Fully Authoritarian
World’s Population
Population
HRF classifies Egypt as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seized power in a 2013 military coup that ousted Egypt’s first elected civilian president, Mohamed Morsi. He was installed as president in an unfair and unfree election in 2014. In the years since, the ruling military junta behind el-Sisi has commandeered an unprecedented marginalization of civilian control over, and participation in, the country’s politics, economy, and society, transforming itself into the dominant institution at the helm of all branches of government.
National elections are a sham to the point that the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete. Regime-controlled security and intelligence agencies collude with the National Elections Authority (NEA) to disrupt the campaigns of opposition candidates, engineer electoral results, and bury efforts to seek accountability for electoral malfeasance. The regime regularly disqualifies the campaigns of both major and little-known opposition candidates, often targeting them and their supporters with trumped-up legal charges and other intimidation tactics. Amid a total lack of free and fair electoral competition, the regime and its affiliates purport to win presidential and parliamentary elections by wide margins.
Independent and state media, political and civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Protesters and members of the political opposition in Egypt face systematic state violence and extrajudicial murder. Vague laws and widespread surveillance pave the way for the regime to forcibly disappear, harass, and arbitrarily arrest all kinds of people, including opposition candidates, journalists, and its own supporters. The regime has detained more than 60,000 prisoners of conscience in a neglectful carceral system for years without trial, frequently in torturous conditions, with little recourse due to the regime’s co-optation of the judiciary and unfettered use and expansion of politically motivated parallel court systems.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Through electoral manipulation and the reorganization of legislative and executive institutions, the regime has rendered the parliament into a rubber-stamp institution and consolidated its control over the central government. Sham constitutional amendments passed in 2019 granted el-Sisi and the military significant control over the judiciary, which has only increased in recent years with the appointment of a military general to the Supreme Constitutional Court in 2022 and the passing of legislation in 2024 that grants military courts the same legitimacy to try civilians within their jurisdiction as the national courts. This consolidation of executive power grants el-Sisi and the military impunity to interfere in elections and enforce a zero-tolerance policy for political opposition or any form of dissent or expression that does not comply with proscribed norms of the state, resulting in one of the most repressive and exploitative environments of any country in the region.
In Egypt, national presidential and parliamentary elections are a sham to the point that the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete. Since overthrowing Egypt’s first and only democratically elected government, the Sisi regime has taken measures to shift electoral administration and oversight from the previously semi-independent judiciary to newer bodies entirely under its control. With no institutional route for accountability, the regime is able to engineer electoral results, commit widespread fraud, and pressure voters and candidates alike while systematically minimizing formerly influential mainstream opposition parties. As such, the regime-aligned parties sweep elections with impossibly high margins that indicate a complete lack of electoral competition.
The regime has seriously undermined independent electoral oversight to the point that it is able to commit systematic electoral law manipulation, voting irregularities, and electoral fraud with impunity. The regime effectively banned independent and foreign monitors from operating in the country since the 2023 elections, after subjecting them to obstacles such as restricted access to polling stations, stalled or canceled accreditation, strict regulation of vote count reporting transparency, and deportation for “working illegally” while monitoring electoral campaigns in prior elections. Further, in passing the 2014 constitution, the regime established a 10-year plan to phase out prior judicial oversight over elections, replacing judicial bodies with the National Election Authority (NEA), an executive agency made up of ten members appointed directly by el-Sisi since 2017. The NEA sets dates for elections, oversees registration and implementation of campaigns, regulates voting procedures and observation, and is mandated to investigate complaints of electoral malfeasance. In practice, the regime instrumentalizes the NEA to manufacture elections and to unfairly target opposition candidates, granting it license to exceed maximum campaign expenditures, to abuse its influence over MPs and public institutions for free campaign publicity, and to hire polling staff that outwardly encourage voters to elect el-Sisi. Meanwhile, the Authority wholly ignores or rules in favor of the regime in official complaints and takes measures to disband opposition campaigns for minor or imaginary infractions, such as when Farid Zahran, leader of the leftist Social Democratic Party, lodged an official complaint against regime transgressions in the 2023 presidential elections, and the NEA buried the file and announced that el-Sisi won 89.6% of the vote with no documented irregularities. During the 2025 Senate and House of Representatives elections, the first to be organized without the participation or supervision of judges, the NEA widely enforced obscure provisions to disqualify opposition candidates such as prominent leftist Haytham Al-Hariri and Dr. Ahmed Yehia, a leader of the Salafist Al-Nour party in Beni Sueif governorate, on the basis of being exempted from mandatory military service, despite Al-Hariri having already served as an MP from 2016-2020 and Yahya having been cleared to run for the previous three elections.
