Things were looking up in Cairo last week as a new nightclub opened with a blare of hot music on one of ousted King Farouk's abandoned yachts. A glittering new Shepheard's Hotel, to replace the old one burned by antiforeign mobs back in 1952, was ready to open its doors again to foreign spenders. The Egyptian cost of living had momentarily ceased its steady climb; the stock market was active, and toll money from a once-again busy Suez Canal was pouring into the national treasury. A prospective purchase of $35 million worth of cotton by France gave a needed boost to the export balance. The government announced a budget surplus of nearly $55 million. And to top it all, the government's hand-picked candidates were easy winners in the new regime's first nationwide parliamentary election.
To be sure, like the election itself, Egypt's happy state was not quite all it seemed to be. Before trusting his future to the 5,000,000 Egyptians who trooped to the polls last week, Strongman Nasser had made sure of the results by eliminating all opposition in the key districts. Even so, some 16 voters were reported killed in the fray and another 40 injured; when the final count was made, the Interior Ministry announced that new elections would have to be held in 172 out of the 269 districts reporting since no candidate had been able to muster a clear majority. Still, Nasser himself said: "We have to go step by step."
Isolated Man. Still loyal to his throttled dreams of dominating the Arab world, Strongman Nasser was seeking them now in a new direction. He was trying to win himself back in the good graces of Britain, while his Voice of the Arabs radio turned on an unprecedented campaign of hatred against the U.S., which had saved his neck during the Anglo-French invasion but was now effectively curbing his ambitions under the Eisenhower Doctrine.
More and more, Nasser found himself backed into a lonely corner. As U.S. influence grew to supplant that of Britain as the principal stumbling block to his own ambitious plans for the Middle East, Egypt has been forced to look to Soviet Russia for encouragement. Russian trade with Egypt in the first months of this year quadrupled 1956's figures—but Russia is proving itself an exacting, suspicious and unprofitable partner, and Nasser's Moscow commitments have roused the Arab world's three Kings (Saud, Hussein and Feisal).
Last week Nasser sent his No. 1 military man, Major General Abdel Hakim Amer, scurrying off to neighboring Saudi Arabia to patch things up with oil-rich King Saud. Earlier in the week, sitting before the cameras of Britain's Independent Television News—as Russia's Khrushchev did for CBS in the U.S.—Nasser sent an amiable grimace into several million British living rooms. "I'm sorry," he said, "about that period of bad relations between Britain and Egypt. We hope that both countries will work for good relations in order to be friendly again." As an earnest of his good faith, Nasser at last had released two Britons accused (and long since acquitted) of spying on him in Cairo, promised to pay pensions to Britons formerly employed by the Egyptian government, and even invited BOAC planes back to Cairo airport. He seemed a little surprised that all this did not immediately win the British over to him.