Standing before a joint session of Parliament in 2006, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt told lawmakers what most in attendance had already assumed: He planned to stay in power until the day he died.

The speech was not offered as a threat or boast, but as comfort, because in Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt it had become an article of faith for his allies that stability required his continued stewardship.

“I will pursue with you the march of transition into the future, shouldering the responsibility and burdens as long as I draw breath and my heart beats in my chest,” he told the joint session of Parliament on its opening day. “I will neither falter nor shake.”

Now five years later, as Egypt quakes beneath the fury of a huge public uprising and tanks roll through its cities, that compact between Mr. Mubarak and his subjects has broken. His focus on stability, which relied heavily on police powers and support from the West, has proved to be his greatest liability. Protesters now march through the streets chanting slogans like this: “Down, down, down Mubarak!”

The litany of complaints against Mr. Mubarak is well known to anyone who has spent time in any coffee shop or on any corner chatting in any city in Egypt. The police are brutal. Elections are rigged. Corruption is rampant. Life gets harder for the masses as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. Even as Egypt’s economy enjoyed record growth in recent years, the number of people living in poverty actually grew.

“I graduated from the university about 16 years ago, and the only jobs open to me were cleaning other people’s houses,” said Ali Suleiman one day last week as he stood in the center of the city, offering a common lament. “I am lucky I was able to start selling newspapers. I have three daughters, and I make about 20 pounds,” or $3.50, a day.

That is Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt, a place where about half the population lives on $2 a day or less, and walled compounds spring up outside cities with green lawns and swimming pools and names like Swan Lake. It is a place where those with money have built a parallel world of private schools and exclusive clubs, leaving the rundown cities to the poor.

“The whole system is seen as being his fault,” said Anne Mariel Peters, an assistant professor at Wesleyan University, who closely follows events in Egypt. “People do believe that Mubarak is the absolute dictator.”

To many Egyptians, and to many who have closely followed Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian government over his nearly three decades in power, the surprise is not that he is widely despised, but that so many are no longer afraid to speak their mind. That hostility may prove to be the epitaph of Mr. Mubarak, a former air force general, who told Egyptians on the day of his inaugural in 1981: “We will embark on our great path: not stopping or hesitating, building and not destroying, protecting and not threatening, preserving and not squandering.”

But it is the fault of the government he built, where all power ultimately rested in his hand, political scientists said. “Once you hollow out civil society and repress the unions and you concentrate so much power around your hands, you are vulnerable and it becomes the flip side of stability,” said Diane Singerman, a professor at American University in Washington who has followed events in Egypt for years. “I think he is hated for good reason: the constant humiliation, the over–the–top sort of need to control everything, the excessive force.”

Mr. Mubarak, 82, became president in 1981 after his predecessor, Anwar el–Sadat, was assassinated while the two men sat in a reviewing stand at a military parade. He came to power with a vision — and a mandate — to try to preserve stability. It was the perfect calling for a military man schooled in the former Soviet Union who made one of his first acts the imposition of an emergency law. The law gave his government the ability to fight the extremists who killed Mr. Sadat and for years after would violently threaten the state.

Mr. Mubarak did not come to office with an ideology, like the pan–Arabism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He did not promote bold ideas, like Mr. Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel. He was a cautious man, glacial in his pace, whose early years as president were spent steering his nation through a minefield of economic and political crises.

“You can divide the period of Mubarak into two periods: one battling militants and one transforming Egypt to a civic state,” said Gihad Ouda, a member of Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. Early on, the president also helped steer Egypt back into the Arab fold, after it had been ostracized for its treaty with Israel. He had other foreign policy successes in helping reconcile the Palestinians and Israelis.

What has impelled so many to the streets is the collateral damage, the hurt and anger after years of repressive rule and cronyism. Mr. Mubarak kept the emergency law in place so that his government had the ability to arrest and detain without charge, to limit public gatherings, to operate a special state security court. His police culture fostered a sense of impunity for law enforcement that led to widespread reliance on torture.

One case that drew widespread international condemnation involved a cellphone video of police officers sodomizing a driver with a broomstick. In June 2010, Alexandria erupted in protests over the fatal beating by police officers of Khaled Said, 28. The authorities said he died choking on a clump of marijuana, until a photograph emerged of his bloodied face. Just last month, a suspect being questioned in connection with a bombing was beaten to death while in police custody.

In recent years, the president appointed a cabinet, led by Ahmed Nazif, a technocrat, with the mandate to overhaul and liberalize the economy. It made some progress and won plaudits. In the end, though, it may have undermined stability because there was more money in the country — but it was not trickling down.

“Egyptians are sick and tired of being corrupted and when you live on 300 pounds a month,” about $51, “you have one of two options: you either become a beggar or a thief,” said Ghada Shabandar, a longtime human rights activist. “The people sent a message: ‘We are not beggars and we do not want to become thieves.’ ”

Mr. Mubarak and his allies did not see the danger coming. They had succeeded over the years in managing the anger, co–opting those they could, suppressing others. In November, they thought they had succeeded in further consolidating power — and in their view increasing stability — after widely criticized parliamentary elections in which the president’s party won about 500 seats in Parliament, leaving fewer than 20 to the opposition. That helped set off the recent days of rage.

The anger was compounded by speculation that Mr. Mubarak planned to have his son Gamal succeed him. “We all want at least some minimum ground for democracy and a comfortable standard of living and some sort of justice in the distribution of income,” said Asmaa Mahfouz, 25, one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, which organized the demonstrations this week. “We want to fight corruption. These are all things that we have agreed on.”

And one more item, which the protesters shouted from the barricades: President Mubarak has to go.