Liberal Longings in Republican Egypt (1977-2013) In the months leading to the 2013 coup, social media producers crafted a carefully scripted nostalgia for the halcyon days of the monarchy. One meme juxtaposed a portrait of Queen Nazli (poised, bejewelled) with Mrs. Mursi (head-scarved, bespectacled) to highlight Egypt’s ostensible fall from civilisational grace. By inducing a longing for that bygone age, these commentators formulated an elitist critique of Mursi’s one year presidency. Among certain social sectors, this form of critique fortified, enlisted and mobilized support for Sisi. But this was not the first time that the ‘liberal’ age of the interwar years was posited as a measuring stick for Egypt’s relative civilisation, or lack thereof. In the late 1970s, after two decades of silence, some Egyptians began to speak favorably and publicly, about the former monarchy, and its so called liberal politics. The timing was hardly coincidental— Sadat had launched his ‘Open Door Policy’ whose mission was to undo the ‘disasters’ of Nasserism by opening up Egypt to the global free-market. Relying on hitherto unseen private papers and interviews, this paper traces how the proponents of Sadat’s liberalising economic programme evoked the memory of the liberal ‘golden age’ to establish political legitimacy, and formulate social critique. Intellectuals and politicians recast liberalism as the mere prehistory of neoliberalism, positioning Nasser as an interruption to an otherwise continuous project. These men presented their enterprise as the continuation of a pre-1952 one, even as they proposed an economic programme that was far more liberalising than that of Sadat himself. Foremost among them was the New Wafd—of which Sirag al-Din Pasha, a disgraced figurehead of the ancien regime, was president— which borrowed its name from the Nationalist party of the interwar years. The party’s polemical embrace of the ‘secularism’ of its alleged ancestor, posited a critique both of the ascendant political Islam and the waning radical left. This paper interrogates the relationship between the ‘liberal’ age of the interwar period and the infitah of Sadat, which was a prelude to fully-fledged neoliberalism. The New Wafd enlisted influential public intellectuals and historians to shape and reshape its intellectual genealogy, thus making these two histories particularly difficult to disentangle. The paper will end by analysing the mobilization of memories of the liberal past by the New Right in post-2011 Egypt.