EGYPTIAN VOTERS defied pundits, pollsters and the people as a whole by projecting two old regime figures, Muslim fundamentalist Muhammad Mursi and former minister Ahmad Shafiq, into the second round of the presidential election on June 16th-17th.

The choice before voters, as Dina Ezzat observed in Ahram Online, is now between “theocracy” and “a police state”, placing those who mounted the revolution between “a rock and a hard place”. Mursi, who won 5.8 million votes, is the candidate of a veteran faith movement that has been both outlawed and tolerated by pre-uprising regimes but has always managed to operate its welfare projects, clinics, schools and religious outreach programmes. One of the main strengths of the Brotherhood is its grassroots organisation, which can mobilise popular support. Its political machine was set in motion as soon as Mursi declared his candidacy. He was portrayed, unconvincingly, as a revolutionary dedicated to the goals set by the secular leaders of the uprising, although he pledged to implement the Brotherhood’s 80-year-old programme by installing Muslim canon law, sharia, and gradually transforming Egypt into an “Islamic state”. However, the Brotherhood did not win nearly as many votes as its leaders expected. Almost half of the 47 per cent of Egyptians who backed the Brotherhood in the 2011 parliamentary poll did not vote in the presidential election or did not vote for Mursi because they have been angered by the movement’s brief but negative record as the dominant party in the people’s assembly.

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