The first half of 2008 witnessed the rise of an encompassing environmental social movement in the port city of Damietta, Egypt. The movement succeeded in compelling a reluctant government to halt the construction of a fertilizer plant by the Canadian petrochemical company Agrium and local Egyptian affiliates. The company, like many others, had been recently lured to Egypt by the liberalization policy, greatly subsidized natural gas prices, and a host of other incentives. The movement included wide sectors of civil society, commercial elite, and political parties and ordinary citizen, who feared the environmental pollution by the plant would be detrimental to the local economy—fishing, real estate, and tourism. We argue that this movement rather being an exception could be a “model” for broad political change in that country, or at least a major example from which the opposition—and even the government—could learn how to engage with each other and carry out major political and social reforms. A closer look reveals that this is one of the few “confrontations” where the government engaged the opposition politically - as opposed to resorting to security measures, arrests, and torture. The opposition itself, after an initial call for a strike that the government planned to break up by force, used creative tactics, such as music, art, T-shirts, confronting security men with flowers, mobilizing children. The press, local and national, was used extensively to spread the movement’s point of view. The movement itself was unified, and the political parties remained in the background. Underlying the political engagement of both sides was an elite split: the Cairo government elite, versus the Damietta elite. Following this experience, the opposition could in the future exploit possible splits in the governing opposition or even try to create them. It could also learn from the tactics like those of the Damietta movement. Our research relies on primary sources, including detailed accounts by the national and local press (especially Al-Masry Al-Youm, Al-Badeel, and Domyatt), and interviews with leaders of the movement, including the head of the Popular Committee for the Environment in Damietta, the head of the Sananya Charity Organization (a key activist), the lawyer who took up the case against possible graft in grating the contract, ordinary citizens, including fishermen, and others. We place the discussion in the context of the literature on social movements and foreign direct investment (FDI) and the environment in the global South.