ABSTRACT
The events of Rabaa heralded a swift authoritarian rollback. This chapter covers the post-Rabaa period and reconstructs the emergence of a new nationalist consensus that enabled the restoration of autocracy in Egypt. It illustrates how several players who had supported Mursi’s ouster promoted a securitizing discourse centred on national defense to counterweigh the Islamists’ claim to democratic legitimacy. After Rabaa, this discourse allowed for the rehabilitation of the armed forces as folk heroes and the ascension of a military General to the presidency. The nationalist underpinnings of this nascent constellation, at the same time, created the discursive conditions for an unprecedented restriction of public space, thus changing the rules and parameters of the principal arenas of contentious politics in Egypt.
