ANALYSIS

The second voting day Sunday for Egypt’s first democratically elected president had a markedly low turnout, a showing that many attributed to disappointment with both lackluster candidates.

Scattered voters strolled into the Victoria School voting center without delay and quickly registered their choices for the two finalists in the presidential run-off: Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak-era official, and Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist engineer. 

“They hate them both,” said Wael Ghoneimi, owner of an advertising agency.  “It’s not the election we were waiting for for 30 years.” 

Despite their individual preferences, all voters were concerned about post-election violence if Shafiq, the former prime minster, should win. 

“If Shafik wins, the situation will be very critical,” says Kareem Ali, a gynecologist and a supporter of Morsi, candidate of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.  

Physical therapist Zain Abdine also thinks the Muslim Brotherhood would protest a Shafiq victory. “They ask for democracy but they don’t play by the rules.  I fear there is going to be some violence in the street among the Islamists (if Shafiq wins).  But I have great faith in our armed forces.  They will be able to control whatever happens.”

Right now, the ruling Military Council is trying to do just that.  Reportedly, they will declare a new constitution annex defining the powers of the new president in the next two days.  Egypt’s former constitution had been suspended and was supposed to have been determined by a constitutional assembly.  Because the Muslim Brotherhood tried to dominate the 100-member constitutional assembly, plans to form the decision-making body broke down twice and effectively left the country without a functioning constitution.  

Cairo dispute triggers gunfight as Egypt votes

The constitution would have determined the right of the president to appoint ministers and other state officials and the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government.

The country could not be in greater political disarray.  A president will have been elected but without defined authority.  The composition of a constitutional assembly will likely be determined by the military. 

The predominantly Islamist, democratically elected parliament was dissolved by a recent Supreme Court decision.  The Muslim Brotherhood disputes the verdict, arguing that the ruling military council does not have the power to implement the court’s verdict.  The parliament building is now surrounded by military forces to prevent legislators from entering without permission.   

People have practiced democracy a lot since the revolution.  They have already voted five times.  But practice has not made perfect.  The results of two of those elections have already been overturned.  No wonder they head to the ballot box reluctantly, or not at all, as they enter what could be the beginning of a new chapter of turbulence rather than the democratic transition that reflected their deepest hopes.   
 

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Mohammed Al-Law / AP

Officials say former President Hosni Mubarak's health has deteriorated in the three days since a court sentenced him to life imprisonment in connection to the killing of hundreds of protesters.

Hosni Mubarak, the former Egyptian president whose ouster triggered revolutions across the Middle East, has become dangerously ill, security officials told the Associated Press.

Officials at the Torah prison south of Cairo, where Mubarak, 84, is being held, said he suffered from shock and was experiencing breathing problems. They said Mubarak needed a respirator five times on Wednesday.

Mubarak, who had been in power for 30 years, was sentenced to life on Saturday after he was convicted for his role in the killing of hundreds of protesters during the uprising that ultimately swept him out of office.

Egypt’s state news agency said Mubarak had been in a military hospital during his trial before being flown to prison. On Wednesday, the news agency said he suffered from nervous shock. He spent more than two hours on the aircraft that transported him to prison, saying he was suffering from health problems. 

Mubarak has spent the last 10 months in private hospital rooms, according to independent news reports cited by The New York Times, but has been healthy enough to swim every day and go for walks. 

Egypt’s Tahrir protesters take on Mubarak’s man

After Mubarak was sentenced -- and his sons were exonerated -- protesters descended on Tahrir Square, the focal point of the 2011 revolution to speak out against the former president's chosen replacement, Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's appointed prime minister.

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Khaled Elfiqi / EPA

The upcoming election showdown between Islamist Muslim Brotherhood stalwart Mohammed Morsi (L) and former Mubarak-era minister and military loyalist Ahmed Shafiq has been described as a "worst-case scenario" by analysts across the political spectrum. Is that a correct assessment?

ANALYSIS

CAIRO -- Former Mubarak-era minister and military loyalist Ahmed Shafiq and Islamist candidate and Muslim Brotherhood stalwart Mohammed Morsi will run against each other in Egypt’s upcoming presidential run-off election, officials announced on Monday.

Out of a field of five serious contenders who ranged from moderates to Islamists to secularists, the showdown between these two has already been described as a “worst-case scenario” by analysts across the political spectrum.

Some analysts are already calling for voters to boycott the run-off elections scheduled for the middle of June, the argument being that by withholding their vote Egyptians can delegitimize the process that led to this outcome. Also, the argument goes, by boycotting the vote a citizen can deny the winning candidate a strong mandate to govern.

Other commentators are simply reducing the run-off vote to a choice between security, which is Shafiq’s mantra, and the imposition of Islamic law, Morsi’s pledge.  

