Interview| Journalists Syndicate Head Khaled Elbalshy: “Freedom is a bread-and-butter issue”
Journalism in Egypt stands on ground that erodes a little more each day, until there is no foothold left. Many journalists now work on alert, one eye on the story and the other braced for plainclothes police, and for everything their arrival means: raids, arrests, searches, detention, “rotation” onto fresh charges and, at best, a trial.
That is exactly what happened to Matsadaash at the end of September, and to Mada Masr about a month later. The arrest of a journalist or two, or the blocking of websites, has become routine in recent years. But a shift from arresting individuals to mass arrests, site closures and the potential seizure of equipment is a dangerous turn, and it made us ask what lies behind it and what comes next for journalism in Egypt. To get answers, we asked Journalists Syndicate head Khaled Elbalshy for a long interview.
Elbalshy did not invite us to his office in the syndicate building at 4 Abdel Khalek Tharwat Street in downtown Cairo. He chose to come to Al Manassa himself. When we asked where he stood on solidarity with independent sites threatened with closure or targeted by restrictions, he pointed to the visit. “I’m here today to knock on Al Manassa’s door, and I know exactly what kind of site I’m visiting. And I’ll knock on other sites’ doors too.”
He became syndicate head in March 2023 as a member plainly independent of the state, coming, as he describes himself, “from the unknown.” He is a child of the margins, par excellence. A child of the Egyptian left. A child of Al-Badil, which was shut down, and of Al-Dostor in the years it was out of favor. A child of online journalism, of blocked websites, of a margin that narrows by the day.
The rank-and-file of the Fourth Estate chose him. He registered his candidacy on the last possible day and, to everyone’s astonishment won a first term, then a second against candidates close to the state. But Elbalshy was no stranger to Abdel Khalek Tharwat Street, and he did not suddenly find himself a prisoner of the walls of the possible and the permitted, of daily battles and balancing acts. Before that he had spent four years as head of the legislation committee on the syndicate’s board, then two years as deputy head and head of the freedoms committee.
Now his second term is drawing to a close in the midst of the fiercest escalation in years. In the background are repeated crises over payment of the training and technology allowance, and a stalled increase in it. Meanwhile the syndicate is preparing to take part in the first annual media conference, to be held on Dec. 3. It will be the third track of dialogue between journalists and the state in three years, with the same demands, almost none of which has been met.
Elbalshy opened the interview by objecting to this bleak picture. He defended what had been achieved during his years in office with a long list of battles and services the syndicate had delivered under him: training programs for journalists, a major overhaul of the health care and pension scheme, successful strikes at several outlets for higher pay, and more. But when we moved on to freedoms and the future of the profession, he became more candid.
The Matsadaash Crisis
Matsadaash is a platform that fact-checks news and official statements. On Sept. 28 and 29, security forces arrested six members of its team, only one of whom, Abdullah Qadri, is a syndicate member. The syndicate’s board announced that it would defend all of them, stressing that there is no difference between members and non-members. It filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor over reports that they had been subjected to abuse and forced to make confessions, and it offered to act as guarantor for their release.
He noted that three of the six were among staff whose names had been announced in a similar crisis three years earlier, which ended without charges against anyone. The prosecution’s statement on the latest crisis pointed to a link between the fact-checking platform and the Muslim Brotherhood, and described what the site had published about state shortcomings as deliberate, meant to stoke tension.
“For the past three weeks, the Matsadaash case has been front and center, and the General Assembly has split over it,” he said, and when we asked whether he had asked any authority why they were arrested, he answered: “They told me: it’s not even an Egyptian site. And they told me it belongs to the Brotherhood.”
We asked whether that was reason enough to arrest six journalists. “Did we say that?” he shot back. “Did I say that? The syndicate played its role in full. Everyone has the right to state their justification, and I have the right to say, when I’m told these people are this or that: ‘Innocent until proven guilty.’ We’re defending journalists.”
He said the syndicate is often accused of “defending the Brotherhood,” but its response never changes. “We resort to the principle of innocent until proven guilty. We have journalists who are syndicate members and journalists who aren’t, and to us they’re all equal.”
