ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to the first stage of alignment formation and identifies threats to regime survival and resulting needs. To set the scene, it starts with a brief theoretical discussion, highlighting that regimes primarily care for their own survival and often utilize external alignments to that end. Thereafter, the main players within the regime are examined (the military, the security apparatus, the business elite, and supporting actors), before the basic structure of regime–society relations is mapped out, with a particular focus on the regime’s ideological basis, the underlying social contract, and repression, as all three play a key role for regime survival. Based on these assessments, the main threats to regime survival in the period 2013–2017 are identified: the MB, terrorism, the frustrated people, the economic crisis, and military decline. They are, of course, interrelated, and each of them has already threatened different regimes in the past. Yet, all five reached an unprecedented threat potential after 2011/2013, and they now appeared in combination. Finally, the needs resulting from these threats and their implications for Egypt’s external alignments are deduced.
