Living in the Palm of a Ghost

After spending nearly a full year in Egypt, I am about to bid the country farewell. This time next week I will be in San Francisco enjoying a combination of food, baseball, and fog – a far cry from the oppressive desert heat of the Cairo summer. Before leaving, however, I, along with 85 million Egyptians, am about to witness this country’s first ever competitive presidential election. Voting will commence on Wednesday morning and extend through Thursday evening, with the results to be announced soon thereafter. While this is only the first round (the top two vote recipients will face off in a runoff election on June 17^th and 18^th), the excitement and anticipation in the country are palpable. As my Egyptian dialect teacher told me last week, “we are living in the palm of a ghost [an Egyptian saying meaning that everything is very tenuous, nothing is for certain], no one knows what to expect!”

Indeed, the outcome of this first round is going to be as close to a complete surprise as possible. There are no reliable public opinion polls in Egypt, and, while most people have a general sense that the election is going to be between four main candidates (Amr Moussa, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of the Arab League, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, former MB member turned liberal and Salafi favorite Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, and Mubarak crony and former Minister of Civil Aviation Ahmed Shafik), it is anybody’s guess as to who will make it into the runoff.

Whatever the outcome, Egyptians have thrown themselves into this campaign season with unmatched fervor. Literally every time I walk down the street past a café or overhear discussions in public areas, the subject is always politics! Taxi drivers love to expound on their reasons for voting for one candidate or another, and the newspapers and television talk shows are full of stories about the candidates and the campaign. These past two days have been deemed a “media blackout,” but that has done little to dampen the debate. When I told a friend of mine that I thought the blackout was a ridiculous idea, he responded “Don’t worry, Egyptians are naturally absurd like this: when there is a curfew we go down to the street to see what’s happening, and when there’s a strike we stay home instead of going to protest, so of course when there’s a media blackout everyone will just talk about politics more!”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a chance to see all of the main candidates in person. I wrote about the Mohamed Morsi rally I attended here, I heard Moussa and Shafik speak at luncheons held by the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt (where I have been interning for the past few months), and I attended a political rally-cum-festival last weekend held by the Aboul Fotouh campaign.

Like Morsi, Moussa had very little charisma and his rhetorical style was what I imagine Professor Binns (the “History of Magic” professor in the Harry Potter books known for his endless droning) would sound like. Nevertheless, Moussa has turned out to be highly popular because of his long tenure in government (which he has diligently tried to portray as endowing him with experience rather than associating him with the Mubarak regime). He is the John McCain equivalent in this race – old, a known entity, and running on his long record of civil service.

Shafik, on the other hand, is making no bones about his connection to the old regime. At the AmCham luncheon he made his distaste for the revolution clear, speaking of the “huge crisis” that Egypt was currently facing as a result of doing away with Mubarak. Shafik is running on a security and stability platform, claiming that security will return in “100 days – maximum!” if he becomes president, and there is little doubt that he plans to achieve that goal by letting the police force loose as Mubarak used to do and allowing it to round up anyone and everyone it so desires. Like Mubarak, Shafik is also fiercely opposed to the Islamists and hinted that he would take steps to push them out of politics (primarily by instituting a presidential system and effectively stripping the Parliament of its power). As you might expect, many of the revolutionaries are apopleptic at the possibility of a Shafik presidency. A friend of mine told me that if Shafik wins, he and all of his friends would go down to Tahrir Square with only two possible outcomes in mind: “Either we overthrow him, or he kills us. I would rather die than live in an Egypt where Ahmed Shafik is president.” Despite that fervor, however, I have met a surprisingly large number of people who plan to vote for Shafik.

And finally, we come to Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the closest thing to Obama that Egypt has to offer. Fotouh was a longtime Muslim Brotherhood member, although he was from a decidedly more liberal wing of the brotherhood than Mohamed Morsi. Soon after the revolution, he split off from the group in order to run for the presidency, taking a large chunk of the MB youth with him. Since then, he has assembled a coalition of youth who see him as the most revolutionary candidate, liberals who see him as a pseudo-liberal candidate who has a realistic chance of winning, and Salafis who like that he comes from an Islamist background and don’t want the MB to control both the parliament and the presidency. A true “big tent” campaign. As expected, Aboul Fotouh has been accused of pandering to the different constituencies supporting him, and many liberal and Christian friends are also highly suspicious of his history in the MB (“once a brother, always a brother” is a common refrain). Nonetheless, Aboul Fotouh seems to have been steadily rising in popularity, and the rally I went to last weekend was well attended. In classic Aboul Fotouh form, he stated in his speech that he wanted to create a “civil democratic state built upon a civilized Islamic foundation” - every word in that sentence, of course, was targeted at a particular constituency.

Unlike the parliamentary elections, which hinged much more on a candidate’s local ties and reputation in a particular community, the presidential elections are going to be the first real indicator of the overall political mood in the country. At the same time, however, these elections are certainly not an end in and of themselves. Whoever takes power will inherit an Egypt that still does not have a coherent governing framework, is plagued by the military’s “state within a state” of economic and security interests, and currently faces a huge economic and budgetary crisis. For now, though, it’s time to let the voting party begin!

Finally, here's my off-the-cuff prediction for the first ever competitive presidential elections in Egypt's history:

1) Amr Moussa

2) Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh

3) Ahmed Shafik

4) Mohamed Morsi