Egypt, to put it mildly, is a deeply divided society. And yet the extraordinary thing about Egyptian governments is how they govern for the extremes and not for the centre.
On Monday Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, the then army chief who toppled the elected Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Mursi in a coup last year, was sworn in as civilian president.
He won over 96 percent of the vote in elections late last month.
Just before the elections, the reputable Pew Research Centre conducted an opinion poll among Egyptians which produced quite extraordinarily contradictory results.
Or at least very ambivalent ones.
Among the statistics were that 72 percent of Egyptians were dissatisfied with the direction the country was going in. This pleased the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet the very same poll showed 54 percent of Egyptians favoured Sisi’s military takeover from Mursi last July and the same percentage – perhaps the same people – felt having a stable government was more important than having a democratic one against the 44 percent who felt democracy was more important.
Perhaps the first conclusion to be drawn from the Pew survey is that the Egyptians are disenchanted with their leadership generally.
Over the past year, the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity dropped from 63 percent to 38 percent, that of the military from 73 percent to 56 percent and that of the courts (which played a very active and controversial role in government during Mursi’s rule) from 58 percent to 41 percent.
What the survey, contradictory as it might seem, makes abundantly clear, is that Egypt is a deeply divided country.
Therefore, one might have thought its leaders would draw the glaringly obvious conclusion that inclusivity, and embracing diversity, were the most important objectives they had to meet to achieve the social cohesion needed for development and just plain happiness.
On the contrary, both sides seem to have governed as though they had a mandate from heaven. Mursi, who won the 2012 elections in part because his only opponent in the end was a discredited former minister of the government of Hosni Mubarak, governed as though all Egyptians were supporters of the Brotherhood.
In so doing, he provoked a popular backlash which enabled the military to argue – dubiously but not entirely implausibly – that he had been toppled by the people rather than the military.
And then, one might have thought that having toppled Mursi because he supposedly failed to embrace the diversity of Egyptian political views, the government which toppled him would have tried its best to be inclusive.
Instead it has done the opposite, crushing the Muslim Brotherhood with great ferocity, killing hundreds of its members and handing down scores of death sentences to many other supporters.
It has also blamed the Brotherhood for an eruption of terrorism which probably has nothing to do with the organisation, but which may be the result of other Islamists resorting to violence because the democratic route has been stifled.
Sisi appears to have made it one of his main objectives to crush the Brotherhood, rather than embrace its many supporters in the spirit of national reconciliation that the situation seems to cry out for.
Sisi’s people dismiss Mursi’s victory in the 2012 elections because they say many people voted for him merely as the lesser of two evils.
Yet if Sisi won last month’s election with a rather ludicrous 96-plus percent of the vote, the turn-out was, for the regime, a disappointing one of under 50 percent, suggesting many Muslim Brotherhood supporters and perhaps others boycotted the poll.
Stability above all
As the Pew polls indicate, many Egyptians are nevertheless pinning their hopes on Sisi, partly because they did not like the way Mursi ruled and partly because they are simply desperate for any kind of stability, after more than three years of turmoil which has destabilised the country and crippled the economy.
But whether, having driven the Muslim Brotherhood into the wilderness, he can get Egypt behind him to restore the country to political and economic health, remains a big question.