When I read that Egyptian security forces had arrested more than 50 people for participating in an anti-government online group, I immediately thought of the scorn so often directed at my generation in Egypt—the so-called Generation Z—for being apolitical.
I last heard this accusation from my friend Farid during a trip home earlier this year. An activist turned banker, Farid has a penchant for blaming Gen Z for failing to “carry the torch” of the 2011 revolution. I could dismiss his words as the usual intergenerational tussle, but the notion that my generation in Egypt is uniquely individualistic and narrow-sighted with no regard to political and socioeconomic questions is quite pervasive, both online and offline.
The arrests themselves suggest Farid is wrong; those 50 people were not arrested for being apathetic. Inspired by Gen Z participation in progressive and populist campaigns in the US, as well as Gen Z-led political movements in Morocco and Nepal, they were allegedly members of an Egyptian online group called “Gen Z002,” which gathered over 300,000 online votes calling for regime change in the country. The news stood as a testament not only to the fact that politics is not dead among Egyptian youth, but also to the high cost of practicing it.
Egypt’s Gen Z population, numbering around 19 million, lives in the political shadow of older generations who were at the center of the country’s most significant political upheaval in decades: the January 25 uprising of 2011, commonly known as the Arab Spring. Most were children or young teenagers at the time and did not participate in its mobilization. Instead, they came of age in the aftermath of its defeat in 2013, as the state reasserted its dominance through unprecedented crackdowns and the closing of Egypt’s political sphere. Protests were violently suppressed and free speech was severely curtailed across the ideological spectrum.
Like most of my generation, I was far too young to truly experience the empowerment and euphoria that came with the uprisings. My political outlook was shaped instead by their aftermath.
I, like many Gen Zers, carry profound personal memories of the Arab Spring: the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, and the countless evenings spent listening in silence to heated family debates about presidential elections and constitutional referendums. But, like most of my generation, I was far too young to truly experience the empowerment and euphoria that came with the uprisings. My political outlook was shaped instead by their aftermath.
That experience, however, did not shape an entire generation uniformly. It varied greatly across class, education, and geography, among other divides. I could see this in how differently the two sides of my family dealt with political developments. My father’s side, hailing from Cairo, viewed everything through a more “liberal” lens, with greater sympathy for global ideals and personal freedoms, while my mother’s side, rooted in the rural Nile Delta, held deeply traditional religious, social, and political beliefs. Growing up in a family that had multiple members participating in the revolution from different ideological camps showed me from a young age just how broad and diverse the dreams and ambitions that fueled the 2011 revolution were.
I, along with the rest of Gen Z, also watched these dreams fade amid the sweeping closure of Egypt’s political sphere. The state-controlled media apparatus recast the story of the revolution as an episode of instability and economic collapse, while references to it slowly faded from literature, art, and public displays. The collective memory of the Arab uprisings became less about the demands for “bread, freedom, social justice” and more about violence and disorder. Family conversations and debates on social media and television turned hostile to the revolution. It became the ultimate scapegoat, blamed for every economic and political problem, while the ongoing miscalculations of those in power went unmentioned.
Nor did it help that we went to school and university with hundreds of thousands of Syrian, Libyan, and Sudanese students displaced by the conflicts and instability that followed the uprisings in their countries. Those experiences, alongside repression and propaganda, entrenched the stigma attached to the revolution and to political mobilization more broadly.
But does that make Egypt’s Gen Z apolitical? Such claims conflate the absence of political space with the absence of political will. The generation that led the Arab Spring developed its political consciousness in the mid-2000s under conditions that still allowed for protest movements like Kefaya and the April 6 Youth Movement, as well as labor organizing, blogging, and open dissent.
“Many of Egypt’s Gen Z were witnesses to how revolutionary politics was ultimately met with an iron fist. As a result, many instinctively try to avoid anything that could lead to the same outcome,” said Abdalla Nasef, Egyptian political analyst and host of the Tahrir Podcast.
The dynamic Nasef describes boils down to a simple logic: Why risk your life and livelihood for a political strategy that failed to achieve its goals, even back when a relatively open political environment existed?
Many in my generation have instead sought to engage with political and economic issues via social media without paying the potentially destructive price of revolutionary politics
And while movements like the “Gen Z002” group emerge every now and then, only to get brutally suppressed, many in my generation have instead sought to engage with political and economic issues via social media without paying the potentially destructive price of revolutionary politics.
One example is how Egypt’s Gen Z led widespread boycott campaigns to protest the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. The campaigns have targeted companies perceived to have direct ties to Israel, while simultaneously advocating everyday Egyptians to use local alternatives. This contributed to a significant surge in sales of Egyptian brands such as the soft drink Spiro Spathis. And while economic boycotts are not new to Egyptian political history, Gen Z’s role in reviving it and successfully promoting Egyptian alternatives to international brands demonstrates the political awareness of this generation.
At the same time, this generation has become acutely aware of the class divisions shaping its reality. A popular distinction has emerged online between “Egypt” and “Masr”—the country’s Arabic name. “Egypt” evokes an ultra-rich class that flaunts its gated communities, private schools, and summers in the North Coast online. “Masr,” meanwhile, denotes everyone else: those struggling with rising prices, living in neglected neighborhoods, and relying on public transport. The pairing has become a vernacular for describing a widening social divide and unequal access to dignity, mobility, and security. Platforms like X and TikTok have sharpened that awareness by placing the display of elite lifestyles and everyday economic hardship in the same feed. In an act of quiet political expression, Gen Z has registered its frustration indirectly, through memes and commentary mocking the consumerism and gaucherie associated with “Egypt.”
This level of awareness and subtle activism are inherently political and demonstrate a level of malleability that skeptics often underestimate. It would be a mistake to dismiss this generation as passive. If greater political space does open up, this generation’s learned fluidity, hyperconnectivity, and economic imagination could play an important role in Egypt’s political and economic future.
The next time Farid, my activist friend, brings up the “torch” he wants my generation to carry, I’ll have my answer ready: “Give our generation a break. Our political style may be different from that of the youth of the Arab Spring, but we’re all playing for the same team.”