Courtesy of Mish.
On Monday, the Egyptian army gave Islamist President Mohamed Morsi 48 hours to meet the demands of the citizens else the military threatened it would “announce a future roadmap and measures to oversee its implementation”.
From an oil perspective, this flareup should have little bearing as Egypt is not an oil exporter. However, as we have seen in the past, any flareup of any kind in the Mideast tends to drive the price of oil higher.
This time is no different. In the past week Crude has risen from $93 to $102 and is up from $86 since mid-April. To be fair, correlation is not causation, and part of the rebound came before news of trouble in Egypt.
Brotherhood Defiant
With that backdrop, please consider the Financial Times report Egypt: Brotherhood defiant as deadline approaches
They have been jailed and tortured, hunted in the streets and blacklisted from public life. But a year after winning the presidency and reaching the pinnacle of their 80-year quest for power, Egypt’s Islamists are again facing a threat to their existence.
President Mohamed Morsi was fighting back yesterday against what his supporters have dubbed a military coup against his democratically elected government.
In a defiant late-night speech, Mr Morsi made clear he would make no concessions to his opponents and said he was prepared to shed his blood to defend “legitimacy” in Egypt. He warned repeatedly that any moves against him could lead to bloodshed – an assertion that his opponents interpreted as a threat of civil war.
But this time, the president’s Muslim Brotherhood and his millions of supporters made clear, they are not about to give up.
“If the military takes any street action, we will stand in front of the tanks,” vowed Gehad Haddad, an official in Mr Morsi’s Freedom and Justice party.
Following huge street protests on Sunday against what critics see as the president’s ever more autocratic and erratic rule, Egypt’s military leapt back into politics on Monday and demanded that the president and the opposition negotiate a compromise by today or submit to the army’s own political “road map”.
Under a draft of that road map, leaked to the to official MENA news agency yesterday, the constitution would be suspended and the Islamist-dominated legislature dissolved, if a power-sharing agreement were not reached.
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