After nearly eight years at the helm of the Cairo Office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty (FNF), Germany's liberal think tank, Dr Ronald Meinardus, who has on and off contributed also to the editorial page of this newspaper, is (...)
I'll start on a personal note. I'm writing this commentary with a sense of unease and cautiousness. I'm a foreigner living in Egypt, and intend to write about political issues related to the host country. As long as foreign journalists are in jail (...)
Egypt's turbulent transition has entered a new phase, with the first signs of a political realignment. The clear division of Islamists and anti-Islamists – or to bring it to the point: the polarisation of pro-30 June forces and their opponents – is (...)
To understand the unfolding politics of post 30 June Egypt, it is useful to follow developments on three distinct policy levels. First, there is the level of the implementation of the new order's roadmap. This is an extremely ambitious, I would even (...)
CAIRO: Egypt's revolutionaries of the first hour are looking back at the early days of the uprising with a sense of nostalgia, when Cairo's Tahrir Square had become the political center not only of Egypt but the whole world. Half a year later, a (...)
Liberalism in one of the four political mainstreams in Egypt. The others are nationalism, socialism and Islamism. As would be expected in a democratic system, to which this country is morphing, political parties mirror these ideological camps. In (...)
CAIRO: After the downfall of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and the gradual consolidation of the political situation on the ground, international attention is shifting to possible implications the unprecedented Tunisian events may have (...)
CAIRO: This year, we are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the unification of Germany. Apart from bringing unity and freedom to the people of that country, this epochal event also symbolizes more than anything else the end of the global (...)
One of the privileges of working in the international program of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty are the many opportunities to meet liberal organizations from all parts of the world and liberal individuals of different national, (...)
Liberalism is one of the great political mainstreams. Yet, at the same time, in the political dictionary of our times hardly another word is as controversial as the term “liberal.” For many, and surely the liberals, the term has only positive (...)
It is a widely held perception that political development in the Arab world has come to a standstill as governments in power are ostensibly not prepared to open up the process to democratic participation. We have become accustomed to elections in (...)