In addition to testimony from candidates, voters have reported widespread malfeasance, such as being deleted from registration rolls, witnessing regime supporters vote multiple times, and receiving threats from regime officials, whether with 500 LE fines for abstention (approximately $16 during the 2023 presidential elections) or with physical pressure to vote at booths set up in major Cairo transit stations. Voters also report that regime-linked businesses and government departments have coerced employees onto buses and bribed them or forced them to vote under threat of terminating their employment, with independent media estimating that nearly half of the 44 million votes cast in the 2023 presidential elections were bought with bribes of 200 LE vouchers (approximately $6 at the time) or a bottle of oil and a bag of rice.
Despite its ability to manipulate electoral results, the regime systematically and unfairly hinders real, mainstream opposition parties’ or candidates’ electoral campaigns and bars opposition parties and candidates from competing in elections. In 2025, the regime disqualified opposition candidate Mahmoud Geweily and charged him with spreading false news and using electronics to commit a crime after he took to social media to complain that intelligence officials demanded 20 million EGP (approximately $425,000 at the time) to secure his place on a closed party list. During the 2023 presidential elections, candidates and their supporters faced open retaliation for mildly critical views, including campaign interference, cyberattacks with the notorious Predator software, and harassment by paid thugs. The regime selectively disbanded and criminalized campaign events of the critical opposition under Law No. 107/2013, which allows the government to ban assemblies of 10 or more persons, such as when security forces arrested 12 family members and dozens of supporters of opposition forerunner Ahmed Tantawi throughout his campaign, as state notaries blocked official endorsements. In February 2024, Tantawi and members of his campaign were sentenced to one year in prison on charges of “printing and circulating papers used in the electoral process without permission from the competent authority” in misdemeanor court, and banned from campaigning for five years. Regime officials brought further spurious charges, including incitement to terrorism and spreading false news, against him and his wife shortly before his release in May 2025. Similarly, during the 2018 presidential elections, the regime either arrested or forced all presidential candidates who announced their intention to run in the 2018 elections to withdraw their candidacy, excluding Moussa Moustafa Moussa, a pro-government former MP who actively endorsed el-Sisi’s re-election campaign.
Through the eradication of independent monitoring and the systematic targeting of opposition candidates, the regime has skewed the electoral playing field to the point that it claims victory with a very high vote share. While citizens participate in regular presidential and parliamentary elections, the regime manipulates electoral competition and manufactures results such that el-Sisi announced victory in the 2014 and 2018 presidential elections with a purported 97% of the vote, and in the 2023 election with 89% of the vote. Similar to presidential elections, the Nation’s Future Party (NFP) and other parties affiliated with el-Sisi’s military regime win by large margins in parliamentary polls, as in the case of the sham 2020 elections, which resulted in opposition candidates holding just 53 out of 896 total seats for the ensuing five-year legislative period. In May 2025, the regime passed new electoral regulations that established a hybrid voting system for both the Senate and House elections, held in August and October of that year, respectively, wherein half of the elected seats of each body were allocated to closed party lists and the other half allocated to individual candidates. In practice, the closed party list system favored the regime as security and intelligence agencies facilitated access to the party lists through vetting and backdoor deals reportedly costing candidates upwards of half a million dollars for inclusion on a closed list. Further, the regime split the hybrid voting system geographically, where Middle and Upper Egypt voted for all 284 individual seats in the House, while the more populous areas of Cairo, Alexandria, and the Delta voted for 284 seats exclusively via the closed party list system. As a result of this electoral engineering, parties on the National Unified List for Egypt, led by the regime’s NFP, swept all 200 of the contested seats in the Senate and 410 of the 568 contested seats in the House. Given that el-Sisi appoints an additional 100 members to the Senate and 28 members to the House, the regime and its direct affiliates captured control of more than 84 percent (or at least 738 of a total 896 seats) of the legislature in the 2025 parliamentary elections. In contrast, members of mainstream opposition parties won just 40 seats in the House, while independents who often align with the regime’s majority hold the remaining seats.
Independent and state media, political and civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Since taking power in 2014, the regime’s increasingly consolidated control over the government and growing capacity to violently repress its citizens have transformed Egypt into one of the most restrictive countries in the MENA region. A web of vague, overlapping laws grants the regime pretext to target any expression of criticism or disagreement with its policies as an act of terrorism or a threat to national security deserving of harsh sentences and exorbitant fines. Media broadcasts are tightly controlled by the regime and its affiliates, who retaliate against any deviation from proscribed scripts and schedules. Civil society, once vibrant, faces strict regulations on registration, funding, and operations that have led to the dissolution of many prominent organizations. Those who participate in rare public protests or demonstrations are likely to face arrest and extreme state-sanctioned violence.
