Sisi, the IMF, and Egypt's Crumbling Economy

When the Arab Spring reached Egypt in January 2011, sparking unprecedented mass protests in Tahrir Square and across the country, calls for democratic reform and liberation from authoritarian rule seemed to dominate the revolutionary movement. However, it was not just political demands that brought millions to the street to protest the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. At its core, the January 2011 revolution was an economic cry for help from a population that felt left behind by an uncaring and unresponsive government.

Today, the government of President Abdel Fattah al Sisi faces a similar problem. Egypt has now received the first tranche of a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but the country still teeters near the brink of an economic, and possibly political, crisis. Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves – necessary to purchase foreign imports – remain dangerously low, inflation at 14 percent and unemployment at 12 percent threaten the livelihoods of ordinary Egyptians, and the Central Bank’s decision to devalue the Egyptian pound on November 3 in order to meet IMF requirements led the currency to drop by almost 50 percent.

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