Mohammed Ali (building contractor)

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Mohammed Ali ( Arabic محمد علي, DMG Muḥammad ʿAlī ) is an Egyptian contractor , actor and blogger living in Spain who is in opposition to the President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi .

He is viewed by his supporters as a folk hero , accuses the Egyptian president of corruption , demands his resignation and mobilized in dozens of video clips for a march of millions on Friday, September 27, 2019. The march did not take place, Tahrir Square and other places were taken from the Police cordoned off.

Life

Mohammed Ali was born around 1974. He claims to have worked with the Egyptian army for 15 years. He regularly publishes videos on his Facebook page and established himself as the antipode to Egypt's president in September 2019, as his messages have been viewed millions of times. He attacks the president and his wife, making serious allegations: the army is wasting public money and owes him 220 million Egyptian pounds (around twelve million euros) for the construction of a luxury hotel . The president's wife ordered sinfully expensive renovations in some palaces. He attacks the president directly: "You are an oppressor and a failure". The New York Times commented: "He does not speak like a politician, but like one of them, or like someone they would like to be." The political scientist Rabab el-Mahdi of the American University in Cairo brought it up in a nutshell: "You look at him and you see a successful version of yourself". He presents himself as a man of the people and thus opposes Sisi's government, which he accuses of corruption and wasting money almost every day.

Gudrun Harrer reported in Standard that a number of imitators, most of them former military officials, also expressed criticism of the regime as video posters. The Austrian Middle East expert does not consider the contractor to be necessarily credible. Sections of the population followed Mohamed Ali not because they trusted him, but "because they believe that he is right."

March of the millions

On the weekend before the planned march of millions at the end of September 2019, the first street protests in Egypt since 2013 took place. Hundreds of people demonstrated in Cairo and other major cities and there were clashes with the police. The number of detainees ranges from 270 to more than 1900, depending on the source. Although the demos were comparatively small, their symbolic effect was great. The same slogans could be heard as against Mubarak in 2011: "Get out of here" and "The people want the regime to be overthrown". Sisi's opponent, Mohammed Ali, did not come into play as a politician, but rather as a kind of whistleblower who is now said to have suddenly decided to become a leader of the revolution. This was the assessment of the journalist Chaled Dawud , the spokesman for an Egyptian opposition party, in an interview with the New York Times.

On the Sunday before the big rally, the Egyptian government sent an email to foreign journalists. It contained a barely claused threat and indirectly demanded, according to the news magazine Der Spiegel : "The international media should report on the protests just as their Egyptian colleagues do: not at all."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Moritz tree Stieger: Al-Sisi's opponent. Süddeutsche Zeitung, accessed on October 7, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Karim El-Gawhary: Repression in Egypt: Using a cell phone check in prison . In: The daily newspaper: taz . September 30, 2019, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed October 7, 2019]).
  3. ^ Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com): Start of an Egyptian "Revolution" from Spain? | DW | 19.09.2019. Accessed October 7, 2019 (German).
  4. ↑ Der Standard (Vienna): Protests in Egypt: Mohamed Ali and his secrets , written by Gudrun Harrer , September 26, 2019
  5. ↑ Christoph Ehrhardt, Beirut: Government criticism in Egypt: Greetings from Spain . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed October 7, 2019]).
  6. ↑ Der Spiegel (Hamburg): Mohamed Ali drives the Egyptians onto the streets , by Christoph Sydow, September 23, 2019
  7. ^ ORF (Vienna): Mysterious 'folk hero' shakes Sisi's throne , September 26, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Ali, Mohammed
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Egyptian building contractor, actor and opponent of the Sisi regime
DATE OF BIRTH around 1974