The prosecution’s statement alarmed journalists because it strikes at the very heart of the profession. In its official statement, the prosecution categorized routine editorial workflows and independent fact-checking as evidence of a coordinated media plan to incite public anger and destabilize national security.
Elbalshy reads this as reflecting a wider outlook. “A prosecution statement came out making accusations because ‘criticism’ [of state actions] and ‘fact-checking’ are this, that, or the other. And that’s in lots of cases, not just Matsadaash.” He said he responded with a statement reminding readers that “the basics of professional journalistic work are criticism and monitoring of officials.”
Mada Masr
Weeks later, a ruling closed Mada Masr and fined Lina Attalah, a syndicate member, 3 million Egyptian pounds (over $50,000 dollars) on the grounds that the site lacked a license. The syndicate’s rebuttal said the Supreme Council for Media Regulation failed to respond to licensing applications and failed to notify applicants, and that these two administrative violations contradict articles 12 and 16 of the executive regulations governing the council’s work. It said the proper route is an administrative appeal, not criminal prosecution, and that the syndicate had formed a legal committee to challenge the ruling.
But the syndicate head’s absence from the trial hearing shocked large sections of the syndicate and beyond. “Large sections of whom?” he asked first. Then he defended his absence on two grounds. The first was that the syndicate has no standing in the case to begin with. “The syndicate attended with two members, and they were barred from entering. Legally, we have no standing. We have a presence in [freedom of] publication cases, and this is a case about the license and ownership of a site. But we saw that the case touched on freedom to publish in this society. Would it have changed anything if the syndicate head had been standing at the door? Would the court have shifted its position?”
The second was that reducing solidarity to the syndicate head’s presence “amounts to canceling the syndicate’s role altogether... Tomorrow, am I supposed to attend, as syndicate head, every case in Egypt? Or the ones that concern me? Or the ones that concern my own outlook?” He then explained why he was absent. “When people called me, I didn’t want to tell them I had a prior appointment outside Cairo, one that couldn’t be moved.”
We asked whether he would visit the journalists of Mada Masr, as he had visited strikers and protesters at other institutions in similar episodes. “When the site is back up, we’ll go to visit,” he said.
Elbalshy concedes that the statement backing Mada Masr did not pass easily inside the syndicate’s board. “There are different views inside the board, let’s be honest with each other.”
But he said the disagreement was over “the wording of the statement... The board’s recent statements all passed unanimously. There was resistance, there was negotiation over the language, but they passed unanimously.”
But what is Mada Masr actually being punished for? Elbalshy declined to speculate. “Direct reasons, that’s a question for the responsible authorities. How do I read it? That would be an interpretation, and I’ll give you my interpretations when I’m no longer syndicate head.” Still, he stressed that the site’s crisis “isn’t Mada Masr’s crisis alone, it’s the crisis of any media trying to play its role in full under conditions that aren’t conducive.” When we asked whether he had asked about the reasons for the escalation, he said, “They told me: they didn’t apply for the license.”
Despite the two cases, Elbalshy refuses to call this moment unprecedented. “People sometimes tell me it’s the darkest day, and I don’t know how to deal with ‘the darkest day.’ When 17 sites were blocked in a single day, all together, what was that?” He added: “This is a protracted situation with peaks and troughs throughout. Are there other reasons? For sure there are other reasons. But I’m not going to sit around digging through the minor reasons. We have to deal with the overall pathology.”
A crisis of transparency
The Mada Masr case hinges on licensing. Law 180 of 2018 recognized news websites and required them to obtain a license from the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, giving sites already operating before the law’s passage a grace period to bring themselves into compliance. But several sites applied years ago and never received a reply, while blocking is carried out by administrative decision. The syndicate demands that a lack of response be treated as approval of the license, as the law explicitly provides for print media, and that administrative blocking be abolished.
Mada Masr isn’t the only site caught in the licensing process. Fakar Tany’s application was rejected, and Elbalshy said five other sites are in the same position. The syndicate has already raised Fakar Tany’s case with the Supreme Council for Media Regulation and plans to do so again.
