The coup d'etat by the Egyptian Army in Cairo on July 3 and the arrest of President Mohamed Morsi and his entourage should not be interpreted as signalling the end of the Arab spring or of the possibility of progress in Egypt toward the adoption of democratic norms.
Revolutions against an autocracy rarely lead directly to the immediate establishment of a democratic regime. The French revolution of 1789 led to the terror and eventually to the autocratic French empire of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is difficult to date the real start of French style democracy but it certainly did not come until after the fall of the second French Empire following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Deng Xiaoping, on being questioned about the effects of the French Revolution, famously declared that it was too soon to tell.
Morsi was elected president of Egypt in 2012 by a thin margin in ostensibly democratic elections, although in a country with such a large population that had suffered years of autocratic rule, it is not clear how accurate the electoral rolls were. Morsi was the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been persecuted and repressed under the Mubarak regime.