Coverage of Egypt in the international press this weekend was uniformly critical after Khaled Ali announced his withdrawal from the race for the presidency on Thursday. While Ali’s chances of actually winning were slim, his supporters hoped his bid would be a means of political mobilization in an otherwise “strangled” scene, says the Financial Times’ Heba Saleh. The arrest of former Armed Forces chief of staff Sami Anan shows that President Abdel Fattah El Sisi is “under no pressure from abroad to play by the rules,” analyst Riccardo Fabiani tells Bloomberg.

Trump should turn back on El Sisi -WaPo: The Washington Post’s editorial board says that now is the time for US President Donald Trump to turn away from his “disappointing” policy of counting El Sisi as a friend despite his “abuse of democratic norms.” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal notes that the most credible challengers to El Sisi had emerged from the armed forces.

Although El Sisi’s reelection seems to be a foregone conclusion, reports are emerging that loyalist businessmen are “bribing” poor voters with cash and food handouts in exchange for signing endorsement forms, The Associated Press’ Samy Magdy says. With opponents out of the way, the presidential elections will likely be a “subdued affair,” Ruth Michaelson writes for The Guardian. El Sisi’s election “seems assured, but his popular support is muted,” she writes. All in all, Egyptians who were hopeful that ousting the Ikhwan in 2013 would usher in a new age of democracy “learned the hard way that they were wrong,” Sara Khorshid writes for Foreign Policy.

Meanwhile, Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton says Mike Pence’s trip to the Middle East shows how much the Trump administration has changed America’s Middle East policy in its first year, in a piece for The Hill. He says Washington and its allies do not need more Russian adventurism in the region and cites one example of this being the “unprecedented” increased presence of Russian military forces in the country.