Two weeks ago, the two candidates widely acknowledged as Egypt’s presidential
front-runners – the Islamist Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh and ex-foreign minister
Amr Moussa – faced off in the country’s first-ever televised debate.
Now,
with the majority of votes counted in the election’s first round, neither
candidate remains relevant. Voters instead gave pole positions to the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Mohamed Mursi, with former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq just behind
and the Nasserite socialist Hamadeen Sabahi in third. Abol Fotouh and Moussa
came in fourth and fifth, respectively.
“Abol Fotouh was never more than
a ‘flavor of the month,’” said Kurt Werthmuller, an Egypt expert at the Hudson
Institute in Washington.
“Moussa’s campaign has foolishly coasted on name
recognition: ‘Why mobilize voters when everyone knows who I am?’” Official
results will be released on Tuesday, but barring any further surprises, the June
16- 17 second-round ballot will pit Mursi against Shafiq.
“This will make
for a deeply divisive period of runoff rhetoric, although it will be a difficult
choice only for the small circle of Tahrir revolutionaries,” Werthmuller
said. “Most Egyptians are likely to perceive the runoff as a
straightforward choice of complete dominance of the Muslim Brotherhood or a
return to safe streets and a certain degree of normalcy.”
“I, for one,
cannot predict which of these two options will prove more persuasive,” he
added.
The stout Mursi is every pound the Brotherhood insider. A
four-decade member of the movement, he has in recent weeks strayed from the
Brothers’ initial post-revolutionary attempts to depict themselves as “moderate”
Islamists committed to civil, non-religious government.
.
In recent
campaign rallies, Mursi’s message has increasingly included references to the
Koran, God, Muhammad and – when he feels the crowd is receptive – promises to
implement Islamic law.
“It was for the sake of the Islamic Shari’a that
men were... thrown into prison. Their blood and existence rests on our
shoulders now,” he said during one recent rally. “We will work together to
realize their dream of implementing Shari’a.”
Mursi, 60, has even pledged
to work for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” imprisoned in
the United States since the 1990s for plotting attacks in New
York.
Abdel-Rahman is the spiritual leader of Gama’a al-Islamiya, a
formerly banned extremist group that was behind the 1981 assassination of
president Anwar Sadat and the 1997 massacre of 62 tourists in Luxor. The group
claims to have renounced violence and now holds 13 seats in the lower house of
parliament.
Last month, Mursi sat impassively at a Cairo stadium rally on
his behalf as a radical preacher pledged to create a new Islamic caliphate based
in Jerusalem, and an MC led the crowd in chants of “Banish the sleep from the
eyes of the Jews; come on, you lovers of martyrdom, you are all Hamas!” The
candidate has called for the 1979 peace treaty with Israel to undergo
“revisions,” but has not specified what exactly those changes would
entail.
Shafiq, by contrast, is viewed by many Egyptians as Hosni Mubarak
2.0. Israeli policy-makers too view the ex-air force chief as a pragmatist keen
to continue the ousted president’s alliance with Washington and its strategic
partnership with Jerusalem.
The 70-year-old has impeccable anti-Islamist
credentials, and has even said that as president, he would be willing to visit
the Jewish state “if it served Egypt’s interests.”
“A Mursi presidency
would probably work with parliament to dismantle the peace treaty through a
gradual, piecemeal process,” Werthmuller said. “Shafiq unquestionably holds the
more favorable stance toward the treaty, having promised to maintain it for the
good of Egypt’s security and stability.”
Raphael Israeli, a Middle East
specialist and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said
his first reaction to receiving the Egyptian election results was “I told you
so.”
“When the treaty with Egypt was drafted, I said we had made peace
with Sadat, but not with Egypt. People called me a warmonger and a pessimist,”
Israeli said. “Today, everyone sees, unfortunately, that it’s
true.”
Israel’s only hope, he said, is Shafiq – a contender many voters
may choose not out of affection, but out of fear of the potential alternative:
“There are many Egyptians who, much more than they want Shafiq, simply fear the
Brotherhood."