No to Constitutional Amendment: On the 4 July Speech & Our Revolutionary Tasks

By Fares Hakim

On the evening of 4 July 2026, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi appeared before the nation from the imposing seat of the State Strategic Command in the New Administrative Capital. In a single address, he distilled the entire project of his regime. The speech deserves attention not because it offered anything new, but because it laid everything bare. It held out the stick and the carrot in equal measure, while marking the ceiling beneath which the regime expects every conversation about change to remain confined. We return to it here, point by point, not simply to dispute its claims, but to say that the change to come will not be forged beneath that ceiling; it will not resemble January; and the only force capable of bringing it into being is the working class.

El-Sisi began, as he so often does, by summoning the spectre of 2011. God, he said, had spared Egypt. The dollar had once been worth EGP 6 and had now climbed to EGP 50. The state had lost 450 billion dollars; a burden, he insisted, “that we are all paying for.” Yet the equation is the reverse of what he would have us believe. The collapse he invokes as a warning was no natural disaster that descended upon everyone alike. It was a carefully managed redistribution of wealth from the bottom upwards.

The flotation of the pound was not a neutral economic event. It was a mechanism that transferred value out of the pockets of those living on fixed wages—people who saw their savings evaporate and, almost overnight, lost half their purchasing power—and into the hands of those who owned tangible assets or held their wealth in foreign currency. At the very moment millions were being driven deeper into poverty, the property bourgeoisie was reaping extraordinary gains. The Talaat Moustafa Group (TMG) alone recorded net profits of EGP 18.2 billion in 2025, a rise of 43 percent over the previous year.

Real estate is no incidental detail here. It is precisely the refuge to which capital retreats when inflation devours workers’ wages. The collapse of the currency itself becomes a source of profit for one class, and a machinery of impoverishment for another. Meanwhile, Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) has not published its Household Income, Expenditure, and Consumption Survey since September 2020, as poverty figures came to reveal more than the authorities were willing to disclose. The World Bank, for its part, estimated that the poverty rate, measured against the lower-middle-income poverty line, had risen to 17.1 percent by the close of the 2023/24 fiscal year.

So when El-Sisi says, “we are all paying the price,” he obscures the only question that matters: who paid, and who collected?

The loss was never shared. It was the reverse side of a wealth that never ceased accumulating. The very figure he presents as evidence of national catastrophe is, in fact, evidence for the prosecution. The billions the state supposedly “lost” did not simply vanish into thin air. They changed hands. And that is the truth concealed by the reassuring first-person plural—”we all.”

The second strand of the speech is a veiled warning. El-Sisi cautions every “official, intellectual, journalist, thinker, and young person” against any action that might worsen people’s conditions. In a single sentence, responsibility is turned on its head. What harms people’s lives is not opposition to these policies, but the policies themselves: the currency flotation that impoverished them, the withdrawal of subsidies that burdened them, and the sale of public assets that stripped them of resources that were once their own. When the regime elevates stability into a value beyond question, it is not defending the public interest. It is defending the stability of an order that produces wealth at the top and deprivation below.

More troubling still, the logic of the statement disqualifies dissent before it can even speak. Anyone who protests their wages or their conditions is recast as a threat to stability, someone acting against the public good. The victim becomes the accused, and the demand for justice is reframed as a danger to security. The right to protest is thus denied not by explicit law alone, but by an inverted moral language in which silence is recast as virtue and dissent as betrayal.

The stability being defended is the vigilance of the sentry outside the barracks, not the peace of the person who goes to bed hungry. It is a courteous name for the freezing of the existing balance of class power, and for disarming the only class that possesses the means to challenge it.

The third point, and the most consequential, is the political carrot. El-Sisi pledged to deepen the National Dialogue, invigorate party politics, and revive local government. No one should be lulled by the gentleness of this language. The Dialogue’s recommendations on political parties, local councils, and the electoral system are not ends in themselves. They are the procedural pathway towards constitutional amendment, whose true object is neither municipal government nor party pluralism, but the article governing the presidential term and eligibility for office.

The purpose is to reopen the question of term limits in order to make permanent what was meant to be temporary. What makes this carrot especially dangerous is the mechanism through which it is offered. A domesticated opposition is invited to the table not in order to oppose, but to lend the amendments the appearance of national consensus. The outward instruments of democracy—dialogue, political parties, the referendum—become the decorative covering for their very opposite. That is the essence of the deception: the very procedure through which the possibility of alternation in power is extinguished is presented as a moment of openness and reform. The revitalized party life that is being promised is little more than stage scenery for this performance: parties granted symbolic seats, local councils stripped of meaningful authority, in return for blessing the removal of presidential limits through silence or participation.

What is being offered, then, is not a space for genuine political action but a carefully scripted role in a play whose ending has already been written. The task of the cast is to manufacture the illusion of consensus around a decision that had been taken long before they were invited to the table.

