How did we arrive at 30 June?

By Hossam el-Hamalawy

The coup of 3 July 2013 did not descend upon Egypt like a bolt from the blue. Nor was it simply a meticulously orchestrated military conspiracy, conceived and executed behind closed doors. It emerged instead from the convergence of several forces: the Muslim Brotherhood’s crisis of governance; the state apparatus recovering its confidence after the shock of 2011; the middle and upper classes’ fear of a revolution that refused to subside; the civilian opposition’s failure to fashion an independent political alternative; and the grave misjudgments committed by the revolutionary forces themselves, including the Revolutionary Socialists.

In this sense, 30 June cannot be understood either as a pure revolutionary uprising that the military snatched away at the final hour, or as a wholly fabricated security spectacle devoid of genuine popular content. It was a real moment of mass mobilization, yet one that unfolded within a balance of power already tilted against the revolution. Its political and social leadership left the door standing wide open for the military’s return—not as a temporary arbiter between rival factions, but as the architect and sovereign of a new state.

The question, then, is not simply: How did the coup happen? The more pressing question is: How did it become possible, acceptable, and even desirable, to broad sections of the opposition and of society at large?
Therein lies the tragedy.

The revolution that brought down Mubarak opened a political horizon, allowing millions of Egyptians to imagine politics anew. Yet it failed to dismantle the very state apparatus against which it had risen. The military, the police, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the media, the business elite, and the networks of the dissolved National Democratic Party (NDP) all remained, for the most part, securely in place. Their authority may have been shaken for a time, but they were never defeated. They waited, maneuvered, aligned themselves first with one camp, then another, and returned in full force once they realized that nearly everyone either needed them or feared their rivals more than they feared the state itself.
From the outset, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) sought a “transition” that would preserve the architecture of the old regime rather than inaugurate a revolution capable of transforming it. It wanted elections, a constitution, and elected institutions, but only on the condition that the deep state, and the military establishment above all, would remain beyond public scrutiny and democratic accountability.
The Muslim Brotherhood accepted this framework because they saw elections as their quickest route to power. They threw their weight behind the March 2011 constitutional referendum, convinced that the ballot box alone could confer legitimacy upon them, even if the rules of the game remained firmly in the generals’ hands. This was not simply an act of political naïveté. It was a deliberate choice; to strike a bargain with the military council at the expense of sustaining revolutionary pressure in the streets.
Liberal and leftist forces, too, helped produce this impasse, though in different ways. Some aligned themselves early with the state against the Islamists, reviving the rhetoric of the 1990s, the language of the “war on terror” and of “religious fascism.” Others came to see the military as an indispensable partner, either to manage the transition or to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from monopolizing power.

Even the more radical currents, among them the Revolutionary Socialists, waged fierce battles against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the police, yet were not spared their own moments of uncertainty once power passed to Morsi, and as the confrontation between the Brotherhood and the civilian opposition widened to accommodate an ever-growing presence of figures from the old regime and the institutions of the ancien régime.

The Brotherhood, for their part, did more than anyone to isolate themselves. After Morsi assumed the presidency, they made no serious attempt to dismantle the machinery of repression or hold it to account. On the contrary, they sought to conciliate it. They reached an accommodation with the military, safeguarded its privileges, and accepted its exceptional status as a state within the state.

The military was no loser under Morsi’s rule. It retained constitutional protections, substantial material privileges, political autonomy, and a position beyond civilian oversight. As for the police, one of the principal targets of the public fury unleashed in 2011, the Brotherhood sought to absorb the institution rather than reform it. They spoke of the “honorable officers” within its ranks and gambled on deploying the police against their political opponents and against social protest. Only later did they discover that an institution built upon contempt for society could not be transformed into a compliant instrument in the hands of a weak elected government.

During Morsi’s first year in office, social discontent continued to gather force. Workers, civil servants, and those pressing the everyday demands of ordinary life took their grievances to the gates of the presidential palace, to the factories, and into the streets. The crisis was never merely a contest between secularists and Islamists, despite the way much of the media framed it. It was also a crisis of bread, wages, dignity, policing, and social justice.

