Constitution-Making during Political Turmoil and Change: Egypt 2011-2014
Constitutions are inherently political as much as they are regulatory charters that are supposed to reflect power and
state-society dynamics. They must perform two functions well, but they seldom do. First, a charter must reflect to
an extent the distribution of existing political powers and their social representation or else it would stand only a
slim chance of ratification and acceptance. The second function is its ability to accommodate future changes in the
distribution of political power and societal change / evolution, or else it would unravel in short order.
The already challenging dual-gaze balance in drafting constitutions becomes even harder to maintain during
periods of political transition and polarization. Political flux in the wake of an autocratic collapse or revolutionary
fervor means it is not yet possible to gauge the weight and power of the various political factions. And the rush
to straitjacket a changing political environment into a body of rules unavoidably privileges some factions at the
expense of others, deepening the transition’s instability and aggravating the charter’s fragility.
The challenges to drafting constitutions during times of uncertainty and political fluidity were on display in Egypt’s
2012 and 2014 Constitutions. The former was scrapped just 7 months from adoption after the removal of President
Mohamed Morsi from office and the latter underwent significant amendments in 2019 – only five years after its
ratification. This paper focuses on the process of constitution-writing in Egypt in 2012 and 2014. It is not an
analysis or judgement of the constitutional articles or a comparative study of what these two constitutions failed to
accomplish. It contends that each of the charters came into existence as a compromise among particular political
coalitions. Over time, and given the nature of political-transition periods, some factions in these coalitions gained
political power as others diminished. Compromises become untenable, whereby the ascendant more powerful
group(s) forced a revision of the rules, and the weaker factions were unable to deter opportunism.
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