Alaa Abd al-Fattah, one of the most iconic figures of Egypt’s 2011 revolution and the country’s most prominent political prisoner under President al-Sisi, was released last Monday, September 22, by presidential decree. The news, confirmed by family lawyer and former presidential candidate Khaled Ali, was met with jubilation among relatives and political activists alike. Alaa’s sister, longtime activist Mona Seif, posted a brief message on X: “My heart is about to stop.” Their mother, Laila Soueif—who had waged a prolonged hunger strike that left her in fragile health and sparked fears for her life—reacted from her home in Giza, where she sat beside her son, surrounded by family and friends. Alongside her joy, she insisted the struggle would not be over until Egypt is free of political prisoners. Messages of celebration also poured in from Egyptian activists, many living in exile, who have consistently championed Alaa’s cause as emblematic of the country under General-turned-President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
A portrait of Alaa
Alaa grew up in a household steeped in politics. His mother, a mathematics professor at Cairo University, opposed the regimes of Anwar Sadat (1970–1981) and later Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011). His father, Ahmed Seif, was a leader of the vibrant student movement of the 1970s. Arrested at least four times and sentenced to five years in 1983, Ahmed studied law while in prison, eventually becoming a lawyer who defended activists and political dissidents in Egyptian courts until his death in 2014.
Alaa’s own political and personal journey is deeply intertwined with that of his parents, though with an even more bitter edge. An activist, writer, and software developer, he holds the grim distinction of having been imprisoned under every political phase Egypt has experienced in recent decades—first under Mubarak, then during the revolutionary period, and finally under al-Sisi’s military regime.
His first arrest came in 2006, when he was accused of organizing a demonstration in support of judicial independence, part of the wider mobilization launched by the Kifaya movement in 2004. He was released after 45 days in detention. Soon after, he and his wife moved to South Africa, where both worked as programmers. But he returned to Egypt with the outbreak of the revolution, ignited by the historic protests of January 25, 2011. He quickly became one of its symbols—and inevitably drew the attention of the military rulers who oversaw the transition after Mubarak’s fall.
On October 9, 2011, Alaa joined a Coptic Christian march in Cairo, where the army opened fire indiscriminately on the crowd, killing dozens. His outspoken condemnation of the massacre led to his arrest and the threat of a military trial. He was released after about two months.
His third arrest came in the heart of the counter-revolutionary wave. On July 3, 2013, the military, led by al-Sisi, overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected president from the Muslim Brotherhood, delivering a mortal blow to the revolution. Many on Egypt’s left, fearing the Brotherhood’s push to Islamize the country, accepted—or even welcomed—the return of the generals. Not Alaa. He continued to organize protests in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the 2011 uprising. But the crowds had dwindled to just a few thousand activists, and the regime found it easy to crush dissent with sweeping, ruthless repression.
Alaa was arrested again in November 2013 and sentenced the following year to 15 years in prison, later reduced to five with no chance of early release. In 2019, he was granted parole on the condition that he spend every night for the next five years inside a police station. After fresh protests erupted that same year against al-Sisi’s rule, he was arrested yet again and sentenced to another five years, which in practice became seven since the two years he had already spent in pretrial detention were not counted.
Why grant a pardon now?
The very title of this section actually contains two questions in one. The first emerges if we drop the final adverb—“now”—and frame it more generally: what motivates a government to pardon certain prisoners? Here, we encounter a feature common to many authoritarian regimes: under certain circumstances, they tend to commute the sentences of political detainees, a practice far less frequent in democracies.
At first glance, this may sound paradoxical. After all, in the common understanding, an authoritarian regime is one that heavily represses dissent and denies even the most basic civil and political rights. Yet the granting of pardons does not contradict these features—it complements them. Authoritarianism is defined by the absence—or more precisely, the weakness—of the rule of law. Judicial decisions therefore tend to be highly arbitrary. Presidential pardons represent the apex of this arbitrariness: they simultaneously display the ruler’s magnanimity and reinforce his position above the law itself. In the end, presidential pardons for political prisoners are not paradoxical at all, but rather a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
What has been said so far situates the political phenomenon in its broader framework, but of course it does not answer why Alaa, specifically, has been pardoned—or why the pardon comes now. The main reason that helps address both questions lies in the Palestinian issue and its repercussions on Egyptian domestic politics. Since Israel’s full-scale genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, al-Sisi’s regime has been beset by numerous contradictions. Two of these, in particular, are of vital importance.