The regime systematically and seriously intimidates and obstructs the work of dissenting actors. Primarily, the regime abuses a constellation of vague laws that grant it a wide pretext to target critics as either cyber or national security threats or terrorism supporters to silence opponents and intimidate residents into self-censorship. The regime imprisons more than 60,000 prisoners of conscience, maintains restrictive house arrests and travel bans on those released from prison, harasses family members and networks of outspoken and suspected critics, and otherwise interferes with dissidents under these laws. For instance, Alaa Abdel Fattah, one of the most famous prisoners of conscience who was imprisoned by the regime intermittently from 2011 until his most recent release and departure from Egypt in the fall of 2025. The regime arrested him at least four times on trumped-up charges from 2011 to 2014 for his anti-regime organizing and tried him by a combination of Emergency Courts, military tribunals, and national courts. He was sentenced to five years in prison in 2015 and released on restrictive parole in 2019, only to be re-arrested a few months later on charges of “joining a terrorist group,” “funding a terrorist group,” “disseminating false news,” “undermining national security,” and “using social media to commit a publishing offense.” The regime has targeted other members of Alaa’s family and network, including his sister, his lawyer Mohammed al-Baqer, and father-in-law Bahey el-Din Hassan, director and co-founder of the leading Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. The regime charged Hassan while exiled in France with “publishing false news” and “insulting the judiciary” in the Terrorism Court over a single critical tweet in 2019, and the courts sentenced him to 15 years in prison and a 20,000 EGP fine (approximately $1,250 in 2020).
The regime systematically and heavily manipulates media coverage in its favor. The military, intelligence agencies, and private loyalists own the majority of television, print, and radio media in the country. El-Sisi directly appoints the members of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, the National Press Authority, and the National Media Authority, which abuse far-reaching powers to license all websites, issue censorship directives of news and entertainment content without legal justification or judicial approval, and set restrictions on journalistic practices. Access to information is highly restricted, with VPN proxies banned and more than 600 websites blocked, including Egypt’s only prominent independent news organization, Mada Masr, whose editor-in-chief, Lina Atallah, and staff journalists are frequently brought to court. As of the end of 2025, Atallah faces renewed charges of broadcasting false news and operating an unlicensed website brought by the State Security Prosecution for publishing a report exposing inhumane conditions in the Badr 3 prison. Other mainstream journalists and pro-regime media hosts who stray even slightly from proscribed scripts and reporting schedules mandated by the regime are forcibly retired and face coordinated smear campaigns across regime-owned and affiliated media. Regime officials also regularly threaten, harass, and deport foreign journalists.
Under the sweeping 2017 “NGO Law,” made more restrictive with amendments in 2019, the regime has taken measures to unfairly shut down thousands of major independent civil society and dissenting organizations and continues to interfere in their registration, funding, and activities. As a result, Egypt’s civil society in 2025, once one of the most active and vibrant in the MENA region, has been reduced to limited private foundations with mostly charitable missions and informal aid networks that face limited capacity from funding and registration restrictions, in addition to the ever-present possibility of state retaliation. In a prominent example from 2022, the regime forced the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, one of the most major human rights organizations operating in Egypt for nearly two decades, to close after years of asset freezes, travel bans, arrests, and physical harassment of staff by thugs affiliated with the National Security Agency.
The regime systematically, seriously, and unfairly represses protests and unauthorized gatherings. After the 2013 military coup, the regime has used various other laws to prosecute assemblies of more than five to 10 people, break up dissenting demonstrations with extreme violence, and charge protestors in military and terrorism courts. Most famously, state security forces killed more than 1,150 demonstrators in the 2013 Raba’a and Nahda Square massacres. No one involved in the extrajudicial killings of peaceful protestors has been held accountable; rather, some security officers at the time were promoted to higher ranks, and statues celebrating the army and police were erected in Rab’a Square. Despite the regime’s demonstrated will and capacity for violent repression, small protests criticizing el-Sisi erupted during the 2023 presidential campaign. Amid the largest of these demonstrations in the rural coastal town of Marsa Matrouh, the regime violently dispersed and arrested more than 400 protesters who used slogans from the 2011 uprisings and called for el-Sisi’s downfall.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Since taking power in a 2013 coup, el-Sisi has systematically subordinated all branches of government to the regime and elevated the role of loyal military officers to high-level governing and judicial positions. Structural reforms and constitutional amendments passed through sham referenda and parliamentary votes have transformed national institutions, such as the judiciary, that had previously been somewhat independent and able to check regime attempts to centralize power into puppet organizations that the regime systematically abuses to legitimize its decisions and retaliate against all forms of dissent. Despite increasingly consolidated control over national institutions, the regime has taken extraordinary measures to establish parallel systems entirely under its purview to target detractors and trap prominent dissidents in prolonged, and at times indefinite, detention.
