Only a few days after the start of the revolution, the regime is beginning to take desperate measures.
Appointing Omar Suleiman as vice president means telling everybody that Hosni Mubarak is over and out and that Gamal Mubarak will never be president.
At the same time it means telling the people that Suleiman, the man for Israel and the CIA, is the candidate to succeed Mubarak and that the regime is only conceding defeat formally and not structurally. In other words, after the ouster of Mubarak, it is Suleiman who will automatically become president and elections will not be held till their scheduled date.
The people will not accept this and will keep protesting even after Mubarak steps down. The youth of 6 April and their large network on Facebook (more than half a million) will keep agitating and calling for protest.
The regime lost its political and security claws (NDP and the police), and the army is only interested in appeasing the people and guaranteeing continuity of the state structures and the macro political line (on the demand of the USA and Israel, Camp David must be kept — this is the key issue).
A regime without claws apart from some militias and snipers here and there, and with an army that can only play the referee, is a losing bet for anybody, even for the Americans.
Sooner or later they will realize that a better bet would be to go for democracy and pray for ElBaradei to be elected. The people doesn’t care who will be elected as long as it is the true elector.
Dyab Abou Jahjah is founder and former president of the Arab European League. This article was first published in his blog Abou Jahjah Comments on 30 January 2011; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.
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