What happens now will be interesting. A military council has taken power, the president is gone, the vice president still there but his future in doubt, the protestors happy for the moment but not dumb enough to think this is the end. Mubarak was the tip of the iceberg, the regime he represented is still in place and it will be difficult to dismantle it. The real revolution sarts today.
UPDATE: the response from Tafrir Square:
Al-Jazeera: Egyptians hold ‘Farewell Friday’
Egypt’s labor movement has been the sleeping giant of the past two weeks’ protests, and its involvement could amount to a real fillip for the antigovernment demonstrations. The workers bring experience at protests and organization to the youth-led protest movement, whose efforts to extract major concessions from Egypt’s government was beginning to stall as it entered its third week.
The Socialist Worker (US edition) has more on the influence of the organised labour in the protest movement:
THE DEMONSTRATORS in Tahrir also called on workers who began returning to their jobs all across the country over the weekend to begin striking and occupying factories–both public and private companies–and to walk out in mass demonstrations.
But the workers were already in action. On the morning of February 9, workers at the important KOK Chemical Factory in Helwan, which is a historically militant industrial suburb of Cairo, began a strike, followed by petroleum workers at Petrol Trade.
By the afternoon, the strike began to spread to different factories around the region and beyond. Two of the most important places are industrial centers in the Nile Delta–Kafr Zayat and Kafr al-Tawar. These are also historically militant textile industry towns that have given the regime a hard time for many years. Kafr al-Tawar is only half an hour outside of Alexandria, the country’s second-largest city.
The interesting thing is that in these strikes, the demands were to raise wages, but also the removal of the government-appointed CEOs of the companies–in many cases, of course, these CEOs are members of the National Democratic Party, the ruling party of the Mubarak regime.
You know you’re fucked when you give a speech and #Ceausescu starts trending — angryyoungalex.
So Mubarak had his big speech and while everybody expected he would announce his retirement, he instead blew a giant raspberry to the Egyptian people, who are now more angry then ever. It does remind you of the last speech of Ceausescu, that moment when everybody but the great dictator himself had realised that he was toast, that repression no longer worked and compromise was no longer possible, that the question was no longer if the revolution would succeed, but when. Mubarak too had his chance to either violently repress the revolution or to step down peacefully. The first was only tried halfheartedly, largely it seems because the police and hired thugs failed while the army refused, the second was probably never on the cards for him. So tonight the chances have increased dramatically that he will end his days bungling from a lamp post or shot in the streets.
Frank Wisner, President Barack Obama’s envoy to Cairo who infuriated the White House this weekend by urging Hosni Mubarak to remain President of Egypt, works for a New York and Washington law firm which works for the dictator’s own Egyptian government.
Mr Wisner’s astonishing remarks – “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical: it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy” – shocked the democratic opposition in Egypt and called into question Mr Obama’s judgement, as well as that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The US State Department and Mr Wisner himself have now both claimed that his remarks were made in a “personal capacity”. But there is nothing “personal” about Mr Wisner’s connections with the litigation firm Patton Boggs, which openly boasts that it advises “the Egyptian military, the Egyptian Economic Development Agency, and has handled arbitrations and litigation on the [Mubarak] government’s behalf in Europe and the US”. Oddly, not a single journalist raised this extraordinary connection with US government officials – nor the blatant conflict of interest it appears to represent.
That really makes you have faith in the White House’s interest in reaching the right solution…
Egyptian protestors hang a “closed for the duration of this revolution” sign on the parliament building.