An interview with Abdel Fattah al-Sisi aired Monday – the first televised sit-down that the presumptive future president has done during the current campaign – saw Sisi declaring that the Muslim Brotherhood would not be allowed to operate as a national movement under his administration, accusing the Islamist movement of having fomented national instability both directly and by proxy:

El-Sissi’s comments were a stark signal of his intention to ensure the elimination of the 86-year-old Brotherhood as both a political and ideological force in the country. He is building on an unprecedented popular resentment of the group, after its rise to power in the last three years.

Asked whether the Brotherhood will no longer exist under his presidency, el-Sissi replied, “Yes. Just like that.”

Egyptian security forces have systematically moved to decapitate the Brotherhood’s leadership structure since a government led by the movement’s then-president Mohammed Morsi was overthrown by the military in mid-2013 amid mass protests calling for Morsi’s resignation.

Morsi’s government had brought the country to the brink of outright state failure, and observers at the time feared that Egypt was caught in a downward spiral in which a lack of foreign currency drove instability, and instability prevented foreign currency from flowing in.

Last weekend Sisi went so far as to blame “hardline religious rhetoric” for having undermined Egypt’s critical tourism sector, publishing a video to YouTube in which he promised to restore tourism and “allow people to earn.” The highly influential NightWatch intelligence bulletin on Monday assessed that “outside interests that advocate on behalf of the Brotherhood are out of step with the political turn Egypt has taken.”

[Photo: Ahm3d Mostafa / YouTube]