9Prep Civilian Allies and the Generals They Backed
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Reading Passage

When soldiers seize power, the civilians who help them rarely stay close to the centre of events for long. Burkina Faso offers a recent illustration: the military government of Captain Ibrahim Traoré has abolished the country's political parties. In the view of a researcher who studies military takeovers, party politics in the country was finished in practice once January 2026 closed.

The researcher's earliest example is Sudan in 1969. After the coup of that year, the Communist Party made common cause with the Free Officers under Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri and supplied important political backing. Inside seven months, Nimeiri was already pushing the party to the margins, stripping prominent Communists of government posts. By 1971 he had turned against them completely, in a violent crackdown that destroyed the party. Egypt in 2013 followed a comparable course. The protest movement Tamarod campaigned openly for General Abdelfattah el-Sisi to take power and afterwards endorsed his takeover. Tamarod's influence, like that of other political parties, disappeared before long as the space for civic activity contracted.

Many of the civilian movements that pushed for the recent coups in the Sahel are now living through what comparable groups elsewhere experienced earlier. One Malian coalition, M5-RFP, gathers opposition parties together with clerics and campaigners close to Imam Mahmoud Dicko. It was among the first to back the Malian coup. Months of mass protests had been directed at President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, and M5-RFP welcomed the army's intervention of August 2020, expecting a hand in directing the transition.

That expectation faded within a short time. While the transitional government was being assembled, the junta set the coalition aside, keeping many of its leaders out of important posts. Colonel Assimi Goïta's second coup in May 2021 removed the civilians heading the interim government and tightened the army's control, and M5-RFP lost further ground. An alliance of convenience ended with the coalition pushed to the edges, and the movement is now among the loudest critics of Goïta's junta.

Questions

6 questions

Questions 1–6

Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Old alliances, familiar endings

Earlier partnerships between officers and their civilian helpers ended in much the same way. In Sudan, the Communists had thrown their weight behind the colonel who seized power in 1969, yet within 1 their best-known members were losing their places in government, and by 1971 a bloody 2 had wiped the party out. The Egyptian case of 2013 ran along similar lines: the protest movement that had openly urged the general to take charge counted for nothing before long, as the scope for 3 narrowed. Mali tells the same story. A bloc of opposition parties and religious leaders was among the earliest to cheer the army's seizure of power in 2020, which came after months of street pressure on the president, and it assumed it would be given a say in 4 the handover. That assumption was short-lived. The soldiers pushed the bloc aside while the caretaker cabinet was being assembled and kept many of its leaders out of the jobs that mattered; a second takeover in 2021 then removed the civilians at the head of that cabinet and 5 military control still further. What had been a marriage of convenience left the bloc stranded on the sidelines, and it now ranks among the junta's most outspoken 6.