Mohamed Mursi: a Footnote in Egypt's History
Incompetence doomed his presidency – and Egyptian democracy.
Mohamed Mursi.
Photographer: Moustafa El Shemy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
There is a special poignancy to the fact that Egypt’s only democratically elected ruler should have died as a prisoner and been buried without ceremony. This was not the end I could have imagined for Mohamed Mursi the last time I saw him, in December 2012, posing for photographs in a presidential palace.
Seated uncomfortably in a chintz chair while the photographer’s lights popped around him, Mursi had seemed an almost forlorn figure, shrunken by the grandeur of his surroundings. But it was not the pomp of the buildings that diminished him as much as the office of the presidency: Less than five months since being sworn in, he was already proving unequal to the task.