So is Egypt facing a depressing return to the Mubarak-era or a drastic plunge into the sharia law-era?

Not necessarily either of these scenarios. 

The results of the election, and the upcoming run-off, can be interpreted much less pessimistically.  Instead of the bleak assessments being peddled now, Egypt may instead be entering an era where compromise, coalition-building and power-sharing are part of the political lexicon.

Marco Longari / AFP - Getty Images

A man demonstrating in Cairo's Tahrir square on May 29. His sign reads: "The revolution continues... No to candidates from the old regime...No to the Muslim Brotherhood....STOP".

Runoff could take Egypt's voters on one of two very different paths

There are a few facts that need to be considered when analyzing the recent vote.

Fact one: The majority of voters who went to the polls did not want Morsi or Shafiq to be president. The figures indicate Morsi garnered 24.4 percent and Shafiq 23.3 percent. The rest of the candidates split the remaining 52.3 percent of the vote.

Simply put, more people wanted someone else to be president than they wanted either one of these two candidates.

Fact two: By garnering almost as many votes as the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate, Shafiq and the grassroots organization he built and mobilized over a few months has become a major cause of concern for the long-standing political force. 

Egypt's next president to be an Islamist or Mubarak's former premier?

Fact three: A majority of Egyptians have grown weary of Islamist politicians in an very short period of time.  In fact, the majority voted for either staunchly secular candidates, Shafiq, Amr Moussa and Hamdeen Sabahi, or Aboul Fotoh, a moderate Islamist who promised not to mix religion and politics and also enjoyed the support of idealist secular youth.

In essence, this election has proved that while the Muslim Brotherhood may be the dominant force on Egypt’s streets, that doesn’t mean they are the most popular political force.

While they are still considered the best-organized and funded political organization in Egypt, the recent results probably rattled the Muslim Brotherhood’s cage while helping them understand that they need coalitions too. In other words, the election results prove that there are forces capable of competing against the Muslim Brotherhood.

For 16 months, a debate has raged over the country’s political future.  Should it be a presidential or parliamentary system? Should it be an Islamist state? Secular? Capitalist? Socialist? The candidates tried to define themselves assuming these were the metrics the voters used.

But the results of the first round of voting showed that Egyptians en masse have yet to answer a central question about the country’s future: Do they accept change and the uncertainty and chaos it brings, or will they choose stability and the stagnation it breeds?

For the past year and four months, everything that has unfolded in this country can be seen through this prism – a choice between change or stability.

Egypt's next president to be an Islamist or Mubarak's former premier?

From deadly street protests, to military trials, to parliamentary elections -- every time Egypt’s revolutionary movements have tried to shove the country towards radical change, forces just as eager to slow the pace of change have pushed it back from the edge.

So, as people call for change, just as many have overcome their apathy and said "not so fast."

When the change appears to lean in favor of the more powerful Islamist parties, it becomes more palpable for many to slow change down.

And with around 48 percent of voters now behind Morsi or Shafiq, 52 percent are now up for grabs. So what is clear is that for Morsi or Shafiq to win the presidency, they will have to win the hearts and minds of the remaining voters.  

Now the questions is – what can the two candidates do to secure this group’s support?

In Egypt's elections, politics is a new family affair

For Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, the message from the electorate is clear: The Brotherhood is beatable, Egyptians are tired of the Islamists’ meteoric power grab, and want to see the MB reach across the political divide and move to the center.  Morsi’s Islamist base of support is not enough to win the elections so he must moderate his party’s policies to win the support of cautious and skeptical revolutionaries, many of whom are liberal and likely secular, but nonetheless pro-revolutionary and pro-change.

In contrast, Mubarak’s last prime minister Shafiq, has tapped into a core of the population who wants stability and is more afraid of Islamist politicians than of a return to Mubarak-era policies and practices.

And Shafiq can’t win the Presidency without recognizing that the new balance of power depends on the young, who are overwhelmingly pro-revolutionary, either as Islamists or secularists.

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Shafiq played the fear of uncertainty card well in the first round, but he will have to show voters that he can deliver reforms, change and democracy as well as security and stability. In other words, Shafiq’s core of staunchly secularist and anti-change, pro-stability loyalists are not enough to win the final round of elections.

So the core supporters of these two camps are not enough to win them either an all-out majority, which leaves a central question: Which candidate can overcome his shortcomings better?

Will Shafiq show undecided voters that he will bring reforms, security and democracy? Can Morsi convince voters that the Muslim Brotherhood will commit to a civil secular pluralistic state?

The candidates will have a month to sell themselves to the voters -- and the voters will have a month to decide just how they envision Egypt’s revolution playing out.

