It's been a week since Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was removed from power by the military, and something odd has happened: There aren't any lines for gas, and electric power is consistently on.

Fuel shortages and power cuts have stopped abruptly in the wake of Morsi's departure (and disappearance), and the police are back patrolling the streets, leading Morsi supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood and elsewhere to accuse Egyptian elites and functionaries of the old regime of undermining the Islamist leader during his brief time in office, the Times reports:

“This was preparing for the coup,” said Naser el-Farash, who served as the spokesman for the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade under Mr. Morsi. “Different circles in the state, from the storage facilities to the cars that transport petrol products to the gas stations, all participated in creating the crisis.” [...]

When Mr. Mubarak was removed after nearly 30 years in office in 2011, the bureaucracy he built stayed largely in place. Many business leaders, also a pillar of the old government, retained their wealth and influence. Despite coming to power through the freest elections in Egyptian history, Mr. Morsi was unable to extend his authority over the sprawling state apparatus, and his allies complained that what they called the “deep state” was undermining their efforts at governing.

Not only did security forces and bureaucrats hold back on providing services during the year Morsi was in power, Egyptian elites served to sponsor, fund and advise the mass movement that sought to remove him. Billionaire Naguib Sawiris "donated use of the nationwide offices and infrastructure of the political party he built... [and] provided publicity through his popular television network and his major interest in Egypt’s largest private newspaper"; former judges and legal experts helped the movement craft legal strategy.

None of which is to say that Morsi was a good president, whatever that might mean in the circumstances, nor to imply that the movement that called on the army to seize control didn't have mass support. He was by most accounts a difficult head of government, disinclined to compromise or to reach out to his political and ideological opponents, and the counterfactual in which the Egyptian state apparatus worked at its full capacity, preventing or abating the economic trouble and social turmoil that led to his loss of support and power, can be met with one in which Morsi himself acted as a better diplomat to that apparatus, and the Egyptian elite, and gained their trust and support.

Neither happened, obviously. There was (probably) never a "conspiracy," of the smoky-back-room variety, to undermine and remove Morsi—just capital, social and economic, and the widespread, deeply rooted bureaucracy of the Egyptian state, resisting a president it mistrusted, and a party it had always hated, in the only way it knew how.