Following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt became one of the main forces contending for political power in Egypt against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and other established centers of the former Hosni Mubarak regime.
The parliamentary election in November 2011 to January 2012 resulted in dominant parliamentary representation for the Freedom and Justice Party and other Islamic parties. The Brotherhood's leader Mohamed Morsi won the presidential election that followed in June 2012. Morsi became the first democratically elected and first civilian President of Egypt.
The Supreme Council made a series of moves aimed at minimizing the Brotherhood's influence and depriving it of its newly acquired institutional power base. The post-Mubarak ruling establishment had the outcome of the parliamentary election nullified in the courts. At the outset of Morsi's presidency, numerous critical issues were unresolved, including the status of the disbanded parliament and the sweeping powers granted by the military council to itself. The Brotherhood was formulating its response and working on a strategy for protecting its electoral gains in a new situation, when one of their own holds the highest elected office. Having come to power as a revolutionary force, but being historically pragmatic and moderately conservative, they now had a stake also in protecting the constitutional and legal continuity of the state. The electoral success of the Muslim Brotherhood gave rise to misgivings among other leaders and factions of the Egyptian revolution, and also in the United States and elsewhere.
In June 2012 Parliament instituted the Constituent Assembly of Egypt, tasked to prepare a new constitution to be approved in a referendum. The constitution was supported by 63.8% of voters in the referendum, held in December of that year.
Egypt remained highly unstable. The second anniversary of the revolution (January/February 2013) brought renewed mass street demonstrations and violence, with a number of fatalities. The volatility contributed to the deepening of the country's economic crisis. The Muslim Brotherhood faced opposition from some of the secular activists who had helped defeat the Mubarak regime, as well as from the judiciary and the military. President Morsi declared a limited state of emergency, but Egypt was being increasingly overtaken by "chaos and lawlessness".
Renewed mass demonstrations took place on President Morsi's first anniversary in office (June 2013). The demonstrators demanded his resignation or removal. Morsi refused to step down, but his elected government was overthrown in a military coup led by the Minister of Defense General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi on July 3, 2013. After weeks of tense pro-Morsi sit-in demonstrations in Cairo, a state of emergency was declared and the new regime's security forces violently dispersed the protestors on August 14.
Muslim Brotherhood in Mubarak's Egypt
During the long-lasting presidency of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood went through different stages of social and political development and activity, becoming a formal participant in the political process, being a banned and persecuted opposition group, or both. During the later period of Mubarak's rule, the movement had been persecuted in a number of ways and candidates for offices associated with the Brotherhood were subjected by the government and the National Democratic Party to electoral fraud, causing the Brotherhood to boycott, together with other opposition parties, the second round of the parliamentary election of 2010.
Under President Mubarak, the government waged decades of psychological warfare against the Brotherhood and presented the Islamists as a dire threat to the country, using them as a justification for its own heavy-handed one-party rule and frequently imprisoning the movement's members.