The words freedom and democracy seem to be yoked together – like gin and tonic or Laurel and Hardy. In the rhetoric of many western politicians, the two words are used almost interchangeably. Promoting his “freedom agenda” in 2003, President George W Bush hailed the “swiftest advance for freedom in the 2,500-year story of democracy”.
But the current political upheavals in Egypt show that freedom and democracy are not always the same thing. They can sometimes be enemies. Egyptian liberals who backed the military coup against President Mohamed Morsi justified their actions because they believed that the Muslim Brotherhood government, although elected, was threatening fundamental freedoms.
It is true that queues for petrol, the rising price of food and the sense that security was breaking down in Egypt were crucial in bringing millions of anti-Morsi demonstrators on to the streets.