3 - “We Need the Government to Unleash Us, the Tigers”

Summary

Chapter three examines Egypt’s embrace of a neoliberal policy paradigm through the adoption of a comprehensive package of structural adjustment policies proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the early 1990s. This neoliberal shift was a gradual process that was contested by the conservative faction within the ruling National Democratic Party who were primarily concerned with the preservation of social order. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, an ideologically committed neoliberal faction, aligned with transnational capital, emerged within the party and was able to establish its hegemony and form government in 2004. Under this ‘government of businessmen’, the implementation of the neoliberal agenda was accelerated by means of an increasingly disciplinary state expropriating customary and public property and enforcing capitalist property rights, resulting in rising income inequality and growing popular discontent.