If El-Sisi read it, why can’t we find it?

At the Egyptian Family Iftar few days ago, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi spoke about the reasons behind the latest surge in fuel prices, tying it to the fallout from the US-Israeli war on Iran. In the course of his remarks, he referred to an article that had caught his attention for criticizing the government’s lack of transparency—or, in the president’s own words, “an article saying that the government doesn’t tell the full truth, and makes promises it doesn't fulfill.”

The president did not name the writer nor the newspaper. But his remark raises questions: Which article did he mean when most pieces pass through wary editorial channels, and where direct criticism of the executive branch rarely surfaces, whether in state-owned newspapers, in outlets owned or controlled by security and sovereign bodies?

And because, as the saying goes, the journey is the reward, Al Manassa digged the opinion pages and sections in state-owned newspapers, and those owned by the United Media Services (UMS) group, alongside a number of privately owned, partisan and independent media. Our search covers the price increase onwards.

We found dozens of articles. Many justified the government’s decisions, some offered cautious criticism, and only a very few came close to the president's remarks.

United Media Group: see no evil

A review of opinion pieces in UMS outlets—Youm7, Al-Watan and Al-Dostor—shows no article that matches the description.

In Akram Al-Qassas’s article, “Fuel, war and the burden on citizens: government promises, oversight and transparent decision-making,” the familiar pattern of hedging between two positions is clear enough. He points to the suffering caused by inflation, yet at the same time justifies the government’s economic decisions since 2020. Without criticizing those policies, he calls instead for supporting citizens.

The day after prices were raised, Youm7’s print edition omitted a front-page headline on the most important development in the country. It made do with a subheadline reading, “Madbouly: Decisions on fuel price adjustments will be reviewed if the war stops,” and another, in larger type, declaring, “No change to the price of subsidized bread after fuel prices are adjusted.”

Neither Al-Watan nor Al-Dostor published a single article by their columnists criticizing the price hike. Al-Watan’s opinion section instead ran five pieces praising the president’s wisdom, transparency and candor, with titles such as “With the leader’s frankness and the citizen’s awareness, Egypt will endure,” “El-Sisi’s candor on war, inflation, debt and subsidies,” and “Words of candor and disclosure.” Al-Dostor published more than 60 opinion articles, and not one of them mentioned prices or their impact on citizens.

National newspapers: Madbouly had to

Despite the abundance of content in Al-Ahram’s opinion section, we found only two articles addressing fuel prices: one titled “Energy earthquakes,” the other “Above $108.” Both surveyed rising global prices without directing any criticism at the government.

In Akhbar Al-Youm, despite the large number of articles, only three dealt with rising fuel prices, and all leaned toward justifying the government. The first, “The fires of war have scorched everyone,” by Mohamed Al-Shammaa, argues that the government “cannot bear the terrifying rise in oil prices, and so the burden was passed on to the citizen,” adding that austerity measures were an act of solidarity with the public, without posing any real question of accountability.

The second, titled “The war economy,” linked the increase directly to the war, insisting that the government was “compelled,” that what happened was only natural, and that safety and security remain the overriding priority.

The third article was somewhat bolder. Titled “Government governance 2,” it was a sequel to an earlier piece by Mohamed Hassan Al-Banna. In its opening lines, he noted that “even the measure that had given citizens cause for hope was followed by the government’s raising fuel prices.” Yet he still justified the decision and called on the government to carry out the president’s vision.

In Al-Gomhuria, a piece by Hamdi Rizk appeared under the title “Madbouly compelled, not heroic”—a play on the phrase “Your brother is compelled, not a hero,” commonly attributed to Amr Ibn Al-Aas when Muawiya Ibn Abi Sufyan ordered him to duel Imam Ali. Rizk had used the same phrase before in a 2021 article in Al-Masry Al-Youm, also in defense of Madbouly.

In his latest article, Rizk exhausted every derivative of the word “compelled,” likening the Egyptian people to the Quranic verse praising “those who are patient in poverty and hardship and during battle.” He insisted that citizens understand the prime minister’s necessity in making these decisions and that they will support him.

As we moved from one newspaper to another, we noticed something telling: while United Media papers tend to use the euphemism “price adjustment,” the national papers use the more direct “increase,” revealing a difference in editorial tone between the two camps.

Glimmers of hope 

For a moment, hope seemed faint that we would find the article the president had read in either United Media papers or the national press. So we turned to party-affiliated and private newspapers and websites such as Al-Masry Al-Youm, Al-Wafd, Al-Shorouk, Cairo 24 and Sada El-Balad, which are supposed to retain some degree of independence, even if they do not stray far from the carefully drawn line.

Then another possibility made us pause: Does the president read independent outlets whose opinion writing is marked by boldness, latitude and a willingness to break from the government chorus, such as Al Manassa or Mada Masr?

Despite the fact that Cairo 24 was the first to report the fuel price increase—hours before it was officially announced—it carried no opinion pieces criticizing the government, limiting itself instead to straight news coverage tracking the hike. Sada El-Balad was not much different. It published no articles criticizing the authorities over the increase.

On the contrary, Sayed Al-Dabaa, in a piece titled “Is what we are living through today the hardest? Or have Egyptians endured harsher times in war?”, argued that earlier generations had lived through conditions in which life itself was under threat, not merely prices or the pressures of daily living.

