TAHRIR SQUARE, Egypt – The entire nation of Egypt is experiencing a collective bout of déjà vu this week, as mass protests continue to fill the streets and the government inches closer to being seized by the Egyptian military. Millions of Egyptian citizens are calling the situation “trippy,” and swearing that it “feels like this already happened before.”
“Seriously, this is all so freaking familiar,” said Mohammed Hassan, a Cairo resident. “The streets filled with people calling the president a fascist, demanding that he step down; the military threatening to take control of the government. It’s like I already experienced this.”
“It’s so vivid,” said another Egyptian who asked that her name be withheld for fear that people would think she is crazy. “Yesterday I walked through Tahrir Square and saw all the protestors, and it struck me: My God, it feels like this exact same thing has happened before, like I’m living it over again. It’s quite unsettling.”
Over the weekend, thousands of opposition protestors, who have been demonstrating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, demanded that Islamist President Mohamed Morsi relinquish control of the Egyptian government. The unrest began late last year when Morsi pushed a new constitution, drafted mostly by his Islamist allies, through the legislature without judicial oversight, and began consolidating political power around his inner circle. On Monday, the Egyptian military gave Morsi 48 hours to come to an agreement with the opposition, resign from his office, or face a military coup—all of which, Egyptians are saying, must have “happened already in a past life or something.”
President Morsi himself is not immune to the wave of déjà vu sweeping his country. “The military is threatening to throw the president out of office, huh?” Morsi said in an appearance on state television. “Am I the only one who finds this very familiar?”
“The effect is so strong, I can almost tell what’s going to happen next,” former-Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak said from his jail cell. “The president’s forces will try to squash the protests. There will be bloodshed, but the unrest will continue. Eventually, he’ll realize the futility of his position and step down, at which time the military will take control of the government. And sometime time next year, there will be elections, in which a veritable clone of Morsi is chosen to lead Egypt.”
“Don’t ask me how I know all this,” said Mubarak. “It just feels like that’s going to happen.”
