I just read this Wall Street Journal interview with Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany, who is a best-selling novelist in the Arab world. The interview covers what you'd expect, comments about Egyptian poverty and lack of democracy. I daresay all of that is to some degree true.
However, on a recent visit to Alexandria we took a drive 50+ miles west to the World War II battlefield at El Alamein. During that entire drive we passed huge seashore condo developments. We estimated we saw many tens of thousands of units, in literally dozens of developments. These are obviously new and only occupied during the summer. We were there in late September and almost nobody was around.
The sheer size of this "second home" phenomenon in Egypt argues that there is a very substantial upper middle class with sufficient disposable income to afford a summer place at the beach. We take such developments for granted in the U.S.; we were stunned to see them in a supposedly impoverished country like Egypt which lacks oil wealth.
My conclusion - there is more to Egypt than the standard litany of poverty and dictatorship. Perhaps, like Singapore and China, the Egyptian government has discovered that if you can create economic opportunity for many of your people, they will not complain about a lack of governmental representativeness.
