As many as five people were reported killed in Port Said in clashes that continued into the early hours of March 4. A number of Egyptian media sources also reported clashes between army and police personnel, reports that official military spokesman Col. Ahmed Ali strongly denied in a statement on Facebook. It appears that army units trying to help quell the unrest were hit by tear gas shells in the melee and responded by firing into the air.

Port Said has been the scene of unrest for more than a month, beginning with a Cairo court's late January sentencing of 21 residents of the city to death for their involvement in Egypt's deadliest soccer riot, which left 74 people dead in February 2012. What began as a reaction to the verdict has ballooned into a general state of public disorder involving protests, strikes (including those by police officers) and work stoppages, including the blocking of a major port that local and national law enforcement agencies have failed to subdue.

While Port Said has seen some of the worst unrest, social disturbances are present in many other cities across the country. Much of the unrest stems from local issues and other public grievances that have gone unaddressed for years. In the post-Arab Spring atmosphere, especially after the coming to power of the country's first democratically elected president, there has been a genuine public move to make demands of the government. 

There is also the general public proclivity to riot that is to be expected in countries that have long been ruled by autocratic leaders and thus will take time to develop the ethic of civil protest. Complicating these natural circumstances is the political situation, in which a multitude of secular forces opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood are trying to prevent the Islamist movement from consolidating power. These include opposition parties, civil society groups, economic elites and elements within the establishment who are unhappy with the military's move to work with the Brotherhood.

These secularist forces have an interest in a sustained agitation because they hope to prevent a military-Brotherhood working relationship from taking shape. They hope to achieve their goal by creating conditions in which the Morsi administration is unable to govern, forcing the army to step in and reset the transition. These secularist forces realize that, given their weak and divided condition (many of them are not in favor of the military being in politics), it is unlikely that they would win in an electoral or constitutional process that restarted from scratch.

Therefore, many of them would like the army to take over and rule more or less directly or through a combination of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and a technocratic Cabinet. The problem is that the army has no interest in governing the country for three reasons. First, the constitution drafted by the Islamist-dominated Constituent Assembly and approved by popular referendum secures the political and economic interest of the armed forces.

Second, the army does not want to inherit the many social, political and economic problems plaguing the country. It would much rather have a civilian government handle, and take the blame for, those problems. There is also the fear that derailing the democratic process could actually worsen the country's financial problems.

Lastly and most significantly, the military needs a civilian partner to govern. For the military, the biggest problem that the Arab Spring created was that it dismantled its civilian vehicle, the now-defunct National Democratic Party, founded by Anwar Sadat and presided over by Hosni Mubarak. Not only did it lose the single-party system, but the army is now forced to rely on the Brotherhood, which is the only organized and coherent political group in the country and one that has performed well in the elections.

The armed forces share the opposition's ideological opposition to the Brotherhood, but the army, as the guarantor of state stability, also needs governance to move forward. It has cautiously moved forward with the transition, balancing between the need to keep a check on the Brotherhood and the need to govern the country. Therefore, the generals are trying to quiet the secularists and have asked Morsi to talk to them so that parliamentary elections can be held sometime before the middle of the year.

At this point, there is no reason to believe that the process will be derailed. But the situation remains fluid, and if Morsi fails to turn it around and unrest spirals out of control, the army could be forced to take over.