Thousands of opponents of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi are gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square ahead of planned mass protests aimed at forcing the president out of office.
His supporters, meanwhile, are holding a rally at the nearby presidential palace on Sunday in order to defend Egypt’s leader.
Crowds of pro- and anti-government protesters grew in the capital on the first anniversary of the inauguration of country’s first democratically elected president.
People opposed to President Mohamed Morsi have already rallied in Cairo’s Tahrir Square for the past three days calling for him to resign, while the president’s supporters have vowed to defend his legitimacy to the end, leading to fears of confrontation.
The anti-Morsi protests are being organised by a grassroots campaign calling itself Tamarod, meaning “rebellion” or “insubordination”, which claims to have collected signatures from 22 million Egyptians demanding the president’s ouster.
The signature drive has no legal standing, but it has nonetheless tapped into widespread public anger towards Morsi. The president has made a number of controversial decisions since taking office, most notably a November decree which shielded his decisions from judicial review.
Egypt’s economy is in free-fall: The pound has dropped in value by nearly 20 percent since Morsi took office, foreign investment continues to dry up, and businesses are paralysed by widespread fuel and electricity shortages.
Human rights abuses remain widespread, rights groups say, with Morsi’s administration doing little to rein in the notoriously brutal security services.
“We gave him the confidence to give us a new programme, to correct what Mubarak had done to Egypt, but he didn’t do that. So we have the right to withdraw the confidence that the Egyptian people gave him,” said Eman el-Mahdy, a spokesperson for the Tamarod campaign.
“The same Egyptian people have the same right to withdraw this confidence.”
{aljazeera}
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