The regime has systematically undermined institutional independence to the point where cases or issues challenging the governing authority are no longer brought or frequently dismissed. The military regime has abused its control over the executive branch to marginalize or co-opt nominally democratic institutions to exert near-total influence over the legislature. Among widespread interference in the electoral process to ensure regime victories, el-Sisi pushed for the establishment of the Senate with constitutional amendments in 2019 that granted him the power to directly appoint a third of its members. The bicameral parliament, which once fielded at least a semblance of a party system and policy debate despite heavy regime interference, is now a rubber-stamp institution that passes executive orders without question and accepts the military’s comments on legislation. Of 596 total seats in the House of Representatives, 28 are appointed directly by el-Sisi, 384 are elected in a closed-party list system that the National Security Agency and intelligence agencies regulate, and the final 384 are directly elected. Since the sham parliamentary elections in 2025, mainstream opposition members hold just 40 out of 896 total seats in the parliament.
The regime has systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that abolish or seriously weaken their independence and operational effectiveness. Constitutional amendments pushed through a rubber stamp parliament and a sham referendum in 2019 subordinated the judiciary to el-Sisi and the military, allowing the military to veto judicial decisions and awarding el-Sisi unchecked power to appoint, promote, and dismiss the heads of Egypt’s judicial bodies, including the Supreme Constitutional Court, the Commissioner’s Authority, the Court of Cassation, the Supreme Council for Judicial Bodies, and the prosecutor’s office. In early 2024, the regime deepened military control over the judicial system with a series of new laws and amendments to prior statutes on military tribunals codified the role of military courts as a judicial authority with all the powers and jurisdiction granted to ordinary judicial authorities, effectively institutionalizing their use against civilians cast by the regime as threats to the state. In addition to legal reforms and restructuring, the regime has systematically retaliated against members of the judicial branch who rule contrary to regime interests, or who are perceived as a threat, with forced retirement, travel bans, asset freezes, forced disappearance, arrest, and detention on fabricated charges. At least 59 judges who called for reform were forcibly retired between 2013 and 2016, while at least three judges who lodged official complaints against their dissenting colleagues were promoted to minister of justice during the same time period. As a result, the national courts, which historically served as a civilian check on regime attempts to consolidate power and oppress opponents, have since been transformed into a puppet institution that regularly fields and rubber stamps trumped-up charges against regime critics and traps tens of thousands of political opponents in indefinite detention.
The regime systematically directs cases to separate, regime-controlled courts. Prior to its consolidated control over the civilian judicial system, the regime created a number of special courts to operate outside of the previously civilian-run national court system. In these special courts, the regime has full control to appoint judges, approve decisions, and fully restrict the civil liberties of defendants by denying defense attorneys the right to call witnesses and the ability to make statements, as well as withholding charges and case information, holding defendants incommunicado, and harassing defense lawyers with impunity. The first among these courts was the Terrorism Courts, established shortly after then-president Mohamed Morsi’s ousting in 2013 to try political opponents and later all people considered a threat to the state on trumped-up terrorism charges. The regime then established the Emergency State Security Courts (ESSC) during a state of emergency called under the pretext of fighting terrorism that lasted from 2017 to 2021. Although previous dictators in Egypt regularly abused emergency powers to repress dissent, el-Sisi declared the state of emergency explicitly to charge opponents en masse and incarcerate them indefinitely through a strategy of ‘rotating’ or ‘recycling’ prisoners of conscience across the national and parallel court systems on similar charges after completing their initial sentence. For similar reasons, el-Sisi has also institutionalized the use of military courts for civilians accused of crimes on or against public and military property with Law No. 136/2014, and he began appointing military officers to ESSC tribunals trying civilians as early as 2017. For example, in the prominent case of poet and activist Galal el-Behairy, whose song lyrics were a popular symbol of the 2011 uprisings, security forces arrested him at Cairo airport in July 2018 on trumped-up charges for authoring the popular 2018 song ‘Balaha’ that criticizes el-Sisi. After serving his initial three-year sentence in the ESSC, the regime rotated el-Behairy to a new round of pre-trial detention on similar charges in the military courts, where he was held in dismal conditions without trial and in spite of having already served the length of his politically motivated sentence. In 2025, the State Security Prosecution brought renewed charges of spreading false news and aiding a terrorist organization against el-Behairy within the national courts, thus initiating another indefinite period of pre-trial detention.
