Mahmoud el-Sisi for President? Who Is Behind the Campaign

On 14 October 2026, speaking at the Armed Forces’ 44th cultural symposium, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi settled the question that had hung over Egyptian politics for months. “The state has a constitution, a constitution we approved,” he said. “No one will touch it.” Anadolu Agency reported the pledge the next day, and three days later, at the Military Academy graduation on 17 October, he told cadets that 2030 would be the end of his term, Sky News Arabia reported.

Within hours of the first statement, something odd surfaced: a polished website, a Facebook page and a slogan announcing “Mahmoud el-Sisi, President of Egypt 2030”, a campaign for the president’s eldest son. The campaign is fake: an operation built to replace a narrative Sisi had just killed, “he will amend the constitution to stay”, with a new one: “he will hand power to his son”.

The “Mahmoud el-Sisi 2030” campaign appeared a day after Sisi ruled out touching Egypt’s constitution; Facebook’s own transparency data dates its page to 15 October.

It has no candidate photo, no spokesman, no office and no statement, and its WhatsApp messages went to the state’s best-known opponents rather than to potential supporters.

The messages came from Egyptian numbers routed through VPN servers in London and California, and several of the numbers traced back to one handset.

The campaign was built to plant one word, “inheritance”, the charge that helped bring down Hosni Mubarak in 2011. It is a fabrication, and Egyptians should treat it as one.

Start with the campaign itself, read the way an investigator would read it. The website is slick: the red, white and black of the Egyptian flag, gold lettering, and the words “the official presidential campaign”. A Facebook page called “Mahmoud el-Sisi President of Egypt” appeared alongside it. Facebook’s Page Transparency tool, which shows when a page was created, gives its date as 15 October, one day after the president’s speech. Serious presidential campaigns are not conceived, designed and launched in 24 hours.

The second gap is stranger. The site has no photograph of its candidate. It is like an action film whose hero never appears: not on the poster, not in the trailer, not in the film itself. The third gap completes the picture. There is no launch statement, no named official, no spokesman and no headquarters. Any genuine campaign begins by telling voters who stands behind it. This one began by hiding exactly that.

A website alone does nothing; nobody visits an anonymous page with no information on it. Someone had to push it, and that is where the WhatsApp messages came in. They opened with a formal greeting, asked the recipient to join and support a campaign to make Mahmoud el-Sisi the next presidential candidate under the slogan “Complete the journey”, and some were signed by a “Lieutenant Colonel Ashraf Said”. Alamat Online reported that activists and media figures received them, and that neither the sender’s real identity nor the body behind him is known.

Look at who received them. A human rights activist announced she had been sent a stream of them. The exiled opposition presenter Amr Abdel Hadi posted that he had received one proposing the president’s son as Egypt’s next leader. A campaign looking for supporters does not write to the state’s most committed opponents. That is like planning a wedding and sending the invitation to the person who hates you most, with a note asking him to share it. It makes sense only if you were never looking for guests. You wanted someone to talk.

That is what this campaign wanted: angry publishers, not supporters. Every recipient who posted the message became free advertising for the website. And “Lieutenant Colonel Ashraf Said” has no public record, no title and no face. He reads like a character written on paper, there to suggest that the state itself was behind the messages.

Mahmoud el-Sisi, born in 1982, is the president’s eldest son and a brigadier general in Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, where he was appointed deputy head in June 2018 after serving in Military Intelligence. In November 2019 the independent outlet Mada Masr reported, citing two intelligence officials, that he was to be moved to a diplomatic posting in Moscow; the move was never officially confirmed. He has never held elected office, given a political speech or announced any ambition for the presidency.

The constitutional picture is equally clear. The 2014 constitution limited presidents to two terms, and the 2019 amendments, approved by 88.8 per cent of voters in a referendum, lengthened each term to six years while keeping the two-term limit, The New Arab noted. Sisi’s current term ends in 2030. Nothing in the constitution provides for a president to pass power to a relative, and the president has now said publicly, twice in four days, that the text stays as it is and that 2030 is his last year.

All of this was done for one word: tawrith, “inheritance”. In 2011 that word helped bring Egyptians into the streets against Hosni Mubarak, whose son Gamal was widely seen as being groomed to succeed him. Someone is trying to plant it again in Egypt, with no basis in fact, at a sensitive moment.

The script, the direction and the acting all came from the same people. The film has one problem: its hero does not exist. Mahmoud el-Sisi has not appeared or spoken, no state official has endorsed anything, and the state has announced no such plan. The whole campaign rests on a name without its owner.

The method for exposing it is open to anyone. When was the campaign created? Who stands behind it? What kind of numbers sent its messages, and from where? How did the posts about it spread, and who spread them? Ask those questions before sharing any rumour about the Egyptian state. This was not a campaign. It was a way of working, a professional one, and its purpose is plain. Anyone who receives a message promoting “Mahmoud el-Sisi for President” from “Lieutenant Colonel Ashraf Said” is looking at the operation itself.