The chaos continues

The chaos continues

by I.A. | CAIRO

CURFEW hours are getting shorter in Cairo. As of Monday they were only between 8pm and 6am. But the night still belongs to the men who proudly defend their neighbourhood as part of neighbourhood-watch type committees, even though the looting and violence of last week has largely subsided. Banks are re-opening, but with restrictions on how much cash can be withdrawn and shorter working hours. Cairo’s traffic is being re-directed around its barricaded hub in Tahrir Square, where lots of protesters remain, slowed down by many checkpoints, but this is a city long-used to traffic jams. Most schools remain closed, but even so something close to normalcy is beginning to return. Egypt is stuck in a not-quite-revolutionary limbo, and a fog has set over its political horizon.

Some things are clear: Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president, has now been relegated, in the public’s eye at least, to a secondary role. His new vice president, Omar Suleiman, now looks like the regime’s strongman. It was Mr Suleiman who announced that Mr Mubarak’s son, Gamal, would not be running for president. It is Mr Suleiman who is holding court with various opposition groups to prepare for the process of transition many Egyptians demand. And it is Mr Suleiman that outsiders, particularly the Obama administration, appear to be backing in the name of restoring stability to Egypt.

Beyond this, however, Egyptian politics remain as chaotic as Cairo’s central square, now a tent city that is gaining permanency with every passing day. There, thousands continue to chant that they demand the end of the regime. For them, the negotiations are largely irrelevant as long as Mr Mubarak remains in place. The youth movements that organised the protests have still not forgiven more established opposition groups for rallying to them late, and then only hesitantly.

Legal parties such as the Wafd party and Tagammu, long part of a loyal opposition to Mr Mubarak, have agreed to negotiate. Members of the National Association for Change, an umbrella group advocating for reform, have met with Mr Suleiman. But the group's leader, Mohammed ElBaradei, has refused to negotiate while Mr Mubarak remains in power, as do other parties. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group which has provided the most substantive opposition to Mr Mubarak's regime for many years, in what may be a historic first, was invited to take part in negotiations. But the Brothers remain ambivalent about how to proceed.

Egypt’s opposition may have lost the initiative, successfully driven apart by the regime’s invitation, but perhaps even more hampered by its inability to speak for both the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and for the wider Egyptian public. Like the country itself, it finds itself torn between a desire for change and the understandable urge by a population unused to such upheaval to return to normalcy.

The government has capitalised on this national divide. It has orchestrated the relaunch of the National Democratic Party (NDP), whose headquarters burned for three days last week. A new steering committee has been put in charge, made up of supposed "reformist" personalities—although some are the same individuals who were close to Gamal Mubarak’s wing of the NDP. Ministers and senior officials have adopted a take-charge attitude on state television and are using it to dampen the calls for reform from Tahrir Square with doom-laden warnings over the country’s security. On every channel, an Egyptian flag flutters, imprinted with the words "Protect Egypt" as presenters aired allegations of conspiracies by Israel, Iran and Hamas—an unlikely trio to join forces against the land of the Nile.