HRF classifies Egypt as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seized power in a 2013 military coup that ousted Egypt’s first elected civilian president, Mohamed Morsi. He was installed as president in an unfair and unfree election in 2014. In the years since, the ruling military junta behind el-Sisi has commandeered an unprecedented marginalization of civilian control over, and participation in, the country’s politics, economy, and society, transforming itself into the dominant institution at the helm of all branches of government.
National elections are a sham to the point that the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete. Regime-controlled security and intelligence agencies collude with the National Elections Authority (NEA) to disrupt the campaigns of opposition candidates, engineer electoral results, and bury efforts to seek accountability for electoral malfeasance. The regime regularly disqualifies the campaigns of both major and little-known opposition candidates, often targeting them and their supporters with trumped-up legal charges and other intimidation tactics. Amid a total lack of free and fair electoral competition, the regime and its affiliates purport to win presidential and parliamentary elections by wide margins.
Independent and state media, political and civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Protesters and members of the political opposition in Egypt face systematic state violence and extrajudicial murder. Vague laws and widespread surveillance pave the way for the regime to forcibly disappear, harass, and arbitrarily arrest all kinds of people, including opposition candidates, journalists, and its own supporters. The regime has detained more than 60,000 prisoners of conscience in a neglectful carceral system for years without trial, frequently in torturous conditions, with little recourse due to the regime’s co-optation of the judiciary and unfettered use and expansion of politically motivated parallel court systems.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Through electoral manipulation and the reorganization of legislative and executive institutions, the regime has rendered the parliament into a rubber-stamp institution and consolidated its control over the central government. Sham constitutional amendments passed in 2019 granted el-Sisi and the military significant control over the judiciary, which has only increased in recent years with the appointment of a military general to the Supreme Constitutional Court in 2022 and the passing of legislation in 2024 that grants military courts the same legitimacy to try civilians within their jurisdiction as the national courts. This consolidation of executive power grants el-Sisi and the military impunity to interfere in elections and enforce a zero-tolerance policy for political opposition or any form of dissent or expression that does not comply with proscribed norms of the state, resulting in one of the most repressive and exploitative environments of any country in the region.
In Egypt, national presidential and parliamentary elections are a sham to the point that the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete. Since overthrowing Egypt’s first and only democratically elected government, the Sisi regime has taken measures to shift electoral administration and oversight from the previously semi-independent judiciary to newer bodies entirely under its control. With no institutional route for accountability, the regime is able to engineer electoral results, commit widespread fraud, and pressure voters and candidates alike while systematically minimizing formerly influential mainstream opposition parties. As such, the regime-aligned parties sweep elections with impossibly high margins that indicate a complete lack of electoral competition.
The regime has seriously undermined independent electoral oversight to the point that it is able to commit systematic electoral law manipulation, voting irregularities, and electoral fraud with impunity. The regime effectively banned independent and foreign monitors from operating in the country since the 2023 elections, after subjecting them to obstacles such as restricted access to polling stations, stalled or canceled accreditation, strict regulation of vote count reporting transparency, and deportation for “working illegally” while monitoring electoral campaigns in prior elections. Further, in passing the 2014 constitution, the regime established a 10-year plan to phase out prior judicial oversight over elections, replacing judicial bodies with the National Election Authority (NEA), an executive agency made up of ten members appointed directly by el-Sisi since 2017. The NEA sets dates for elections, oversees registration and implementation of campaigns, regulates voting procedures and observation, and is mandated to investigate complaints of electoral malfeasance. In practice, the regime instrumentalizes the NEA to manufacture elections and to unfairly target opposition candidates, granting it license to exceed maximum campaign expenditures, to abuse its influence over MPs and public institutions for free campaign publicity, and to hire polling staff that outwardly encourage voters to elect el-Sisi. Meanwhile, the Authority wholly ignores or rules in favor of the regime in official complaints and takes measures to disband opposition campaigns for minor or imaginary infractions, such as when Farid Zahran, leader of the leftist Social Democratic Party, lodged an official complaint against regime transgressions in the 2023 presidential elections, and the NEA buried the file and announced that el-Sisi won 89.6% of the vote with no documented irregularities. During the 2025 Senate and House of Representatives elections, the first to be organized without the participation or supervision of judges, the NEA widely enforced obscure provisions to disqualify opposition candidates such as prominent leftist Haytham Al-Hariri and Dr. Ahmed Yehia, a leader of the Salafist Al-Nour party in Beni Sueif governorate, on the basis of being exempted from mandatory military service, despite Al-Hariri having already served as an MP from 2016-2020 and Yahya having been cleared to run for the previous three elections.
