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Egypt's opposition leaders will meet later today to consider President Mohamed Morsi's offer of emergency talks to determine a response to ongoing unrest, but their initial response has been cool at best.

Individual leaders have warned that unless the government addresses more fundamental problems that leave Egypt ripe for upheaval, talks will be "a waste of time."

President Morsi declared a state of emergency yesterday in the provinces of Port Said, Ismailiya, and Suez after a weekend of violence and protests that left scores dead. The rioting began two days earlier in response to a court sentencing 21 people to death for their involvement in a soccer riot in February. Mr. Morsi called for a meeting with opposition leaders to discuss how to resolve the crisis.

But while the capital sentences may have been the trigger for the riots, opposition leaders blame the president's policies for the underlying unrest, and said that a meeting that does not also address Morsi's role in fomenting instability would be pointless, reports Reuters.

The Monitor's Kristen Chick reported yesterday that many analysts agree with the opposition's sentiment that the current upheaval – both the soccer conviction protests and ongoing anti-Morsi protests which increased in intensity on Jan. 25, the second anniversary of the 2011 uprising – "is a symptom of an unresolved political crisis and the decreasing legitimacy of state institutions."

The BBC's Aleem Maqbool noted in a broadcast that the protests are also a byproduct of the success of the demonstrations against Mubarak: "People saw two years ago that taking to the streets is something that works. Even though of course two years ago over 800 people died, people saw that it produced results."

"Since then, that sort of replaced normal politics," he said. "People take to the streets, we've seen over the last couple of days, in opposition to what they feel the president is doing, or even when it comes to a judgment they didn't like in the courts – in the case of Port Said, where today we saw over 600 people injured, because they didn't like the judgment 21 death sentences handed down to people from Port Said who were involved in a football riot. So, that is a huge thing for [Morsi] to tackle, and that in itself is a huge problem for Egypt going forward."

And in an editorial today titled "Morsi plays Mubarak," Lebanon's Daily Star argues that demonstrators are not the only ones repeating history.  The Egyptian government's decision to instate curfews and a state of emergency were "as if Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood team around him could find nothing better to do than take a page from the Syrian playbook on how to deal with mass anger: Shoot first, and ask questions, maybe, later."