We asked how the Supreme Council explains granting licenses to some sites and denying them to others. “They don’t need to explain. We’re talking about a crisis of transparency in licensing.” He refused to lay the blame on the Council itself. “So we don’t wrong the Council: this is a crisis of how the media in general is viewed. An outlook that sees the media and its diversity as a problem.”
Elbalshy lays out his alternative with striking candor. “I’m not against there being media that represents the security agencies, mind you. But there should be other media too. There should be diversity of ownership, freedom to launch publications, and equal opportunity for everyone.”
“I won’t impose a vision from above”
The sites struggling to get licensed employ, like others, journalists who are struggling in turn to get syndicate membership. Law 76 of 1970, which established the Journalists Syndicate, in practice limits membership to those working in “print media” and employed by its institutions. So hundreds of journalists at news websites, and hundreds more who are not formally employed by their papers, remain outside the syndicate, with no membership and no syndicate protection. Efforts to amending the law have stalled for years, for fear it would come out of Parliament in a worse form. The issue returned to the fore last August, when TV broadcaster Sherif Amer applied for registration with the syndicate, and the syndicate called an open discussion of it on Oct. 3.
We asked whether this situation can last. Elbalshy said the fear of Parliament is not an assumption but the product of two experiences. The first came when he proposed amending specific articles of the syndicate law and invited journalist MPs to discuss it. “The MPs, while we were sitting right there in the session, said: don’t you dare bring the law to Parliament. However careful you are, you can’t be sure. All the journalist MPs, except a few.” The second was the Criminal Procedure Law, which the syndicate pressed to amend and which came out in a form that forced the president to step in. “That’s the reality we’re in. If I didn’t see it for what it is, I’d be a fool.”
The alternative, according to Elbalshy, is to reinterpret the existing text by a decision of the General Assembly. “The law says print media, and it also says news agencies. Are news agencies print media?” He believes that, in the philosophy of the law, the definition extends to everyone who practices the profession.
In his first term, Elbalshy floated a middle path, associate membership for website journalists, and it met wide resistance inside the General Assembly. Now he says the syndicate is drafting a broader proposal to interpret the text, to put to the next General Assembly. “A change that has the General Assembly’s protection can’t be undone by a board afterward. It takes a later General Assembly to change it.”
Part of the resistance among syndicate members to widening registration comes from fear for their livelihoods, in particular the role of the training and technology allowance. This state subsidy paid to journalists on the syndicate’s rolls was meant to help them develop their professional skills, keep pace with technology and cover the costs of the tools of the trade. As the economy worsened, institutions and papers came to treat it as part of journalists’ pay, and it became a main source of income for those whose outlets had been shut down or who had been fired.
Elbalshy did not dispute that, but said the fear is misplaced. “Our whole constituency works at websites, let’s be honest with each other. And the idea that the market widens and you become influential could be an opportunity, not the opposite. Because when you’re influential, all these rights come in greater measure.”
Al Manassa interviews Khaled Elbalshy
We told him website journalists see in him a syndicate head “like them,” a former editor-in-chief of a blocked site, and that many say that if Elbalshy doesn’t resolve this issue, nobody will. He replied sharply: “That question, unfortunately, entrenches a vision we’re fighting all the time. Either we believe democratic debate is what brings change, even if it takes a long time, or we believe in a vision imposed from above. I won’t impose a vision from above. Is our dictator good and theirs bad?”
When Minister of State for Media Diaa Rashwan issued a vague call to regulate websites, then said he meant regulating their owners, Elbalshy rejected any alternative body claiming to defend journalists from outside the syndicate. We asked him, as a man of the left, why he opposes website journalists organizing themselves outside the Journalists Syndicate, when a plurality of trade unions is an authentic left-wing position. “That’s not even in the Constitution to begin with. Unfortunately, that’s the text of the Constitution. Do we change the Constitution?”
