Is the country better suited for a Parliamentary system than a U.S.-style presidency?
The Egyptian military has dissolved both the parliament and Constitution that were central to now-resigned President Hosni Mubarak's rule, promising free elections in six months. Mubarak's government is already disappearing, but its not clear what, exactly, will come next. As Egypt's future hangs in the balance, what's most likely to determine the outcome? Observers are now focused largely on the army, but there's much more at play that will determine the future of governance in Egypt.
At this point, a democratic transition will most likely require the army to continue to play a strong, guiding role. Now that the military is transitioning from managing the protests to running the country, it is in a position to either seize power for itself or secure a path toward democracy.
Any political transition is likely to be more successful if more and more citizens come to feel that they "own" the protests and the resulting transition. In this respect, the fact that the demand for Mubarak's immediate resignation originated from Cairo's Tahrir Square rather than from the Obama administration is a positive development.
Many of the opposition groups, representing a broad spectrum of opinion - including a traditional liberal party, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and the Facebook activists of the April 6 Youth Movement - have indicated that they might support an interim government, possibly one led by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei.
But, in order to choose a leader, these groups must coalesce into a coherent force. Great civil-society protest movements - such as those in Egypt and Tunisia - can overthrow a dictatorship, but a true democracy requires parties, negotiations, election rules, and agreement on constitutional changes. In most successful transitions, the first step toward forging the unity required to create an interim government is taken when the diverse groups begin to meet more often, develop common strategies, and issue collective statements.
Regardless of who leads it, there are some things an interim government should not do. Judging by the transitions that we have studied, a successful democratic outcome stands the best chance if the interim government does not succumb to the temptation to extend its mandate or write a new constitution itself. The interim government's key political task should be to organize free and fair elections, making only those constitutional changes needed to conduct them. Writing a new constitution is best left to the incoming, popularly elected parliament.
Most activists and commentators are now asking who will or should become the next president. But why assume that a presidential political system, headed by a powerful unitary executive, will be instituted? Of the eight post-communist countries in the European Union, not one chose such a system. All of them established some form of parliamentary system, in which the government is directly accountable to the legislature and the president's powers are limited -- and often largely ceremonial.