After years of being oppressed, the Muslim Brothers enjoyed a sheen of goodness and efficiency. Now that they are in power, they are rapidly losing it

WHEN a swarm of locusts recently engulfed Muqattam, a posh suburb of Egypt’s capital that houses the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters, humorists lay in wait. “Official spokesman: locusts retreat following President Morsi’s promise to fulfil all their demands,” quipped a popular Facebook commentator, hinting that after eight months in power, Egypt’s Brotherhood-run government is itself something of a plague. Soon after, a different kind of swarm menaced the Islamist group’s offices in Cairo. Scores of youths chose the spot to perform a taunting rendition of the Harlem Shake, a pelvis-thrusting dance that has gone globally viral.

It is not just in Egypt that the Brothers are taking a battering nowadays, and not just in the form of ridicule. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf, the many mainstream Islamist groups allied to, inspired by or sympathetic to the Brotherhood, whose main branch was founded in Egypt in 1928, face a range of tricky challenges. In countries that have so far been spared the upheavals of the Arab spring these can take familiar shape: the United Arab Emirates, still an absolute monarchy, this week began trying 94 alleged Brothers on charges of conspiracy against the state. Yet across most of the region the trials are of a new kind, brought on not by persecution as in decades past, but by the responsibilities and burdens of being in charge.

At the height of the Arab spring two years ago the Brothers, known in Arabic as Ikhwan, looked unstoppable. Elections ushered in by the first Arab revolutions brought big wins for Nahda, Tunisia’s relatively liberal version of the Brotherhood, and for Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party, a new political vehicle for the old-school version. More violent revolts in Libya and Syria were meanwhile taking on an increasingly Islamist cast, with Brotherhood-linked networks, backed by rich friends in the Gulf, initially prominent in fighting, funding and political mobilisation. Libya’s Brotherhood-linked party did poorly in a general election a year ago but may have got stronger since then.

Sniffing the wind, King Mohammed VI of Morocco pre-empted unrest by handing government to the mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party, which he had previously held at arm’s length. In Jordan King Abdullah has been at pains to deny the Brothers a chance to dominate his parliament, but they are widely regarded as the best-organised group in the country.

Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite television channel, was meanwhile becoming an increasingly bold proponent of Ikhwan causes. Its widely watched programmes cheered on the uprisings, granting privileged airtime to Islamist leaders. Two powerful non-Arab countries, Iran and Turkey, offered starkly contrasting models of Islamist rule, with Turkey, an Al Jazeera favourite, backing a model closer to the Brothers. Western diplomats urged that it was time to embrace the Ikhwan.

Compared with the Arab world’s fractious secularists, the Brothers often appeared coherent and disciplined. And they shone brightly against the darker end of the Islamist spectrum. At the far extreme this included al-Qaeda and other jihadists, but also fundamentalist Salafists among the Muslims’ Sunni majority, plus groups such as Lebanon’s Hizbullah or Iraqi followers of Muqtada al-Sadr among Shias. Unlike most such outfits, the Brothers had generally tempered ritual calls for sharia law, or for crushing Israel, with patience and pragmatism. “Basically, the Brothers are the only game in town,” shrugged a Western envoy in Egypt early last year.

This apparently winning wave seemed naturally to follow earlier successes by the Ikhwan and their cousins wherever they had found space to manoeuvre. Hamas, the Brothers’ Palestinian branch, handsomely won elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006 and the next year took control of Gaza by force. Brotherhood franchises had performed strongly since the 1990s in elections in Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq and Bahrain. They had captured power in Sudan as early as 1989 by way of a coup (but later lost it) and would have taken it by majority vote in Algeria in 1991, had the army not upended the table and engaged in a bloody civil war to stop them.