In addition to testimony from candidates, voters have reported widespread malfeasance, such as being deleted from registration rolls, witnessing regime supporters vote multiple times, and receiving threats from regime officials, whether with 500 LE fines for abstention (approximately $16 during the 2023 presidential elections) or with physical pressure to vote at booths set up in major Cairo transit stations. Voters also report that regime-linked businesses and government departments have coerced employees onto buses and bribed them or forced them to vote under threat of terminating their employment, with independent media estimating that nearly half of the 44 million votes cast in the 2023 presidential elections were bought with bribes of 200 LE vouchers (approximately $6 at the time) or a bottle of oil and a bag of rice.
Despite its ability to manipulate electoral results, the regime systematically and unfairly hinders real, mainstream opposition parties’ or candidates’ electoral campaigns and bars opposition parties and candidates from competing in elections. In 2025, the regime disqualified opposition candidate Mahmoud Geweily and charged him with spreading false news and using electronics to commit a crime after he took to social media to complain that intelligence officials demanded 20 million EGP (approximately $425,000 at the time) to secure his place on a closed party list. During the 2023 presidential elections, candidates and their supporters faced open retaliation for mildly critical views, including campaign interference, cyberattacks with the notorious Predator software, and harassment by paid thugs. The regime selectively disbanded and criminalized campaign events of the critical opposition under Law No. 107/2013, which allows the government to ban assemblies of 10 or more persons, such as when security forces arrested 12 family members and dozens of supporters of opposition forerunner Ahmed Tantawi throughout his campaign, as state notaries blocked official endorsements. In February 2024, Tantawi and members of his campaign were sentenced to one year in prison on charges of “printing and circulating papers used in the electoral process without permission from the competent authority” in misdemeanor court, and banned from campaigning for five years. Regime officials brought further spurious charges, including incitement to terrorism and spreading false news, against him and his wife shortly before his release in May 2025. Similarly, during the 2018 presidential elections, the regime either arrested or forced all presidential candidates who announced their intention to run in the 2018 elections to withdraw their candidacy, excluding Moussa Moustafa Moussa, a pro-government former MP who actively endorsed el-Sisi’s re-election campaign.
Through the eradication of independent monitoring and the systematic targeting of opposition candidates, the regime has skewed the electoral playing field to the point that it claims victory with a very high vote share. While citizens participate in regular presidential and parliamentary elections, the regime manipulates electoral competition and manufactures results such that el-Sisi announced victory in the 2014 and 2018 presidential elections with a purported 97% of the vote, and in the 2023 election with 89% of the vote. Similar to presidential elections, the Nation’s Future Party (NFP) and other parties affiliated with el-Sisi’s military regime win by large margins in parliamentary polls, as in the case of the sham 2020 elections, which resulted in opposition candidates holding just 53 out of 896 total seats for the ensuing five-year legislative period. In May 2025, the regime passed new electoral regulations that established a hybrid voting system for both the Senate and House elections, held in August and October of that year, respectively, wherein half of the elected seats of each body were allocated to closed party lists and the other half allocated to individual candidates. In practice, the closed party list system favored the regime as security and intelligence agencies facilitated access to the party lists through vetting and backdoor deals reportedly costing candidates upwards of half a million dollars for inclusion on a closed list. Further, the regime split the hybrid voting system geographically, where Middle and Upper Egypt voted for all 284 individual seats in the House, while the more populous areas of Cairo, Alexandria, and the Delta voted for 284 seats exclusively via the closed party list system. As a result of this electoral engineering, parties on the National Unified List for Egypt, led by the regime’s NFP, swept all 200 of the contested seats in the Senate and 410 of the 568 contested seats in the House. Given that el-Sisi appoints an additional 100 members to the Senate and 28 members to the House, the regime and its direct affiliates captured control of more than 84 percent (or at least 738 of a total 896 seats) of the legislature in the 2025 parliamentary elections. In contrast, members of mainstream opposition parties won just 40 seats in the House, while independents who often align with the regime’s majority hold the remaining seats.
Independent and state media, political and civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Since taking power in 2014, the regime’s increasingly consolidated control over the government and growing capacity to violently repress its citizens have transformed Egypt into one of the most restrictive countries in the MENA region. A web of vague, overlapping laws grants the regime pretext to target any expression of criticism or disagreement with its policies as an act of terrorism or a threat to national security deserving of harsh sentences and exorbitant fines. Media broadcasts are tightly controlled by the regime and its affiliates, who retaliate against any deviation from proscribed scripts and schedules. Civil society, once vibrant, faces strict regulations on registration, funding, and operations that have led to the dissolution of many prominent organizations. Those who participate in rare public protests or demonstrations are likely to face arrest and extreme state-sanctioned violence.
