ABSTRACT
The Failure of Parliamentarian-Nationalist Education The middle of the 1930s constituted a watershed in the history of Egypt’s parliamentary regime. This watershed ended a period of public confidence both in the regime’s ability to cope with the country’s mounting problems and in the Western values behind its political institutions. The exclusiveness of politics to the hitherto privileged upper and middle classes with their European-modelled parties came under challenge. An era of eroding parliamentarianism began, marked by increasing violence and the introduction or the reintroduction of methods and approaches alien to the representative system. At the centre of this phenomenon, the Wafd’s dominance over the political public continuously declined. Parliamentarianism (and parliamentarians) grew irrelevant to the new socio-economic reality and to the new political atmosphere, as the process led gradually to the eventual demise and final collapse of the ancien régime in 1952. As with other multi-dimensional phenomena, the discerning of a clearcut turning point offers little more than an optical convenience. Yet, from the angle of our discussion, the event that symbolized, indeed indicated one of the major components of the fundamental change, was the student rioting during the academic year of 1935-6. Characterized by the Wafd’s loss of control over their bursting political energy, the students’ eruptions of that year directly affected the two concrete major issues on the country’s agenda: the fate of the parliamentary Constitution of 1923, which had been abrogated in 1930, and the negotiations toward and the shaping of the 1936 AngloEgyptian Treaty. Furthermore, the 1935-6 riots heralded the frequent reappearance of massive and violent student demonstrations which
would have an important role in eroding parliamentarianism and in discrediting the declining regime.
