‘The Middle Egypt governorate of Beni Suef, an agricultural province located 70 miles south of Cairo, is an Islamist stronghold. Islamists won 14 of Beni Suef’s 18 seats during the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections in December 2011, and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi won nearly two-thirds of Beni Suef’s votes in the second round of the 2012 presidential elections en route to an otherwise narrow victory.

Yet Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, who teaches in the veterinary school of Beni Suef University, hasn’t visited his home in the governorate since late March, when activists hoisted anti-Brotherhood banners and surrounded the mosque where he was scheduled to deliver a Friday sermon. “The people planned to attack him and hold him in the mosque,” Waleed Abdel Monem, a former Muslim Brother who owns a socialist-themed cafe up the street from Badie’s home, told me. The Supreme Guide’s son now holds down the fort, and Brotherhood cadres are occasionally called upon to protect his home whenever demonstrations are announced on Facebook.

The anti-Brotherhood backlash that has forced Badie from Beni Suef is the product of mounting popular frustrations regarding the organization’s failed governance of Egypt during Morsi’s first year in office. Rising food prices, hours-long fuel lines, and multiple-times-daily electricity cuts — all worsening amidst a typically scorching Egyptian summer — have set many Egyptians on edge, with clashes between Brotherhood and anti-Brotherhood activists now a common feature of Egyptian political life. And this low-grade unrest may soon intensify: On June 30, the anniversary of Morsi’s presidential inauguration, opposition activists will launch nationwide protests under the banner of “Tamarod,” or “Rebellion.”

The “Tamarod” campaign claims to have collected nearly 15 million signatures (take those numbers with a massive chunk of salt) on petitions that list Morsi’s many failures — such as “the economy collapsed” and Morsi “follows the Americans” — and demand early presidential elections. If this demand sounds unrealistic, well, it is: There is no legal basis for using a petition drive to force an elected president of Egypt to call for early elections.’

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