MISTAKES
Mursi and his allies in the Brotherhood's Guidance Council - Egypt's liberals called them his puppeteers - also made mistakes: "He has been a disastrous leader," Shehata said. "Divisive, incompetent, heavy-handed and deaf to wide segments of Egyptian society who do not share his Islamist vision."
Broken promises on the economy in particular, where people have suffered shrinking real incomes and lengthening lines for fuel, widened the appeal of a protest movement rooted in a liberal opposition that repeatedly lost elections to Islamists.
"Mursi has alienated the other forces, he didn't handle the economy well and he made many enemies - in the courts, in the army, the police, the media," said Khalil al-Anani, a senior fellow at Washington's Middle East Institute currently in Cairo.
Highlighting the "media warfare", he added: "He was fighting on many fronts at the same time and that is always a very bad political tactic. He united the opposition against him."
As hopes for consensus faded, Mursi ploughed on regardless, casting his opponents as bad losers who spurned his outstretched hand. His allies, meanwhile, were whittled down to Islamists at the extreme religious right.
Mursi defended his legitimacy as an elected leader in a keynote speech last week before an invited audience of cheering supporters, after a first warning from the army to embrace his opponents. Broadcast live on national television for nearly three hours, it was a mark of a stubborn failure to understand how to communicate beyond the Brotherhood's electoral base.
"He knows his primary audience is not opposition supporters or secular-minded urbanites," the International Crisis Group's Yasser El-Shimy said of Mursi's attempt at a new, folksy style.
فقلبي يحترق من هؤلاء الحقودين على الإسلام و أهل الإسلام 