In 2012 alone, Egypt witnessed thousands of labor actions and social protests, which is more than the country had seen over the entire decade preceding the revolution. Yet neither Morsi nor the Brotherhood recognized this surge of social unrest as a continuation of the revolutionary process. They saw conspiracy instead.
When the police opened fire in Port Said in January 2013, killing dozens of civilians, among them the young Revolutionary Socialist Ahmed Sami, Morsi defended the police and denounced the demonstrators as thugs and conspirators. It was a moment of painful clarity. The first elected president to emerge from a revolution against police brutality had chosen to stand with the police against the street.

From that point, the civilian opposition expanded rapidly. Yet not all of that expansion carried the revolution forward. The Jabhet al-Inqath al-Watani (National Salvation Front) brought together a broad spectrum of liberals, leftists, and Nasserists, but it also included figures from the old regime or entered into political and tactical alliances with them.

For the Revolutionary Socialists, this was reason enough to refuse membership in the Front. The danger was plain: opposing Morsi through a coalition led by men such as Amr Moussa, and sustained by networks of business elites and the old media establishment, would rehabilitate the remnants of the Mubarak order rather than renew the revolution. Yet rejecting the National Salvation Front did not prevent the Revolutionary Socialists from later joining the Tamarrod (Rebel) campaign. It was here that they committed their gravest mistake.

In its early phase, Tamarrod began as a decentralized youth initiative, collecting signatures to withdraw confidence from Morsi and demand early presidential elections. That decentralized character gave a range of political forces, including the Revolutionary Socialists, room to participate while maintaining an independent voice: against Morsi, against the military, and against the remnants of the old regime.
The hope was that popular anger toward the Brotherhood could be channeled in a left-wing, revolutionary direction, and that 30 June might become a new wave of revolt, one that would remove Morsi while opening the way to a broader revolutionary process. This expectation was reinforced by the mounting strikes and social protests that marked the first half of 2013. But politics is not measured by aspirations. It is measured by the balance of power: by who exercises leadership, who commands the weapons, who controls the media, and who holds the state in their hands.

By June, Tamarrod had begun to change. Its leadership grew more tightly concentrated, while its rhetoric moved steadily closer to the military, the police, and the remnants of the old regime. The networks of the former NDP entered the campaign, joined by powerful businessmen, the media of the counter-revolution, and influential sectors of the judiciary and the state bureaucracy, all rallying behind the promise of stability at any cost. They were backed in turn by regional powers hostile to the revolution, above all the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Tamarrod was no longer simply a youth campaign. It had become a capacious vehicle for removing Morsi, but one offering no assurance whatsoever about who would govern in his place. Worse still, the answer was already taking shape before everyone’s eyes: the military. The chant of “Come out, Sisi!” gathered force; the army’s image returned to the public squares; and the thirst for retribution against the Brotherhood swallowed almost every conversation about civilian rule, social justice, or military domination.
The Revolutionary Socialists recognized the danger. In the final weeks before 30 June, they boycotted all coordination meetings with Tamarrod and the National Salvation Front in protest at a political line that had grown ever more accommodating to the military, the police, and the remnants of the old regime.

On 30 June, they marched beneath the slogan: Down with all who have betrayed us: the military, the old regime, and the Brotherhood. They carried photographs of those killed by the army and the police, chanted against military rule, and distributed leaflets warning of the consequences of military intervention. But they were a minority within a vast popular wave whose political character had already begun to shift. In Cairo and across the provinces, their activists were at times assaulted for raising slogans against the army. The “wave” they had hoped to influence had, by its decisive moment, become one that looked to the military to settle the conflict.

