ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on how Egyptian society became ready for the 2011 uprising. It is imperative to learn how Egyptian society, including workers, were in such a difficult situation that led to more and more political protests, even though at the time they were disguised as socio-economic discourse. Egyptians throughout the country had sunk into a state of deep despair, depression, and angst. During the last ten years of the Mubarak regime, many Egyptians (including the dwindling middle class and the intelligentsia elites) recognized that they were not too far from police brutality, something that the marginalized, voiceless, poor Egyptians had always suffered from. Politically, Egyptians had witnessed one bad election after another with the few glimmers of hope dimming in the 2005 parliamentary elections when the “independent” opposition, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, won around 80 seats. Egyptians were in despair about the country’s economic and political future. These socio-economic, political, and even cultural changes have been ongoing arguably since the early 1970s with the beginning of Sadat’s rule, with a steady decline until the eruption of protests with the workers in the early 2000s, the elites’ Kefaya movement in 2004, and then ultimately Egypt’s largest mass protests starting in January 2011.