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Khaled Desouki / AFP - Getty Images

Egyptian election officials count ballots at a polling station in Cairo on Thursday after polls closed in the country's landmark presidential vote.

ANALYSIS

CAIRO - Hundreds of thousands of people throng the streets. The crowds furiously demand an end to nepotism and corruption and all the unemployment and injustice they create. The protesters rally behind a slogan that is also a deeply held conviction: Islam will make things better. Islam will bring justice.

That was Iran in 1979. The revolution was popular at the time. We all know how well it turned out. Iranian’s Islamic revolutionaries became ever more zealous and bellicose. They stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and held 66 Americans hostage for over a year. Iran has been a pariah ever since.

An Iranian friend told me today that when older Iranians in Tehran watch what’s happening in Egypt now, they say, “It looks like what we went through. The same thing is happening.”

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, banned for 80 years, appears to be in the lead in the country’s first ever free election. The group has staged mass rallies. The group’s slogan is "Islam is the solution." If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt, the changes could be as profound for this country and the region as they were for Iran.

This is where things stand now. On May 23-24, Egyptians voted. There were more than a dozen candidates, among them five with the potential of winning.

As of a preliminary, still-unofficial counting, it appears there will be a runoff election between the two top contenders of the first vote. The runoff will take place June 16-17. The two candidates couldn’t be more different: former President Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohammed Mursi. Whoever wins will take the country down one of two very different paths.

Ahmed Shafiq

Ahmed Shafiq is promising to be a strongman. Critics call him a fascist. An Egyptian tonight told me he worried Shafiq will become another pharaoh. Shafiq is the antithesis of the Muslim Brotherhood. Shafiq has promised to restore law and order to Egypt within 24 hours of his election. He’s said that he’d crush any new protests if they are illegal, and that he wouldn’t hesitate to send in soldiers and police. He still openly expresses his admiration for Mubarak. On his campaign posters around Cairo, Shafiq’s slogan reads: "Actions, Not Words." Shafiq is not the man the revolutionaries who went to Tahrir Square more than a year ago had in mind when they demanded democracy. In fact, the revolutionaries –- especially the Facebook and Twitter generation -- hate Shafiq. But those revolutionaries aren’t setting the political agenda here anymore.

Mohammed Mursi

Mohammed Mursi is the Muslim Brotherhood’s man and has promised to purge Egypt of the old regime if he wins. After casting his ballot, Mursi told local television that he won’t allow “ANY members of the former criminal and corrupt regime to keep their jobs.” He stressed the word "any," shouting it and waving a finger. It’s a message directed at Shafiq and the Egyptian military. If Mursi has his way, Shafiq will be removed, maybe even put in jail; so will all the old cronies. That appeals to many Egyptians. A lot of Mubarak’s cronies are still hanging around in bogus jobs the former president created to appease and enrich his inner circle. The threat of a purge is also a warning to the military that it won’t be able to stage a coup against the Brotherhood, which is a distinct possibility.

This could go a couple of ways. Neither looks promising.

Egypt's next president to be an Islamist or Mubarak's former premier?

Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

Former prime minister and presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq talks during a news conference in Cairo on May 14.

A Shafiq victory

If Shafiq wins, the Brotherhood will go berserk. It will claim fraud. It will protest. It will take to the streets. The old revolutionaries, the ones who didn’t want the Brotherhood or Shafiq, will go to the streets and try to re-occupy Tahrir Square. They’ll call for a new revolution, a do-over, hoping to get new candidates and new elections. Shafiq will crush the demonstrations. It will be violent. There will be deaths.

Shafiq won’t hesitate to use force. He’s already openly said he’ll smash dissent, and he’ll have a mandate from voters. How will the United States react? Will there be real condemnations? Egyptian revolutionaries, the sympathetic-looking, educated ones who speak English, will complain that they have a new dictator worse than Mubarak. Islamic cells will go underground, potentially carrying out bombings and other attacks that will delegitimize the “democratic revolutionaries.” But can Shafiq really win and restore order? Or will the revolutionaries and the Brotherhood be successful with another Tahrir revolution? If Shafiq wins, will Egyptians have defeated themselves by electing a man who is against the revolution they fought for? Egyptians will effectively have used their votes to elect someone many fear will be a strongman like Mubarak. Many Egyptians will believe the democratic revolution will have failed if Shafiq is the new president.

Asmaa Waguih / Reuters

Presidential candidate Mohammed Mursi arrives at a polling station to cast his vote in Al-Sharqya, northeast of Cairo, on Wednesday.

A Mursi victory

If Mursi and the Brotherhood win, the army will go on the defensive. Senior officers will fight against being purged from their jobs. If the Muslim Brotherhood wins, Egyptian women and Christians will suffer.

