# Abdel Fattah el-Sisi Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (born 1954) is the Egyptian general who seized power in a 2013 coup and has ruled as president since 2014 — the strongman whose rise extinguished the democratic hopes of the [[Arab Spring]] in the Arab world's most populous country. He represents the "authoritarian restoration" pattern the vault tracks in the wake of the 2011 uprisings. ## Rise to Power After [[Hosni Mubarak]]'s fall, Egypt held its first free presidential election in 2012, won by the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi. As defense minister, el-Sisi led the July 2013 coup that ousted Morsi and suspended the constitution. The crackdown that followed was ferocious: in the August 2013 Rabaa massacre, security forces killed more than a thousand pro-Morsi protesters in a single day, an act rights groups described as a possible crime against humanity. El-Sisi was elected president in 2014 and has won every subsequent election after jailing, excluding, or disqualifying his opponents; he secured a third term in December 2023. ## Authoritarian Rule El-Sisi presides over one of the most repressive governments in modern Egyptian history — tens of thousands of political prisoners, a muzzled press, and a security apparatus that exceeds even Mubarak's. He has nonetheless remained a favored Western partner. [[Donald Trump]] notably praised him and reportedly referred to him as "my favorite dictator," capturing the transactional embrace of friendly strongmen that runs through the vault's [[Authoritarianism]] material. ## RWKB Significance El-Sisi is the clearest single illustration of the [[Arab Spring]]'s reversal: a popular revolution against a dictator that ended, within a few years, in a harsher dictatorship. His warm reception in Washington — across both parties, but especially from the Trump-era right — exemplifies the strongman-affinity and "stability over democracy" logic the vault documents in the American right's foreign relationships. ## See Also - [[Arab Spring]] - [[Hosni Mubarak]] - [[Authoritarianism]] - [[Donald Trump]] - [[Egypt]]