Nostalgia for Nasser

Perhaps the increase in Nasserist nostalgia in Egypt isn't that surprising:

Four decades later, he (Nasser) is enjoying a comeback. Amid the confusion and violence in Egypt, his face has begun to reappear – on T-shirts and placards at demonstrations and on the front page of newspapers...

Last week, demonstrators objecting to proposed US air strikes on Syria waved flags with the Nasserist Popular Current bloc’s name on them. One man wore a banner with Nasser’s face wrapped around him. The demonstrators chanted defiant anti-American slogans.

The Nasserist revival has happened in parallel with the rise of a man who seems to be filling the role of Egypt’s strongman: Gen Abdel Fattah El Sisi.

In his crackdown on the Brotherhood since ousting the Islamist president Mohammed Morsi on July 3, in his publicly assertive attitude to western reservations about the brutality of his security forces, and in his stirring, nationalist rhetoric, some Egyptians see a new Nasser in Gen El Sisi, and put their pictures together on posters and placards.