The Muslim Brotherhood is at its heart a salafist group, a purist fundamentalist movement focused on imposing Islamic laws and morals. In the current political discourse, there has been a distinction drawn between salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. The difference isn’t as wide as it seems. Salafists are fundamentalists who dedicate their lives to religious preaching, converting non-believers and defending the strict moral codes of Islamic law. Salafists are generally poor, sometimes impoverished, choosing the purity of poverty over the temptation and ungodliness of wealth. Salafists spend many nights sleeping on hard mosque floors. They generally do not organize politically. They are like medieval Christian hermits, dedicated solely to the path of God. The Brotherhood started out as a salafist movement. The group’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, began his career by writing letters, some of them threatening, warning fellow Egyptians to give up immoral practices.

But the Brotherhood, unlike the ascetic salafists, embraces politics and does it well. The Brotherhood is practical. It has wealthy donors. The Brotherhood believes the best way to implement Islamic law is to win power by gradually taking control of state institutions.

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If Mursi becomes president, it will be disastrous for Egyptian women. Some will pay in blood. Female circumcision –- also known as female genital mutilation –- has long been practiced in Egypt. The process involves cutting out part, or all, of a girl’s clitoris when she starts to show signs of sexual maturity. In the 1990s as many as 97 percent of young Egyptian women underwent the practice. Female genital mutilation, or FGM, is most often carried out by barbers or midwives using a straight razor, or even more commonly, with the snip of scissors. Unlike male circumcision, FGM isn’t primarily used to demarcate community affiliation or for its purported health benefits. FGM is about control. In popular Egyptian and regional culture, women are seen as weak, easy victims to temptation in the same way Eve couldn’t resist that shiny apple in the Garden of Eden. FGM follows the same principle. The clitoris, as a center of sexual pleasure, is seen here as a source of temptation. If a woman rides a donkey, which many rural woman do, or bathes, her clitoris might be stimulated. Like Eve, she’d lose control of herself and make bad decisions. Society would collapse. Paradise lost. Therefore for everyone’s good, including her own, the woman’s clitoris is snipped out.  The practice was banned under Mubarak. His wife was a major advocate of the ban, which had a major impact. FGM still takes place in Egypt but no longer in public hospitals. FGM percentages dropped over a third after the 2008 ban. As part of its election campaign, the Brotherhood said it wants to reverse the ban on FGM. It also wants to lower the legal marriage age for women to 14 and make it much more difficult for a woman to divorce her husband or keep custody of her children.

Many Christians fear their future won’t be much brighter than women’s under the Brotherhood. Although the Brotherhood has gone to great lengths to say it will not persecute Christians, few believe it. Christians worry they’ll be forced to pay a tax called jiziya, an ancient form of Islamic protection money that Christians paid to Islamic rulers in exchange for safety and community rights. Several Christians have told me they will leave Egypt if the Brotherhood wins. Others say they will stay and fight. Egypt has a large Christian community –- 10 million to 12 million members now –- which has had a presence in this country since the Roman Empire.

Possible coup?

If the Brotherhood wins, the Egyptian army will probably consider a coup. A coup would go against every democratic principle that Egyptians fought to achieve in last year’s revolution, but, then again, so would electing Shafiq. A coup would be condemned internationally, but many foreign governments might secretly welcome it. The possibility of a coup could explain why Mursi went to such lengths to say he’d purge the entire Egyptian power structure if elected. Omar Suliman, President Mubarak’s old intelligence chief, who knows a thing or two about the military’s thinking, said he expects there would be a coup if the Brotherhood wins power. A coup, if it happens at all, might not take place right away. The military might wait until the Brotherhood alienates moderate Egyptians, so that they’d welcome a military intervention. The longer the military waits, however, the harder it will be to carry out a coup, because the army won’t be able to fight off purges from a democratically elected government forever.

In Egypt's election, politics is a new family affair

Constitutional battle

The military does, however, have one trump card. There is currently no Egyptian constitution. It was dismantled during the revolution against Mubarak and still has to be rewritten. Without a constitution, the new president’s powers will be unclear. If the Brotherhood wins, its supporters –- who now have the overwhelming majority in parliament -- will try to write and pass a new constitution as soon as possible. Control over the constitutional process will become critically important in the coming months.

In the end there are two very distinct scenarios. If Shafiq wins, there will be protests, which he will try to suppress. There will be violence. Where the violence goes is hard to predict. If Mursi wins, the Brotherhood will gradually impose Islamic law, try to fight off a military coup by purging the military and quickly write a constitution. Women and Christians will suffer.

Either way, the next few months in this country are critical, with as much at stake for Egypt as there was for Iran in 1979. Change is coming, but it remains unclear which way Egypt and the Middle East will go.

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