The first contradiction lies in the tension between an Egyptian state that presents itself as sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and its complete inaction in the face of the ongoing slaughter. This gap calls into question the legitimacy of al-Sisi’s regime, as it plays out in a society that overwhelmingly supports the Palestinian people. As with the 2011 revolution—incubated in the solidarity movement with the Second Intifada of 2000—every time the Palestinian question returns to the center of national and international political debate, Cairo’s regime is torn between the image it projects and its actions.
The second contradiction concerns the relocation of the Palestinian population. This issue has grown more pressing as Israel’s apparent attempt to carry out a near-total ethnic cleansing of Gaza becomes increasingly evident. As the only neighboring country, Egypt is the natural candidate to absorb part of the roughly two million people at risk. Other Arab states could, in theory, take them in—but such an operation would take months and would still depend on whether Gazans themselves agreed to resettle in the Gulf, which remains highly uncertain.
In all likelihood, Egypt would instead find itself hosting refugee camps on its own soil, potentially housing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Such camps, as history has shown, could easily become incubators of armed resistance. In that case, attacks on Israel would originate from Egyptian territory. The inevitable Israeli retaliation would then raise a stark dilemma for Cairo: would Egypt tolerate the violation of its sovereignty, effectively joining the ranks of semi-states like Lebanon and Syria, or would it respond militarily, as Iran did this past summer? A military response, however, would almost certainly escalate beyond missile and drone exchanges, drawing Egypt into a full-scale ground conflict with its neighbor.
It is precisely to avoid such a scenario—above all else—that Egypt’s generals have every interest in seeing Israel’s campaign in Gaza halted. But how can they achieve this goal, given that Egyptian pressure on Israel is, at best, negligible?
This is where Alaa Abd al-Fattah enters the picture—as a small bargaining chip in a much larger game. Since 2022, thanks to his mother’s London birthplace, Alaa has held British citizenship. That status significantly strengthened the U.K.’s diplomatic push to persuade President al-Sisi to pardon his most prominent political prisoner. Al-Sisi’s move, however, is less a concession to international pressure than an attempt to draw closer to London. Many analysts have noted that ties between the two countries have markedly improved in recent months.
This warming of relations reflects Europe’s partial repositioning after the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency, which has brought a series of jolting demands on U.S. allies—from tariffs to increased military spending—while aligning Washington even more firmly with Tel Aviv. While still considering Israel a vital outpost for safeguarding their interests in the Middle East, Europe’s leading powers have cautiously begun to distance themselves from the way Israel is prosecuting its conquest of the Gaza Strip.
Neither Europe’s capitals nor al-Sisi, however, are genuinely interested in the creation of a Palestinian state. What they seek instead is a truce—driven by the need for domestic legitimacy and the pressures of a complex international chessboard. In this context, Alaa’s pardon emerged as a convenient, cost-free gesture for al-Sisi, one that might—alongside other factors—help defuse the “Palestinian problem” for Egypt’s rulers.
It would therefore be a mistake to interpret Alaa’s release as a softening of al-Sisi’s repressive grip. His regime has been—and remains—a vast military panopticon. That does not mean, however, that it is destined to last forever. Internal contradictions, subordination to Western powers, and a persistent inability to improve the material conditions of broad popular sectors make Egypt’s regime a giant with feet of clay.
Signs of renewed unrest in the workplace, as recently noted by Hossam el-Hamalawy—analyst and activist with the Revolutionary Socialists—show that even al-Sisi’s suffocating repression is not enough to silence every dissenting voice. The strikes of 2025 have so far been primarily economic and defensive in nature: responses to unpaid wages, withheld bonuses, unjust firings, and workplace abuses. They differ from the strike wave of 2006–2008, when worker militancy, coupled with the democratic fervor of activists like Alaa, helped prepare the ground for the revolutionary explosion of 2011.
Still, these strikes represent an important countertrend—one that could signal a stronger opposition movement in Egypt’s near future.
Cover photo: British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah celebrates with friends at home after his release in Cairo on September 23, 2025. (Photo by Mohamed EL-RAAI / AFP)
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