Sisi’s Presidency Was a War, Not a Prize. Whoever Rules Egypt After 2030 Will Be Measured Against Him

Egypt’s 2014 constitution limited presidents to two four-year terms. Constitutional amendments approved in an April 2019 referendum extended the term to six years, kept the two-term ceiling and added a transitional clause that lengthened Sisi’s second term to 2024 and allowed him one more six-year term. He won the December 2023 election and was sworn in for that term in April 2024. It ends in April 2030, when he will have served 16 years.

Under the current text he cannot run again. Staying would need a new amendment, approved by parliament and then by a referendum. Loyalist politicians and pro-government accounts have called for exactly that, which is why his October 14 statement mattered: it was the first time he addressed the amendment question directly, and he closed it. The Silent Dossier analysis published on October 15 looked at why he chose to say it more than three years early.

A president who comes to power on a wave of popular support is expected to repay it. Sisi spent it. In July 2014, weeks into his term, the government cut fuel subsidies. In November 2016 the central bank floated the pound, ending years of spending reserves to defend the currency, as part of a $12 billion IMF programme. From Gamal Abdel Nasser to Morsi, presidents had shied away from both. They were deeply unpopular, and he took them anyway, because the alternative was a state that could not pay its bills.

The shocks kept coming. COVID-19 shut down tourism. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit the country’s wheat imports and forced Cairo to choose between Moscow and the European Union. It chose neither, and kept both. When Vladimir Putin met Sisi at the BRICS summit in Kazan in October 2024, he told him Egypt’s position was very important to Russia.

Military men are usually tempted by military adventures. Sisi built a doctrine against them: the strength of the Egyptian army lies in not using it.

In February 2015 Islamic State fighters in Libya beheaded 21 Christian workers, 20 of them Egyptian Copts, on a beach. Egyptians demanded revenge. The easiest thing for a former defence minister was to declare war. Instead Egypt struck Islamic State targets in Derna, punished those responsible and stopped there.

The same rule held in Sudan. The civil war that began in April 2023 sent an enormous wave of refugees into Egypt, a cost the country still pays. Another ruler might have seen an opportunity to send troops across the border. Entering Sudan would be easy; the question is how you get out. Cairo did not go in.

It held when Israel seized the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border in May 2024, when many expected an Egyptian military response. It held over Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, even though Donald Trump himself said in October 2020 that Egypt would end up blowing the dam up. The policy is that the army stays at home unless Ethiopia moves against Egypt’s water. And it held after the Houthis drove shipping away from the Suez Canal: Egypt has not been dragged into a war with a group far from its territory, a point Silent Dossier examined when Riyadh’s war on the Houthis escalated.

Restraint is the strategy, not a weakness. A distant adversary that cannot be defeated in one blow drags a stronger state into a war of attrition: every jet answered with a cheap drone, with no end in sight. That is the pattern of the Russia-Ukraine war and of the US war with Iran. Sisi has refused to give Ethiopia or the Houthis that war.

At home, there was no choice. In Sinai Egypt fought jihadist groups that, by US intelligence estimates, held 24 fortified positions and drew fighters from Afghanistan, Syria and beyond. In March 2023 Sisi said the war had cost the state around one billion Egyptian pounds a month for 90 months. Meanwhile citizens were complaining about power cuts and asking what Sinai had to do with them.

Gaza brought Egypt to the edge of war with Israel. Then the new American president Cairo had counted on proposed, in early 2025, moving Gaza’s population to Egypt and Jordan. Egypt refused and offered its own reconstruction plan. The outcome: in October 2025 Trump stood in Sharm el-Sheikh beside Sisi at the summit that sealed the Gaza ceasefire, and Palestinians were not moved into Sinai. His administration is now backing the Egyptian army more generously than recent predecessors, Barack Obama included. The full military aid package continues, and in July 2025 the State Department approved a $4.67 billion NASAMS air defence sale. Even long-time critics of Cairo in Washington have struggled to explain how Egypt persuaded a president who wanted Gazans in Sinai to keep them in Gaza, without breaking its channel to Hamas.

The Iran war repeated the pattern. When it began, nobody bet on Egypt as a mediator; the money was on Qatar and Oman. On September 20, 2026, CIA Director John Ratcliffe met Sisi in Cairo as Egypt carried messages between Washington and Tehran on the terms for ending the war. Sisi has described the region’s wars plainly: they bring nothing but destruction and the loss of a people’s future, and almost nobody comes out a winner.

Even Israel is now caught in Cairo’s net. Voices in Israel claimed Egypt was behind the October 7 attack. Now Benjamin Netanyahu must explain why he ignored Egyptian intelligence warnings that the pressure on Gaza would explode. Israel cannot claim both.

Some will say any capable leader could have done this. Look at Syria. The script was the same: jihadists the state could not defeat, sectarian strain, an economic crisis they exploited, and a march on the capital. In December 2024 an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group with al-Qaeda roots, toppled Bashar al-Assad after Israel had spent months destroying the forces that propped him up. Israel then took more Syrian land. Syria is still trying to recover, and nobody knows how it will get that territory back.

The same pieces were on Egypt’s board: Israel on the border, jihadists in Sinai next to Israel who attacked Egypt, not Israel, and a goal of bringing down the government in Cairo. Egypt did not become Syria.

Sisi fought much of this without a media machine of his own, against a Brotherhood that spent heavily on channels built to attack him. His weapon was his standing with Egyptians.

His last achievement is diplomatic: he turned adversaries into partners. Turkey, which sheltered the Brotherhood, held its first joint naval exercise with Egypt in 13 years in September 2025. Qatar committed $7.5 billion in direct investment in 2025, anchored by the Alam El-Roum project on the Mediterranean coast. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are quarrelling with each other, and Cairo has kept both. This is a ruler who does not lose partners.