Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood was penetrating these the syndicates found ways to give voice to the many in society who supported the organization. This paper seeks to unify the various discussions of Egypt’s professional syndicates. Looking at syndicates as institutions captured by groups with ideological opposition to the regime at a given moment downplays their broader, historical implications. Instead, Egypt’s professional syndicates channel and amplify dominant political leanings of educated, white-collar middle-class Egyptians. This paper traces the political role of professional syndicates in Egypt, starting with the Lawyers’ Syndicate which was established in 1912, by engaging with primary and secondary sources in Arabic and English. In doing so, it provides a scaffolding that unites previous scholarship on syndicates, the journalistic coverage of syndicates in the post-Mubarak period.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None