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Egyptians protested a decree by President Mohamed Morsi granting himself powers that shield his decisions from judicial review. More Photos »
CAIRO — In the second potent showing of opposition rage in less than a week, tens of thousands of people streamed into Tahrir Square on Friday, angrily denouncing Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, and the hasty passage earlier in the day of a draft constitution written by an Islamist assembly.
The gathering on Friday was smaller than one that packed the square on Tuesday, raising the question of whether Mr. Morsi’s opponents — liberals, leftists and fierce opponents of the Islamist group that the president once helped lead — could maintain their momentum. As they planned ways to escalate the protests with civil disobedience, Mr. Morsi had to face his critics personally at a mosque in Cairo, where, state news media reported, the president was heckled during Friday Prayer.
Egypt’s often fractured opposition banded together this week to protest a series of moves by Mr. Morsi that had led to accusations that he was reviving the country’s autocracy, presenting him with the most severe crisis in the five months since he took office.
Mr. Morsi’s moves to issue an edict placing his decisions above judicial review and to press the Constitutional Assembly to pass a draft constitution hastily, despite a walkout by non-Islamists, have provided the opposition with a rallying cry. Despite the heady atmosphere on Friday, protesters and activists in Tahrir Square’s choked approaches, bus shelters and plazas predicted an increasingly bitter standoff, given the slim likelihood that the president planned to accede to their demands.
Slogans calling on Mr. Morsi to leave or for his government to fall have energized crowds and drawn new faces to the opposition, including people staunchly opposed to Islamist leadership and those who have supported figures from Hosni Mubarak’s government, like Ahmed Shafik, a former minister who ran against Mr. Morsi in the presidential race. Strikingly, some revolutionary activists now refuse to use the word “remnant,” as they had in the past, to describe their new allies, saying instead that they are glad for the support of people who decided to stay home during the uprising.
It was unclear whether the newcomers would remain while the opposition pressed more concrete demands and stepped up its confrontation with the government. Sitting on a curb in Tahrir Square on Friday night, Adel Abdullah, an unemployed Web designer, said he was happy to find like-minded people also bitterly opposed to Mr. Morsi. But, short of demanding that Mr. Morsi leave office, he said he was not sure, practically, what the president’s opponents should do.
“The people don’t want him,” he said of Mr. Morsi. “I’m so glad he made a mistake.”
Other opposition figures were trying to find ways to capitalize on the president’s mistakes. Leaders of the newly formed National Salvation Front, a coalition of parties, threatened to call for a national strike and possibly to march on the presidential palace to prevent the draft constitution’s going to referendum.
Mohamed Ahmed, a leader of the April 6th Revolutionary Youth Group, spoke of plans to escalate the protests in an effort to win concessions on demands including a rescinding of Mr. Morsi’s edict; a new, more representative constituent assembly; and an overhaul of the Interior Ministry.
“We’re going to have demonstrations in places that affect the regime,” he said, also mentioning the possibility of strikes and civil disobedience. Nearby, a judge speaking to a crowd compared Mr. Morsi to Hitler and Caligula.
Mr. Ahmed said that the talk of toppling Mr. Morsi was unrealistic — but tactically important. “We have to raise our demands to get our demands,” he said.
Islamist parties have repeatedly prevailed at the polls since Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow, leaving the opposition to rely on obstructionist tactics to try to thwart them. Some activists say they hope for help from an Egyptian judiciary angered at Mr. Morsi’s bid to place his decisions out of judges’ reach. They have argued that the president will be unable to hold a referendum on the constitution because the interim charter requires judicial supervision of the vote. Most of Egypt’s judges, though, have gone on strike to protest the decree.
“The judicial bodies don’t approve of the decree, and they don’t approve of the draft constitution, and under current constitutional articles, it is impossible to hold a referendum without judicial monitoring,” said Ahmed Kamel, a spokesman for Amr Moussa, a former diplomat under Mr. Mubarak who ran for president last year and has emerged as an opposition leader.
On Friday, with Mr. Morsi in attendance, worshipers at the Sharbatly Mosque heckled the imam as he called on the public to support the president and recited religious verse that called on people to “obey those in authority,” according to an account of the visit in the semiofficial newspaper Al Ahram.
After the imam stopped his sermon, some worshipers chanted, “Down with the rule of the supreme guide,” referring to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi’s Islamist party. The president asked the crowd to calm down and tried to explain his recent decisions, as some supporters chanted his name, the paper said.
