Onetime Morsi Supporters Allege Egypt Leader Shifted

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's defiant response to his country's latest crisis is consistent with what many opponents call the unbending and autocratic stamp he has put on his first year in Egypt's presidency.

Late Tuesday, on a televised address, Mr. Morsi dismissed calls for him to step down, saying he would defend Egypt's constitution—a document drafted under opposition protest by a body packed with drafters sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood—with his blood.

In interviews, many onetime Morsi supporters traced their transformation into hardened critics to a process that started more than a year ago at a luxury hotel in Cairo, the Fairmont. There, Mr. Morsi—who was at the time the Brotherhood's No. 2 pick for the presidency, after its top candidate was excluded by Egypt's courts—gained support from a spectrum of Egyptian political leaders in a series of backroom negotiations.

After the meetings, activist Shadi Al Ghazali Harb stood at a hotel podium, pledging his support to Mr. Morsi. Now he recalls the meeting with bitterness—both of the direction Mr. Morsi took the country, and for how sees his own revolutionary bona fides damaged after he backed the Egyptian president. "I'm being haunted by the Fairmont picture right now," said Mr. Harb.

Mr. Harb and other secular-leaning activists, as well as some hard-line Muslim leaders, say that after Mr. Morsi used their support to eke out a narrow victory in last summer's presidential elections, he and his Islamist backers adopted a winner-take-all approach to governance.

Relying on counsel from a few advisers from the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi has ruled by edict and has declined at several points to extend an olive branch to others, these people say.

"Part of it is about substance and policy, but some of it is about his personal style," said Shadi Hamid, an Egypt expert and director of researcher at the Brookings Institution Doha Center. "He doesn't seem to respect the opposition and doesn't consider them actors worth taking seriously."

Leaders of the Brotherhood said the president was fairly elected, giving him the right to govern as he sees fit.

During the backroom negotiations at the Fairmont, Brotherhood leaders promised to include liberal activists in a "presidential team" of policy advisers in return for their support, Mr. Harb said. They also pledged to allow more liberal voices onto a constitutional drafting assembly that was already dominated by Islamist delegates, he said.

"It was a big mistake," said Ahmed Maher, the leader of the 6th of April Youth Movement and one of the activists present.

Brotherhood leaders said they believed they had fulfilled the Fairmont pledges. They point out that only eight out of 38 appointed ministers hailed from the Brotherhood, while the rest were mostly nonaligned technocrats.

"Many political actors cannot distinguish between having their voices heard and having their orders obeyed," said an adviser to the president. He added that the makeup of the constitutional assembly was "beyond the president's authority" because its members were elected by Egypt's legislature.

Mr. Morsi's team was also working rooms on the other side of the ideological divide. His team guaranteed that delegates from the Salafi Nour Party would take part in a "complete partnership when taking political decisions" including a Salafi vice president, said Ahmed Thabet, Nour's deputy head.

Crucial to Salafis, Mr. Morsi also promised not to pursue a diplomatic denouement with Iran, whose Shiite government Salafis consider to be heretical, said Mr. Thabet. Brotherhood leaders deny they made such a pledge.

These parties' united front helped nudge Mr. Morsi to a narrow victory over Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister from Hosni Mubarak's ousted regime.

But instead of naming activists or Salafis as ministers, the non-Brotherhood politicians were handed advisory roles to the president, adding to a roster of 17 advisers and four assistants. In the end, said people close to the advisers, a small group of Brotherhood leaders held Mr. Morsi's ear.

When asked why more liberals weren't given cabinet posts, Gehad al Haddad, a spokesman for the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and others close to the presidency said the president had trouble recruiting talented, liberal-minded ministers because many refused to serve under a Brotherhood presidency.

Despite their disappointment, both groups initially stayed the course behind Egypt's first democratically elected president.

But in November, Mr. Morsi issued a constitutional declaration that sidelined a judiciary dominated by Mubarak appointees in order to push through an Islamist-tinged constitution. He called the move a revolutionary measure meant to prevent the judges from staging a comeback of the former regime, a theme he picked up at length in Tuesday night's address.

Liberal activists were outraged. When protesters flooded the streets around Mr. Morsi's palace, Brotherhood leaders went on television to call out Islamist supporters, ushering in weeks of violent street-level clashes that set the stage for this week's demonstrations.

Liberal leaders acknowledge that they exploited the outrage around Mr. Morsi's constitutional declaration to frustrate the president. They announced a boycott of parliamentary elections and put up intractable barriers to reconciliation.

"We managed to get the political atmosphere into a deadlock," Mr. Harb said. "The only conditions that the [opposition] put for dialogue were impossible conditions" such as changing the cabinet and removing Mr. Morsi's Brotherhood-aligned public prosecutor.

Then, in February, Mr. Morsi reached out to Iran, infuriating his Salafi backers. They accused Mr. Morsi of using the Iran issue to empower the Brotherhood at the expense of their ideological opposition to Shiism.

Late that month, Mr. Morsi sacked one of his Salafi presidential advisers, accusing him of the nebulous charge of "misusing his office." Days later, another Salafi presidential adviser and Nour Party member quit his post in solidarity.

That episode ended the love affair between the Salafis and Mr. Morsi. Just like their secular-minded siblings, hardline Salafis began organizing conferences throughout the spring to discuss dissenting against the president.

On Friday, the Nour Party, Egypt's most powerful Salafi bloc, refused to call out their numbers to a pro-Morsi demonstration. Early Tuesday morning, they announced that they supported the opposition's call for early elections.