A top newspaper editor known to be close to President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi hinted in a column published on Sunday that the Egyptian leader should be allowed to rule beyond the maximum two, four-year terms set by the country’s 2014 constitution.
Yasser Rizq, chairman of the state-owned al-Akhbar daily, did not explicitly call for amending the constitutional clause limiting the number of terms a president can serve, but argued that time is running short for the emergence of another leader who “can shoulder the responsibilities of a head of state in a country of Egypt’s weight and prestige.”
Al-Sisi led the military’s 2013 ouster of Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist president whose one-year rule proved divisive. He was elected to office a year later and, running virtually unopposed, won a second term in an election in March with 97 percent of the vote.
His rise to power in 2013 was greeted with popular adulation and hope, but he is believed to have lost much of that support by introducing far-reaching reforms to overhaul the economy that sent prices soaring beyond the reach of many Egyptians.
A general-turned-president, al-Sisi has repeatedly said he would not stay in office any longer than Egyptians wanted him to and that he was not in favor of amending the constitutional limit on the number of terms a president can serve.
Al-Sisi has also said that being a president was not something he sought, but that he was rather “summoned” by Egyptians to lead the nation at a time of an existential threat; political parlance for the upheavals that followed a 2011 uprising, the rule of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and the civil strife al-Sisi’s supporters contend would have engulfed the country had Morsi stayed in power.
Suggestions that al-Sisi be allowed to stay in office beyond eight years are not new — they were made last year by loyal lawmakers and media figures before they abruptly ended — but Rizq’s renewal of the topic carries additional weight because of his closeness to the president.