This must be stated plainly: the decision to participate in Tamarrod and in the mobilizations of 30 June was a political mistake, even if it was understandable in its historical context. It was understandable because Morsi had betrayed the promises of the revolution, entered into an accommodation with the military, defended the police, governed ineffectively, left the country trapped in a deepening political and economic crisis, opened the door—through his alliance with the Salafists—to increasingly sectarian rhetoric, and responded to both political opposition and social protest with the language of conspiracy. It was understandable, too, because broad sections of Egyptian society wanted him gone. But it was still a mistake, because the movement unfolding on the ground was not advancing toward an alternative revolutionary authority. It was moving toward a popular mandate for military intervention.

The Revolutionary Socialists, along with other revolutionary groups, tried to constitute a “third camp.” Yet a third camp cannot be conjured into existence by slogans alone. It requires a broad popular organization, powerful trade unions, a political leadership with real social weight, and media and grassroots networks capable of competing with the machinery of the state. None of this existed.

The civilian opposition committed an even graver error. It did not simply mobilize against Morsi. It turned to the military; or accepted its intervention, justified it, or chose to remain silent about it. Many believed that the army would step in only to remove Morsi before returning power to civilian hands. Some leaders of the National Salvation Front received assurances from Sisi that the military neither sought direct rule nor harbored political ambitions.

Yet the entire history of Egypt’s military establishment pointed in the opposite direction. The army does not enter politics to safeguard a revolution; it enters to safeguard the state. And when the opposition summons it into the political arena, it does not arrive as a neutral arbiter, but as an institution with its own project, its own interests, and its own unresolved reckoning with the revolution of 2011.

The claim that Tamarrod was, from its very inception, nothing more than a security-state fabrication is likewise an appealing simplification, but an inaccurate one. The initiative did indeed begin with young activists who were well-known within opposition circles, some of whom had themselves confronted the SCAF in earlier struggles. Yet that fact does not absolve the trajectory the movement ultimately followed.

Political movements are defined not only by those who launch them, but by those who come to control them, finance them, amplify them, and determine their decisive moment. Tamarrod began as a campaign of protest. As it expanded, however, it became the bridge across which the forces of the counter-revolution crossed into the streets. The state did not need to manufacture public anger against Morsi; that anger was real enough. What it did was reorganize and redirect that anger toward a military solution.

Morsi, for his part, proved incapable of grasping the nature of the danger confronting him. He received repeated warnings about Sisi’s maneuvers, yet he failed to act. Perhaps he feared bloodshed. Perhaps he believed that accommodating the military would ultimately protect him. Or perhaps he imagined that electoral legitimacy, by itself, would suffice. What he failed to understand was that, in a revolutionary moment, legitimacy resides neither in the presidential palace nor in the ballot box alone. It lives in the streets, in the capacity to win the confidence of the popular classes, and in the ability either to dismantle the machinery of repression or render it politically ineffective. Morsi did the opposite. He lost the street, left the coercive apparatus intact, safeguarded the military’s privileges, and then found himself standing alone before an institution that had already made its decision.

By May 2013, the military leadership had begun to incline toward a coup. By the end of the month, some senior officers were speaking openly about their support for Tamarrod. The reason was not that Morsi had threatened the army’s interests. Quite the reverse: within the framework of the transitional order, he had granted the military more than it could reasonably have hoped for. From the generals’ perspective, the problem was that he had failed to bring the revolution to an end, failed to restore stability, and failed to bring the streets under control.

The military wanted a weak civilian ruler who would preserve its privileges while pacifying the country. Morsi was weak, but incapable of delivering that stability. Removing him therefore came to appear, in the eyes of the military leadership, as an opportunity to refound the political order on foundations that were at once more centralized and more repressive.

On 3 July, Sisi appeared surrounded by representatives of both the civilian opposition and religious figures. The image mattered more than the statement. The military sought to present the coup not as a coup, but as a broad national response. The presence of civilian and religious symbols in the scene provided political and moral cover for military intervention. Many of those who stood beside Sisi at that moment would later discover that they had not been partners in a new political order, but rather witnesses to its founding; witnesses, moreover, under false pretenses. But that discovery came too late. Coups do not wait for the remorse of their early allies.