He added that as syndicate head he is bound by the existing rules: one professional syndicate for each profession. But he warned of what follows if the syndicate’s door stays closed to new members. “Because that means I have the right to build my own alternatives. And my alternatives might not be a syndicate. They might be other things, and they could threaten the syndicate’s future and its survival.” As for the owners, they have the right to organize themselves, “but they shouldn’t claim to defend journalists, because the interests conflict, and conflict badly.”
Dialogue, then more dialogue
Licensing, blocking, registration and the jailing of journalists are the issues the syndicate has carried into three tracks of dialogue with the state. In 2023, Elbalshy took part in the National Dialogue as the syndicate’s representative. In 2025, he was coordinator of the legislative committee within the Media Development Committee, which submitted its recommendations to the prime minister in February 2026. The recommendations of the two tracks are strikingly similar, and so is the failure to implement them. Now he is preparing to take part in the first annual media conference with almost the same demands.
Elbalshy says that if he were outside the syndicate, he would not have taken part in the National Dialogue at all. “I saw the general conditions of the National Dialogue, and before becoming syndicate head, I wasn’t going in. But when I’m in a syndicate, no, I’ll take part. A syndicate is a body that has to express different and varied views.” He recounted that at the National Dialogue’s session on freedom of information, he made a point of saying: “I came here today to discuss freedom of information while I have sites that are blocked.”
Regarding the Media Development Committee, he said it adopted both of the syndicate’s projects in full: a ban on custodial sentences in publication cases, and the freedom of information law the syndicate drafted at its sixth general conference. The second bill, he said, gathered the signatures of 60 MPs, on the initiative of one female MP. “Is that all I’m after? No, that’s not all we’re after.”
The syndicate head sees the December conference, which is expected to discuss the Media Development Committee’s proposals, as another chance to advance journalists’ demands. “Syndicates will act wherever a path for action is open to them... That’s what’s available. What’s the other solution? Sit at home and close up shop?!” Elbalshy rejects a boycott as a form of protest, however low expectations run. He insists that negotiation is a fate, not a choice, even when it seems to lead nowhere.
Freedom is our bread and butter
There is a familiar pattern in the syndicate’s history: when a syndicate head who raised the banner of freedoms leaves, he is succeeded by a functionary syndicate head, and freedoms recede. We asked whether he fears that will happen after his term ends. “Honestly, I see something different from what you see. What I see in the General Assembly is a wide, and widening, awareness that freedom is a bread-and-butter issue. And that we’re paying the price for not being able to work.”
But he knows part of the General Assembly sees the opposite. “We get it from the community: ‘You’re ruining our livelihood.’” He divides the General Assembly into three segments. “One segment that’s genuinely anxious about its livelihood. One segment that moves at a given moment for different reasons we won’t get into. And one segment that sees it the exact opposite way: folks, if we’re freed, we all benefit.” He sees the syndicate head’s job as bringing the three together. “Either you take them into account to gather people around your causes, or you lose the cause altogether.”
Elbalshy says he came into politics through economic conditions before freedoms. “I was a labor reporter, by the way, and I used to call on the places I knew were suffering.” When he reached the syndicate, he saw that “the priority of social justice” had long been absent from the issues any syndicate is supposed to defend. Under him, the syndicate organized, for the first time by his account, a strike at the BBC, followed by strikes at Reuters, Al-Wafd and Al-Bawaba. At the last of these, he said, rulings imposing fines for failing to apply the minimum wage were issued for the first time.
But how many institutions apply the minimum wage today? “Not many. The national institutions say they apply it.” He explained, though, that they calculate it on total income, and in some cases the allowance may be counted toward it. “We have private institutions, some of which apply the minimum wage, and some of which don’t pay wages at all.” Their journalists make do with the syndicate’s allowance.
He cited a survey the syndicate conducted among journalists, members and non-members alike. More than 60% of them do not receive the minimum wage. “There are people who get zero,” Elbalshy says the survey found.
Applying the minimum even meets resistance at times from journalists themselves. “They say: we just want to live, that’s it. When you reach that point, that’s the indicator of the danger we’re in.” Elbalshy ties this directly to the retreat of freedoms. “When there was a space for free speech, a journalist’s pay was higher than it is now, in actual numbers, never mind ratios. In 2012 we were working on a newspaper project that never got finished, and we were talking about pay that started at 5,000 and 7,000 pounds ($815–$1,155 at the time) for a journalist.”