The regime systematically and seriously intimidates and obstructs the work of dissenting actors. Primarily, the regime abuses a constellation of vague laws that grant it a wide pretext to target critics as either cyber or national security threats or terrorism supporters to silence opponents and intimidate residents into self-censorship. The regime imprisons more than 60,000 prisoners of conscience, maintains restrictive house arrests and travel bans on those released from prison, harasses family members and networks of outspoken and suspected critics, and otherwise interferes with dissidents under these laws. For instance, Alaa Abdel Fattah, one of the most famous prisoners of conscience who was imprisoned by the regime intermittently from 2011 until his most recent release and departure from Egypt in the fall of 2025. The regime arrested him at least four times on trumped-up charges from 2011 to 2014 for his anti-regime organizing and tried him by a combination of Emergency Courts, military tribunals, and national courts. He was sentenced to five years in prison in 2015 and released on restrictive parole in 2019, only to be re-arrested a few months later on charges of “joining a terrorist group,” “funding a terrorist group,” “disseminating false news,” “undermining national security,” and “using social media to commit a publishing offense.” The regime has targeted other members of Alaa’s family and network, including his sister, his lawyer Mohammed al-Baqer, and father-in-law Bahey el-Din Hassan, director and co-founder of the leading Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. The regime charged Hassan while exiled in France with “publishing false news” and “insulting the judiciary” in the Terrorism Court over a single critical tweet in 2019, and the courts sentenced him to 15 years in prison and a 20,000 EGP fine (approximately $1,250 in 2020).
The regime systematically and heavily manipulates media coverage in its favor. The military, intelligence agencies, and private loyalists own the majority of television, print, and radio media in the country. El-Sisi directly appoints the members of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, the National Press Authority, and the National Media Authority, which abuse far-reaching powers to license all websites, issue censorship directives of news and entertainment content without legal justification or judicial approval, and set restrictions on journalistic practices. Access to information is highly restricted, with VPN proxies banned and more than 600 websites blocked, including Egypt’s only prominent independent news organization, Mada Masr, whose editor-in-chief, Lina Atallah, and staff journalists are frequently brought to court. As of the end of 2025, Atallah faces renewed charges of broadcasting false news and operating an unlicensed website brought by the State Security Prosecution for publishing a report exposing inhumane conditions in the Badr 3 prison. Other mainstream journalists and pro-regime media hosts who stray even slightly from proscribed scripts and reporting schedules mandated by the regime are forcibly retired and face coordinated smear campaigns across regime-owned and affiliated media. Regime officials also regularly threaten, harass, and deport foreign journalists.
Under the sweeping 2017 “NGO Law,” made more restrictive with amendments in 2019, the regime has taken measures to unfairly shut down thousands of major independent civil society and dissenting organizations and continues to interfere in their registration, funding, and activities. As a result, Egypt’s civil society in 2025, once one of the most active and vibrant in the MENA region, has been reduced to limited private foundations with mostly charitable missions and informal aid networks that face limited capacity from funding and registration restrictions, in addition to the ever-present possibility of state retaliation. In a prominent example from 2022, the regime forced the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, one of the most major human rights organizations operating in Egypt for nearly two decades, to close after years of asset freezes, travel bans, arrests, and physical harassment of staff by thugs affiliated with the National Security Agency.
The regime systematically, seriously, and unfairly represses protests and unauthorized gatherings. After the 2013 military coup, the regime has used various other laws to prosecute assemblies of more than five to 10 people, break up dissenting demonstrations with extreme violence, and charge protestors in military and terrorism courts. Most famously, state security forces killed more than 1,150 demonstrators in the 2013 Raba’a and Nahda Square massacres. No one involved in the extrajudicial killings of peaceful protestors has been held accountable; rather, some security officers at the time were promoted to higher ranks, and statues celebrating the army and police were erected in Rab’a Square. Despite the regime’s demonstrated will and capacity for violent repression, small protests criticizing el-Sisi erupted during the 2023 presidential campaign. Amid the largest of these demonstrations in the rural coastal town of Marsa Matrouh, the regime violently dispersed and arrested more than 400 protesters who used slogans from the 2011 uprisings and called for el-Sisi’s downfall.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Since taking power in a 2013 coup, el-Sisi has systematically subordinated all branches of government to the regime and elevated the role of loyal military officers to high-level governing and judicial positions. Structural reforms and constitutional amendments passed through sham referenda and parliamentary votes have transformed national institutions, such as the judiciary, that had previously been somewhat independent and able to check regime attempts to centralize power into puppet organizations that the regime systematically abuses to legitimize its decisions and retaliate against all forms of dissent. Despite increasingly consolidated control over national institutions, the regime has taken extraordinary measures to establish parallel systems entirely under its purview to target detractors and trap prominent dissidents in prolonged, and at times indefinite, detention.