After 3 July, the trajectory quickly revealed its true nature. On 8 July, the Republican Guard massacre took place, when the army opened fire on supporters of Morsi. It was an early warning that the new order would not be content with removing the president; it would move to crush his base.

Then came Sisi’s call on 26 July for a popular mandate to “confront potential terrorism.” That mandate marked a decisive and dangerous turning point: it mobilized public support for repression before it fully unfolded, transformed political disagreement into an existential war against “terrorism,” and recast any refusal of military violence as betrayal, or as alignment with the Brotherhood.

Here, the position of the Revolutionary Socialists stood apart from most of the left. They refused the mandate, warned against “military fascism,” and declined to take part in the mobilization called for by Sisi.

About a week later, however, most leftist, Nasserist, and civil forces, excluding the Revolutionary Socialists, signed a statement titled Ayn Al-Fadd? (Where is the dispersal?), which called for the dispersal of the Rabaa al-Adawiya and Nahda sit-ins by force, under the banner of restoring state authority and confronting the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Revolutionary Socialists refused to sign. This refusal was significant precisely because it preceded the massacre, rather than followed it. When the Rabaa and Nahda massacres took place on 14 August, they condemned the killings and described Sisi as the leader of the counter-revolution. These were important positions, and they should not be erased from memory.

Yet they do not cancel out the earlier misreading of 30 June as a “revolutionary wave” that could be shaped from within. The organisation recognized the danger after the coup, rejected the mandate and the “Where is the dispersal?” statement, and condemned Rabaa, but it did not fully settle, in theoretical and political terms, the nature of 30 June until later, when it came to the conclusion that it had been a reactionary mobilization that handed power to the counter-revolution, rather than a revolutionary wave intercepted by the army.

The rest of the left fared far worse. Large sections saw the military intervention as a war against “religious fascism.” In doing so, part of the left returned to its worst 1990s inheritance: aligning with the state in its war on Islamists, and imagining that repression could be progressive so long as its victims were Islamist.
This logic did not spare the left itself. After the crushing of the Brotherhood, repression expanded outward: 6 April, the Revolutionary Socialists, independent activists, workers, journalists, human rights defenders, liberals, and even some of those who had initially applauded. A state that you give a blank cheque to kill your enemy will not return that cheque once its task is complete.

The harsh lesson of 30 June is that opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, by itself, does not constitute a revolutionary politics. The Brotherhood was a conservative and deeply opportunistic force. At many critical moments, it stood against the demands of workers, women, Copts, and defenders of individual liberties. It entered into bargains with the SCAF, shielded the police from accountability, and took part in the demonization of social protest. Yet confronting the Brotherhood through the military amounted to political suicide. One cannot overthrow a reactionary force by allying with one that is still more reactionary; one that commands the tanks, the prisons, the media, and the courts. Nor can a democracy be built by inviting back the very institution around whose privileges the political order has been constructed since 1952.

The second lesson is that the ballot box is not enough. Morsi’s electoral legitimacy was real, but it did not confer upon him the right to suppress protest, shield the police, or entrench the military’s autonomy. By the same token, Morsi’s failures did not grant the army the right to overthrow him. To defend democracy is not to defend the Brotherhood’s rule. It is to defend society’s right to remove an elected government without surrendering itself to the generals. The only viable path, however difficult, was to build an independent opposition to both Morsi and the military at once: one capable of linking social demands to democratic aspirations; of defending freedoms for all; of rejecting sectarianism, the return of the old regime, and the military’s claim to a popular mandate.

It was the weaker path, but it was also the only one that did not lead inexorably to Rabaa, the Protest Law, the prisons, and the New (Military) Republic.