In Al-Shorouk, we found two articles worth pausing over. The first, by Emad Eddin Hussein, was titled “Fuel prices… where is the problem?!” and posed a central question: “Can the government win the trust of most citizens on the issue of fuel?” He began by pointing to how hard it is for citizens to make sense of rising prices and their knock-on effect on goods linked to transport, before presenting the decision from the government’s point of view, explaining that global crises and the rising prices of oil and the dollar had forced its hand.

The editor-in-chief of Al-Shorouk added that the government is obliged to explain to citizens, in simple language, the scale of the subsidies it provides, stressing that “some citizens think the government is profiting from the citizen’s own pocket, and that is absolutely not true.”

The second article, titled “The government, the people and the easy solution,” had Ashraf Al-Barbari arguing that the government chose the easiest solution for itself and the hardest one for citizens. By contrast, he wrote, countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines had adopted solutions that eased the burden on their people, deepening the crisis of trust between state and society.

Yet for all the flashes of boldness that showed through the caution in both pieces, they remain unlikely candidates. Neither accused the government of lying, nor said that it fails to keep its promises.

Blunted edges

Al-Wafd’s print front page stood out for its boldness, reprising what it had done in the previous round of price increases. It also published several articles on rising fuel prices. Searching among them for what might count as the sought-after piece, we found an article by Magdy Helmy with the blunt title “Fuel price hikes and the government’s incapacity.”

It paints a stark picture of economic hardship, arguing that the rise in fuel, gas and electricity prices reflects the government’s failure.

Helmy describes it as “a government of extraction par excellence,” noting that increases in the minimum wage benefit only a limited segment, while the overwhelming majority of workers and pensioners are left out. He also criticized austerity measures carried out under the banner of rationalizing spending—such as turning off streetlights—and called for austerity to begin at the top of the governmental pyramid, through cuts to salaries, travel and official motorcades, so that citizens might actually see commitment and fairness in public spending.

Even with the article’s sharp language, it does not mention that the government lies or withholds the truth, which places it outside the circle of suspicion.

Narrowing the field

In the independent press, Mada Masr did not address the latest increase in its opinion section. Instead, it followed the issue through in-depth reporting that highlighted its effects across the economy. Chief among these was a report titled “What is the state to do between the hammer of inflation and the anvil of declining foreign currency reserves?” by the journalists Bissan Kassab and Sara Seif Eddin. The report links fuel price hikes to inflation, set against an economic background that may help explain why the government has taken difficult decisions affecting the prices of poultry, bread and transport.

On Al Manassa, alongside the news coverage and a discussion episode that brought together economists and researchers on the Al Manassa Newsroom podcast to examine the economic and social impact of expensive energy on Egypt, the weekly column by Ammar Ali Hassan was published under the title “Egypt’s fuel crisis and the cost of endless ‘exceptional circumstances’.”

The article detailed the consequences of higher prices for Egyptians, listing seven problems confronting them. It reviewed price volatility, the impact of wars and global crises, and predicted that Madbouly would not keep his promise to review prices if the war ended.

Yet although Ammar Ali Hassan predicted that the government would not honor its promise to review prices if the war stopped, he did not connect that to a lack of transparency. And the timing of his article—published at 2:30 pm, only three hours before the president's iftar ceremony—makes it less likely that the president had time to read it, assuming he follows our independent space.

Our final stop was at Al-Masry Al-Youm, where two articles gave us pause. The first, “The war, our economy and our response,” by Dr. Ziad Bahaa Eddin, put a series of questions to the government: “Why this large jump? Why by the same flat amount? Would it not have been better to wait until oil and gas prices stabilized? Is this an emergency increase, or was it coming in any case? And how will the social balance be maintained for groups more affected than others?” But those questions, and their likely answers, remain distant from what the president seemed to mean.

The second article, however, contains the makings of the real candidate.

Alaa Al-Ghatrifi’s article bore the headline “A government that lies..!” and it opened at a boil: “We have nothing left but words with which to question this government, which no one holds accountable, despite the gravity of the moment, the afflictions of reality and the dangers all around us. It has grown accustomed to lying and breaking promises again and again without shame, because it knows full well that the very idea of accountability is absent.”

The newspaper’s editor-in-chief continues: “This has been the history of citizens with their government, and so they cannot believe it. There is no wall of trust left in it for people to lean on. … It cannot fulfill what it pledged, so how are we to believe its current account that petroleum product prices will return to their pre-March 10 levels when things go back to normal? The government continues down the path of lies.”

Al-Ghatrifi’s article is part of a series in which he has made a habit of attacking the government since mid-2024, with the tone intensifying lately after the president’s directives last August to open up to different opinions, in a way that would entrench, in his words, “the principle of opinion and the other opinion,” while insisting that “the other opinion” should not be hidden or barred from appearing in state media.

Among those pieces were “A government that never learns..!”—in which he criticizes its dependence on hot money—and others titled “A government without accountability..!,” “The government of ‘adjustment’!,” “Madbouly and forbidden criticism!” and “The government of narratives.”

Across all of them, the editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm delivers sharp criticism that of course stops at the borders of the government, and does not venture a single step beyond.

Whether Al-Ghatrifi’s article is the one the president meant or not, this tour through the newspapers is revealing in itself. It lays bare the condition of Egypt’s “fourth estate,” and the degree to which it has been domesticated, with control imposed over the overwhelming majority of its platforms—platforms that were supposed to speak for the people.