Sisi’s Regime Raises Fuel Prices Again: Let’s Organize Ourselves and Resist Impoverishment Policies

Statement by the Revolutionary Socialists

This morning, the Fuel Pricing Committee announced new fuel and petroleum product price increases, ranging between 10-15%. This comes just four days before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting to discuss the disbursement of the third tranche of the $8 billion loan to Egypt.

The state’s decision to raise fuel prices today is a preemptive move ahead of the IMF meeting, ensuring that Sisi’s loan-hungry regime secures a new installment in the never-ending debt spiral. Today’s decision will not only increase fuel prices. Still, it will also lead to new hikes in all prices, whether directly through higher transportation costs or indirectly through increased prices of all goods and foodstuffs linked to transportation. The head of the Farmers’ Union has announced that the new fuel price hike will lead to a 20% increase in the prices of vegetables and fruits.

This is the second time this year that Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime has raised fuel prices, part of a broader assault on the rights of the poor and wage earners. This decision is not isolated from recent decisions to cut bread subsidies or to lease public hospitals to investors. It is directly linked to all the severe crises Egypt is experiencing, from power outages after Sisi’s regime squandered gas resources, making Cairo’s lighting dependent on gas supplies from the Zionist enemy, to renting fuel trucks at exorbitant costs. The regime is also squandering renewable energy resources by enabling investors to take over its projects, leaving people experiencing poverty to bear the brunt of the regime’s policies and the burden of the fuel crisis.

This fragile regime, subservient to the IMF and prominent businessmen, ignores the terrible plight of the majority, who can no longer afford the basics of life, including access to water. Many areas now suffer from thirst and cuts in drinking and irrigation water.

This fragility and failure to solve these catastrophic crises, which the regime itself caused, and its submission to the dictates of the IMF and prominent businessmen, are passed on by the regime in two ways: by inciting against refugees, especially Sudanese, through an organized racist campaign to direct public discontent and anger away from the real cause of the crisis.

On the other hand, the regime tightens its iron grip on all forms of protest or even expressions of discontent about these crises through social media, to the point of panicking over a cartoonist who depicts these crises, only to arrest him immediately.

The Revolutionary Socialists reject the new fuel price hike decision, standing in solidarity with every wage earner and poor person who will undoubtedly be affected by this decision. We extend this solidarity to all our people in areas and neighborhoods suffering from catastrophic crises, urging them to organize themselves to confront these policies. We reach out to political and trade union forces to form a broad front that addresses and engages with the pains Egypt is experiencing, which are now visible to everyone. This is the only way to resist the policies of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime