Ayman Nour, the former leader of Egypt’s al Ghad party, was released from jail on Wednesday. He was initially sentenced to five years in 2005 for forging documents to obtain legal status for his party; many, including Nour, suspect that this charge was fabricated in order to punish him for running against Egypt’s current President, Hosni Mubarak, in 2005. He gave the Council on Foreign Relations a personal – albeit brief – interview to discuss his release and the future of Egyptian politics. You can read it here. Both Nour and Marc Lynch caution against reading any sort of progressive agenda on the part of the Mubarak regime into their decision to release him – we can expect the same anti-democratic practices in the country to continue.