Yet the Ikhwan’s more recent moves out of exile, out of prison and out of cramped flats bugged by the old regimes’ secret police have not proved easy. Internal divisions have re-emerged. Already, amid the slight opening of Egyptian politics that predated the revolution of January 2011, a purge by conservative Brothers had ousted more modern-minded elements from the leadership. The slowness of Ikhwan elders to embrace the revolution and their ensuing preference for back-room dealings with the still-powerful institutions of Egypt’s “deep state”, in particular the army and the courts, have alienated many of the Brotherhood’s younger members. Former Brothers now rank among the Ikhwan’s most bitter and effective critics. Some, staking out a middle ground and readier to ally with secularists, pose an increasingly potent threat to the Brothers’ electoral base.

Similar strains have weakened Tunisia’s Nahda. Following the murder of a leftist politician last month, the then prime minister, Hamadi Jebali, who is also Nahda’s secretary-general, offered to resign and form a broader-based government of technocrats, apparently without informing party colleagues. Mr Jebali, replaced in a new government following ructions within Nahda, represents a liberal wing that challenges those who want above all to Islamise Tunisian society. The party’s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, finds himself trying to bridge these currents, says Fabio Merone, a researcher on Islamist movements. “But by trying to please everyone he is pleasing no one.” This week Nahda surrendered the foreign and defence ministries to non-party people.

As in Iraq, where the Islamist prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, is often attacked by more strident adherents of his sect, the Sunni Ikhwan have been undermined by the less-compromising Salafists. They hark back to an even more puritanical version of Islam supposedly espoused by the Salaf, or predecessors, in the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

To general surprise it was not secular politicians but Salafists who recently published a list detailing how Egypt’s Brothers have infiltrated vital government posts. Whereas the Brothers in Egypt squirm to defend “un-Islamic” interest charged on foreign loans that their government desperately needs (they call them “service fees”), their Tunisian cousins have found themselves blackened by association with the Salafists’ extremism. Some attribute the slide in Nahda’s popularity to a Salafist mob’s attack on the American embassy in Tunis last September. “After that,” says Mr Merone, “people said, ‘Enough with these bearded people’.”

In Syria, by contrast, jihadist rebel factions, proving better armed and motivated, have made sharp inroads into the opposition at the expense of mainstream Islamists. The Brotherhood’s political wing, resented for trying to dominate Syria’s opposition councils, has had to accept a lesser role.

In many cases the Ikhwan have profited electorally less from ideology than from impressions of relative honesty and competence. But as chronic troubles such as unemployment have worsened, their popularity in power has suffered. This week a court in Egypt delayed a general election that had been expected in April. After weeks of widespread and often bloody protests against the perceived high-handedness of President Muhammad Morsi’s rule, Brotherhood candidates recently suffered an unprecedented rout in elections to Egypt’s college student unions. A recent poll in Gaza shows Hamas, which was riding high after withstanding last November’s Israeli onslaught, slumping to an approval rate of only 18% (see next article).

Al Jazeera, the Brothers’ faithful mouthpiece, has also seen its ratings plunge, ironically in part due to its success in fostering freedoms that have brought a surge of new local channels. Al Jazeera’s main Arabic broadcast no longer ranks among the ten most-watched in Egypt, for example. Qatar, its tiny, oil-rich sponsor, no longer basks in the Islamists’ popularity. A counter-campaign has widely succeeded in tarring the Gulf emirate with the brush of meddling in other countries’ affairs, promoting the Brotherhood and using its vast wealth to buy up national assets cheaply.

Some of the growing dislike for the Brothers now attaches, oddly enough, to Western countries that long shunned them. John Kerry, America’s new secretary of state, was recently greeted in Egypt by angry charges of favouring the Ikhwan, with cartoons depicting him sporting a beard and zibeeba, the forehead mark that tells of regular prayer. Across much of the region the Ikhwan’s rivals remain fractious. Few secular leaders have a coherent vision with popular appeal. Yet perhaps in time they will find one, and perhaps those diplomats who count on the Brothers to bring justice and prosperity should start hedging their bets again.