After thirty years under President Hosni Mubarak’s iron grip on power, Cairo is alive with activism. In a roundtable earlier this month organized by PolicyMic.com and The Nation and moderated by author Stephen Glain, young Egyptian activists debated some of Egypt’s most pressing issues, including the role and strength of the Muslim Brotherhood, the power of social media in sparking reform and the military’s stranglehold over politics. 

In this video, the activists express their concern about Egypt’s ailing economy and the pace at which economic reforms are progressing. The same free-market policies that drained the country’s finances and widened the gap between rich and poor over the past several years are now being proposed to reinvigorate the economy, a course of action many of the activists strongly object to. They argue that the biggest question in the elections set to be held in September will be: where will the money come from to keep Egypt’s society moving?

Be sure to also check out the other videos in this series on Egypt’s activists: I Wouldn’t Vote for the Islamists Democracy Is a Practical Process Now I Tweet in Arabic