As expected, there’s fighting in Cairo. The Islamists were never going to shrug and say ok, were they.
Tensions in Cairo escalated after Egyptian troops opened fire on crowds that had gathered outside the Republican Guard headquarters, where Mr Morsi is believed to be held.
Three people were killed and dozens more wounded, including the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen whose head was grazed by shotgun pellets.
Tens of thousands of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood – to whom Mr Morsi belongs – had massed outside Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque throughout the day.
By evening, the crowd had filled nearby streets and the Brotherhood’s supreme leader, Mohammed Badie, told the crowd: “We shall stay in the squares until we bring President Morsi back to power.”
It was never going to work – a democratic election that elected people who reject democracy and elections. It’s the terrible flaw that democracy has: it works only as long as everyone plays by the rules. When everyone doesn’t, it becomes a choice between the military and some other kind of brute force.
Jeremy Bowen explains the obvious for us.
This country’s citizens tend to respect, even venerate, the armed forces. But its intervention in politics, and its removal of President Morsi, has alienated a big section of the community.
Two Egypts exist side-by-side.
One is made of men and women, supporters of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are as angry as Mohammed Ramadan. They are furious that what they see as the democratic will of the people has been flouted, and they are in no mood to accept meekly what has been done to them.
Men “and women”…I doubt that part. I doubt that many women are included in that angry group. It’s just a form of words.
For all the talk of rebooting Egypt’s political system, the fact is that its experiment with democracy has failed dismally.
The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and its political party, together the biggest political and social movement in the country, have been rounded up and locked away in a way that happened often in the years before 2011.
The army’s intervention does not of itself do anything to tackle Egypt’s huge economic problems. The country is deeply divided.
It is not a good beginning for a new era.
No, it’s not, but neither was the election of the MB (and the Salafis). That was already a massive failure of Egypt’s experiment with democracy.