Yet these local councils themselves, should elections actually take place, are far from an incidental detail. They are a genuine arena of political struggle: the place where control over neighbourhood and village resources, however modest, is contested. Winning a foothold there is a battle no less significant than the struggle over the constitution itself.
The fourth point concerns the economy: the accelerated withdrawal of the state from economic activity in favour of the private sector. This is no isolated technical measure. It is the economic counterpart to the constitutional amendments, the link that reveals who stands to benefit from the entire sequence. As presidential terms are opened up politically, public assets are put up for sale economically. The two moves serve the same constituency. Over the past fifteen years, Egypt’s capitalist class has accumulated immense wealth. What it now seeks are two inseparable guarantees: the continuity of a ruler who safeguards its interests, ensuring that the rules of the game are not suddenly rewritten, and a larger share of what remains of the public estate, sold off at crisis prices.

The state’s withdrawal is not, despite the language of economic orthodoxy, a neutral retreat in favour of an abstract market. It is a direct transfer of public assets into private hands, often at a fraction of their value and at precisely those moments of economic distress when the state’s bargaining power is at its weakest. Only then does the full pattern come into view. The invocation of 2011, the warnings against “disturbing stability”, the effort to make rule permanent, and the sale of public assets are not separate themes placed side by side. They are links in a single chain, each securing the next: fear justifies stability; stability suppresses dissent; silence permits the perpetuation of power; and perpetuated power guarantees the sale.
At the end of that chain there is only one beneficiary: the alliance between political power and capital, for whom the entire speech ultimately speaks.

Faced with a structure as coherent as this, an old question returns with renewed urgency: what path remains open?

Rejecting the bargain does not mean retreating into passivity while a constitution is refashioned to fit a single man. What is needed now is an appeal to every current within Egyptian society—to opposition parties, trade unions, professional associations, youth movements, and to all who reject the perpetuation of personal rule—to form a broad front of refusal capable of stopping these amendments before they are complete.Across our different banners and competing visions, we bear a shared historical responsibility: to this people, and to the poor of this country; it is the responsibility not to stand silent while the door to political change is closed for good.

The principle of such a front is a simple one. We unite around a single objective: defeating the constitutional amendments. We struggle towards that end together, while each of us retains our full independence, our own programme, and our own vision of what should come afterwards.
The first arena in which this alignment must take shape is the forthcoming trade union elections.

Originally scheduled for May 2026, they have already been postponed, with the current union cycle extended until November. Government officials have explicitly linked the delay to the “forthcoming constitutional milestones”; an acknowledgment, in effect, that freezing workers’ representation is regarded as a prerequisite for entrenching presidential rule.

For that reason, we call upon civil society organizations, left-wing parties, and independent trade unions to coordinate their efforts in preparation for this contest: to reject a postponement that independent labour groups see as an assault on the right to organize, a means of redesigning the trade union landscape, and a device for prolonging the tenure of compliant leaderships; and to support independent candidates capable of breaking the monopoly of the official federation.

Nor does the field of struggle end with the trade unions. The battles being fought within the professional syndicates are no less significant, and they have shown that ground can indeed be won when efforts are united rather than dispersed.

The recent election for the presidency of the Judges’ Club—with its genuine contest, notable turnout, and shifting alignments within the general assembly—offers a case worth studying and building upon. Not because it marked a decisive victory, but because it served as a reminder that monopoly is not destiny, and that sustained organization and disciplined engagement within representative bodies can alter balances of power that once appeared immovable.

The struggle for the independence of the unions, whether of workers or professionals, is not a secondary front, separate from the struggle over the constitution. It is part of the same contest. If the working class and the increasingly impoverished professional strata have the most to lose from this political project, they also possess the greatest potential to resist it. Their strength lies not in abstract declarations but in their independent unions, their workplaces, and the institutions through which they act collectively. It is there, in the patient work of organization, that they acquire the resilience to endure and the capacity to shape what comes next.

But we must be honest with ourselves about the nature of this moment. We are not living through a revolutionary tide, nor are workers in a state of general mobilization. We are in a period of revolutionary ebb. Repression is at its height, and although protests and strikes have become more frequent, they remain fragmented and overwhelmingly local in character. To acknowledge this is not an act of retreat but a condition for success. Those who address this moment in the language of imminent victory risk leaving those who trust them paralyzed by disappointment when victory fails to arrive on schedule.

The task, then, is not to proclaim the working class the leader of a revolution that has yet to begin, but to work alongside workers, patiently and without pretension, helping them build organizations of their own and carrying into their workplaces the trade union and organizational experience accumulated through earlier struggles, in Egypt and elsewhere. That means being present in committees and unions; participating in the formulation of demands rather than dictating them; documenting successful experiences so that they can be shared and adapted; and patiently connecting the struggle in each individual workplace to the broader political conflict of which it forms a part.

To every factory worker, every public employee, every driver, teacher, nurse, and wage earner: the strength you seek is not something that can be bestowed. It is something that is built, step by step. Our role is not to stand above that process, but beside you—to place our experience and our labour at the service of its construction.

El-Sisi’s speech sketches the limits within which the present is meant to unfold: stability in the service of wealth, constitutional amendment in the service of permanent rule, and the sale of what remains of the people’s common assets. The answer to it is not the dream of another January, burdened by the illusions of the last. It is the patient work that begins now by resisting the constitutional amendments through the broadest possible front; uniting forces in trade union, professional, and local elections; and building durable organization in the workplaces, together with those whose labour sustains them.

None of this is guaranteed. None of it is close at hand. Yet it is the only path that does not require passing through the gate kept by power. And its first step lies within everyone’s reach…to begin, where we work, today.