The regime has systematically undermined institutional independence to the point where cases or issues challenging the governing authority are no longer brought or frequently dismissed. The military regime has abused its control over the executive branch to marginalize or co-opt nominally democratic institutions to exert near-total influence over the legislature. Among widespread interference in the electoral process to ensure regime victories, el-Sisi pushed for the establishment of the Senate with constitutional amendments in 2019 that granted him the power to directly appoint a third of its members. The bicameral parliament, which once fielded at least a semblance of a party system and policy debate despite heavy regime interference, is now a rubber-stamp institution that passes executive orders without question and accepts the military’s comments on legislation. Of 596 total seats in the House of Representatives, 28 are appointed directly by el-Sisi, 384 are elected in a closed-party list system that the National Security Agency and intelligence agencies regulate, and the final 384 are directly elected. Since the sham parliamentary elections in 2025, mainstream opposition members hold just 40 out of 896 total seats in the parliament.
The regime has systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that abolish or seriously weaken their independence and operational effectiveness. Constitutional amendments pushed through a rubber stamp parliament and a sham referendum in 2019 subordinated the judiciary to el-Sisi and the military, allowing the military to veto judicial decisions and awarding el-Sisi unchecked power to appoint, promote, and dismiss the heads of Egypt’s judicial bodies, including the Supreme Constitutional Court, the Commissioner’s Authority, the Court of Cassation, the Supreme Council for Judicial Bodies, and the prosecutor’s office. In early 2024, the regime deepened military control over the judicial system with a series of new laws and amendments to prior statutes on military tribunals codified the role of military courts as a judicial authority with all the powers and jurisdiction granted to ordinary judicial authorities, effectively institutionalizing their use against civilians cast by the regime as threats to the state. In addition to legal reforms and restructuring, the regime has systematically retaliated against members of the judicial branch who rule contrary to regime interests, or who are perceived as a threat, with forced retirement, travel bans, asset freezes, forced disappearance, arrest, and detention on fabricated charges. At least 59 judges who called for reform were forcibly retired between 2013 and 2016, while at least three judges who lodged official complaints against their dissenting colleagues were promoted to minister of justice during the same time period. As a result, the national courts, which historically served as a civilian check on regime attempts to consolidate power and oppress opponents, have since been transformed into a puppet institution that regularly fields and rubber stamps trumped-up charges against regime critics and traps tens of thousands of political opponents in indefinite detention.
The regime systematically directs cases to separate, regime-controlled courts. Prior to its consolidated control over the civilian judicial system, the regime created a number of special courts to operate outside of the previously civilian-run national court system. In these special courts, the regime has full control to appoint judges, approve decisions, and fully restrict the civil liberties of defendants by denying defense attorneys the right to call witnesses and the ability to make statements, as well as withholding charges and case information, holding defendants incommunicado, and harassing defense lawyers with impunity. The first among these courts was the Terrorism Courts, established shortly after then-president Mohamed Morsi’s ousting in 2013 to try political opponents and later all people considered a threat to the state on trumped-up terrorism charges. The regime then established the Emergency State Security Courts (ESSC) during a state of emergency called under the pretext of fighting terrorism that lasted from 2017 to 2021. Although previous dictators in Egypt regularly abused emergency powers to repress dissent, el-Sisi declared the state of emergency explicitly to charge opponents en masse and incarcerate them indefinitely through a strategy of ‘rotating’ or ‘recycling’ prisoners of conscience across the national and parallel court systems on similar charges after completing their initial sentence. For similar reasons, el-Sisi has also institutionalized the use of military courts for civilians accused of crimes on or against public and military property with Law No. 136/2014, and he began appointing military officers to ESSC tribunals trying civilians as early as 2017. For example, in the prominent case of poet and activist Galal el-Behairy, whose song lyrics were a popular symbol of the 2011 uprisings, security forces arrested him at Cairo airport in July 2018 on trumped-up charges for authoring the popular 2018 song ‘Balaha’ that criticizes el-Sisi. After serving his initial three-year sentence in the ESSC, the regime rotated el-Behairy to a new round of pre-trial detention on similar charges in the military courts, where he was held in dismal conditions without trial and in spite of having already served the length of his politically motivated sentence. In 2025, the State Security Prosecution brought renewed charges of spreading false news and aiding a terrorist organization against el-Behairy within the national courts, thus initiating another indefinite period of pre-trial detention.