These, he says, are the same people who accuse him of threatening their livelihood. “Some of them scream: Man, I just want to put bread on the table, I need medical treatment, drop the Mada Masr thing and all that. And he doesn’t realize that the balance among these demands is what will solve it.”
Financial independence
Many believe Elbalshy’s second term is harder than his first, and that the syndicate’s positions on freedoms have a cost, specifically in the allowance. He did not deny there is pressure, but he rejected the popular story about the allowance. “Someone comes and tells you that the allowance got hit and didn’t go up. No, the allowance went up. It went up three times. Three times in four years has never happened at any point. The expectation about the size of the raise is a different story altogether. The state is always the one that pays the raises, and the syndicate head negotiates and makes demands.”
When we asked what the syndicate had been punished with for its positions, he rejected the word itself. “Did I say we were punished?” Then he described what is happening in other terms. “We’re in a grinder that’s running. A cog turning, pulling and pushing back.” He added: “Is the syndicate exposed to these things? Yes, of course it is.”
Elbalshy sees the root of the problem in the syndicate’s dependence on state money. “Want complete freedom? You have to free yourself economically. You have to have income that frees you. But in the end you’re going to go knock on someone’s door and say: I want 10 million pounds to fix such-and-such problem. He might say, go ahead. He might say, I only have two. He might say, I have five, that’s all. If you want to call that pressure, call it pressure.”
He said the Syndicate repeats its call to members before every election. “Folks, don’t make the allowance a tool for influencing the elections. That’s a clear headline; it needs no explaining.”
Asked where the pressure comes from, he said: “There’s push and pull; there are different views inside the state. There are views inside the state that think a particular way of talking is harmful.”
His personal rule for dealing with it, he summed up this way. “I’m not going to do political work. But I’ll practice politics through the syndicate’s vision of freedom, or of our right to a free press. That hasn’t retreated in the syndicate’s discourse over all the past years.” He stressed that he understands his role as syndicate head is to take all the balances of power into account and negotiate on behalf of everyone.
The ‘syndicate steps’
The clearest test of this rule was the coveted ‘syndicate steps,’ the broad stairway from the street leading to the syndicate’s entrance and foyer, long a refuge and often almost the only spot in Egypt where people could stand and protest, in a country that in practice does not allow the right to demonstrate. We asked whether anyone had ever told him outright that he had overstepped the acceptable limits. His first term saw the removal of the scaffolding put up for the renovation of the syndicate building’s facade, which had hidden the facade and the steps for years, and protests on the steps disappeared for as long as the scaffolding stood.
The syndicate head did not answer directly, but he described how he handled the space. “There was a moment when the chanting took a certain turn, and I was worried for the people chanting, because they’d become targets. And if one of them were threatened, people would say: you’re the one who shut the steps with your own hands [he means that it gives the security forces a pretext to intervene].”
For that reason, he sometimes did not hesitate to halt protests, or even to call for them to be broken up, to prevent escalation. “One time some colleagues were arrested in Maadi, five journalists. So part of the negotiation was that we stood on the steps and sent people home so the detainees would be released. With our own hands, by the way. And they were out the same day.”
Elbalshy says the debate over the limits of the steps has never stopped, “with parties in the General Assembly, with the state, with everyone: what are your limits?”
In March 2027, Elbalshy will leave his office on Abdel Khaleq Tharwat Street, and the Journalists Syndicate will receive a new head who may have few pressure cards to play. Still, Elbalshy keeps betting on the awareness of the journalistic community, whatever faces represent it. “The Journalists Syndicate will never be just a number. A syndicate’s strength lies in its general assemblies, and in making the General Assembly feel that you’re not an adversary of its gains... The head who’s inside will be a general assembly member outside. All of us should stay active within the syndicate, in different ways.”
As for himself, he will need some time before returning to the ranks of the General Assembly and resuming a union career that has lasted decades. “I’m going to rest a little.”