The third lesson is that counter-revolution does not triumph through repression alone. It triumphs when it persuades significant sections of society that repression is the solution. By 2013, the military scarcely needed to conceal its ambitions. Millions were exhausted, fearful, and angry. Day after day, the media saturated public life with a discourse of impending collapse, conspiracy, and the alleged “Brotherhoodization” of the state. The civilian opposition conferred political legitimacy upon the military establishment. The Brotherhood furnished its opponents with almost every pretext they could have wished for. And the revolutionary forces lacked an organization commensurate with the scale of the moment. At that point, the coup ceased to be merely Sisi’s decision. It became the outcome of an entire balance of forces.

For that reason, the anniversary of 30 June calls neither for ritual self-reproach nor for an anxious defence of the mistakes of the past. What it demands is a sober political reckoning. Yes, the anger directed at Morsi was justified. Yes, broad sectors of Egyptian society took to the streets on 30 June for reasons that were both genuine and deeply felt. And no, not everyone who demonstrated was calling for dictatorship.

Yet the political outcome of that mobilization was unmistakable: it cleared the path for a military coup, and then for a regime more ruthless than Mubarak’s. The present order is not simply a restoration of the pre-2011 status quo. It is a regime that learned from the revolution how to prevent its recurrence; by unifying the instruments of repression, expanding the military’s role throughout the state and the economy, crushing the public sphere, and criminalizing politics itself.

For the Revolutionary Socialists, the reckoning must be twofold. On the one hand, it is to their credit that they refused to join the National Salvation Front, declined to endorse the military’s popular mandate, rejected the Where is the dispersal? statement, refused to justify the Rabaa massacre, and, after the coup, sought—together with other revolutionary groups—to build the Jabhet Tareeq al-Thawra (Revolutionary Path Front) as an alternative to both the Brotherhood and the military.

On the other hand, they must answer for their participation in Tamarrod and the mobilizations of 30 June, where they overestimated their ability to shape a movement whose effective leadership was passing, with remarkable speed, into the hands of the counter-revolution. This is no minor point. Revolutionary politics is measured not only by the integrity of its intentions or the purity of its slogans, but by its capacity to read the historical moment accurately and to discern the dominant direction in which it is moving.

We arrived at 3 July because almost every political force, in one way or another, misjudged the nature of the state. The Muslim Brotherhood believed they could coexist with it while inheriting its commanding heights. Liberals, Nasserists, and much of the left imagined they could enlist it against the Brotherhood and then send it quietly back to the barracks. Revolutionaries believed they could ride the wave of 30 June against both Morsi and the military at once. But the state was never anyone’s instrument. It was the actor that was better organized, better armed, and more patient than all the others. And when its moment came, it did not simply restore the old order, it built a regime narrower and far more ambitious and violent than the one that had preceded it.

The 30th of June was a genuine cry of popular anger, yet it became the back door through which the counter-revolution returned. That is the painful truth from which any honest reckoning must begin. Without acknowledging it, Egypt’s collective memory will remain captive to two false narratives: one that imagines 30 June as a completed revolution later betrayed by a handful of generals, and another that treats everyone who took to the streets that day as an accomplice to the coup from the very beginning.

The truth is more complex, but also more instructive; people can be moved by just causes toward disastrous ends when an independent political leadership is absent, when the state succeeds in monopolizing the very meaning of stability, and when hatred of a political opponent hardens into a willingness to hand the country over to those who command the guns.

Eleven years on, the consequences of that moment continue to shape Egypt’s political life. Every political prisoner, every repressive law, every newspaper forced into silence, every trade union brought to heel, every university subordinated to the security apparatus, every worker punished for striking, every citizen who measures their words in fear—all bear the imprint of that mandate.

Repression did not begin in 2013. But on 30 June and 3 July it found the popular legitimacy that had eluded it in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. For that reason, the anniversary of 30 June should be neither an occasion for nostalgia, nor for vindication, nor for self-absolution. It should be an occasion to understand how revolutions are defeated, not by tanks alone, but also by illusions, by fear, by fatal alliances, and by the catastrophic confusion between overthrowing a political adversary and surrendering the state to those who will ultimately crush everyone.