By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: May 25, 2012
CAIRO — The Islamist candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood appeared set to face former President Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister in a runoff to become Egypt’s first freely elected president, several independent vote counts concluded Friday morning.
Khaled Desouki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The presidential candidates, Mohamed Morsi, left, and Ahmed Shafik.
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A small portion of the ballots remained to be counted. But out of a
broad field of more than a dozen candidates, the runoff appears almost
certain to pit the two most polarizing figures against each other in a
reversion to the decades-old power struggle between Egypt’s
secular-minded military elite and its longstanding Islamist opposition.
It was clear as early as Thursday night that a plurality of votes went to Mohamed Morsi,
the American-educated engineer nominated by the Brotherhood, the
secretive 84-year-old revival group that became the wellspring of
political Islam around the world and already dominates the Parliament.
But only Friday morning did it appear that second place would go to
Ahmed Shafik, a former Air Force general who briefly served as Mr.
Mubarak’s last prime minister. A late entry into the race, Mr. Shafik
was a dark horse campaigning on promises to use a firm hand against the
protests and lawlessness that have prevailed since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
He presented himself as a strong check on the rise of the Islamists. Of
all the candidates in the race, Mr. Shafik came closest to promising a
restoration of the old order and aroused vocal support and threats of a
“second revolution” if he should win.
Mr. Shafik’s law-and-order message resonated with voters, helping him to
overtake the two candidates previously considered, along with Mr.
Morsi, to be the front-runners. One was Amr Moussa,
a former foreign minister under Mr. Mubarak and former head of the Arab
League, who had offered a softer but similar message. In the final
weeks of the race, Mr. Moussa’s support appears to have all but
collapsed in favor of Mr. Shafik.
Ahmad Sarhan, a spokesman for Mr. Shafik, said voters had rallied to the
candidate because he promised to “save Egypt from the dark forces,”
referring to the Brotherhood and more militant Islamists.
Mr. Shafik would bring back security, Mr. Sarhan said. “The revolution
has ended,” he said. “It is one and a half years.” The other former
front-runner who fell behind Mr. Shafik was Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh,
a dissident former Brotherhood leader campaigning as an Islamist and a
liberal. Mr. Aboul Fotouh explicitly challenged the Brotherhood’s
authority to speak as the voice of political Islam. His iconoclastic
campaign promised to upend the old culture-war dichotomies of Egyptian
and Arab politics, and it caught fire among an unlikely alliance of
Brotherhood youth, ultraconservative Islamists known as salafis, and
more secular-minded leftists and liberals.
But in the final weeks of the campaign, some of his more secular-minded
supporters appear to have shifted their allegiance to another dark
horse, Hamdeen Sabahi, a Nasserite socialist. Mr. Sabahi and Mr. Aboul
Fotouh trailed Mr. Shafik with almost all the votes counted, but the
tally was not yet final.
Some liberals and leftists had argued that, in a country where 75
percent of the parliamentary vote went to the Brotherhood or more
conservative Islamists, Mr. Aboul Fotouh was their best hope to
challenge the Brotherhood’s political dominance. But after Mr. Aboul
Fotouh accepted the endorsement from the main party of the
ultraconservative salafis a few weeks ago, some high-profile artists and
intellectuals jumped to Mr. Sabahi.
Mr. Sabahi offered an alternative for those who opposed the Islamists
and the former Mubarak government. A former poet turned populist, he
combined a history of opposition to Mr. Mubarak, a public embrace of the
arts, and full-throated defense of the cause of workers and farmers. He
promised heavy taxes on the rich, more subsidies for the poor, a
greater state role in the economy, and an end to the “the spirit” of
Egypt’s Camp David peace treaty with Israel.
As the votes were counted Friday morning, some liberals and leftists
ruefully observed that, taken together, Mr. Aboul Fotouh and Mr. Sabahi
attracted more votes than Mr. Shafik or Mr. Morsi. Neither, however,
will enter the runoff.
Mr. Morsi’s success was itself a testament to the depth of the
organization’s grass-roots network and popular appeal, which may make
him hard to beat in the runoff.
He was widely regarded as the least charismatic of the leading
candidates. He was derided as a mere “spare tire” who was pulled in
after the disqualification of the Brotherhood’s first choice, of its
leading strategist, Khairat el-Shater. Mr. Morsi mainly promised to
execute Mr. Shater’s plans and platform, and Mr. Morsi’s own face barely
appeared in his two television commercials. He did not participate in
the single televised debate, in which Mr. Moussa faced Mr. Aboul Fotouh.
But his victory also came at a political price. To fend off the
Islamist-versus-Islamist challenge from Mr. Aboul Fotouh, Mr. Morsi and
the Brotherhood dropped some of their efforts to cultivate a moderate
image and turned their campaign appeals sharply to the right.
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After distancing itself from the more conservative salafis during and
after the parliamentary voting, Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood embraced
them on the campaign trail, eagerly standing with them. He called
himself the only true Islamists in the race, led chants for the
implementation of Islamic law, and portrayed his political program as a
distillation of Islam itself.
Some of those shifts may now complicate the group’s efforts to project a
more moderate, centrist image, in the runoff and in its dealings with
the West as Egypt’s dominant political force.
“We are in the lead,” Essam el-Erian, a leading Brotherhood lawmaker,
said at a midnight news conference. “God willing, Mohamed Morsi will be
the next president of Egypt.”
Egypt’s Christian minority, which makes up about 10 percent of the
population, rallied around Mr. Shafik in a coordinated effort to vote as
a bloc against the Islamists, voters and Christian leaders said.
“Because of his military background, Copts are confident he will be
strong enough to restore security and enforce the rule of law,” said
Youssef Sidhom, the editor of Al Watany, a Christian newspaper. A
committee of lay political leaders had convened about six months ago to
devise a Christian strategy for the presidential vote, Mr. Sidhom said.
“After much hesitation between Moussa and Shafik, the final word was
Shafik, in order to avoid splintering the Coptic vote.”
Fears of the Islamists appeared to have outweighed any reluctance by
Christians to support a candidate from the military, despite the
killings of dozens of Christian demonstrators by soldiers just a few
months ago. After the massacre, senior generals sought to blame the
Christian demonstrators for scaring the heavily armed troops.
Mr. Sidhom said Coptic leaders had concluded, however, that there was no
military “conspiracy” against the Copts that resulted in the massacre.
“There was a kind of chaos and panic among the small number of troops
who were stationed there,” he said, although he noted that there had
been no criminal investigation.
Officials of the Brotherhood, who have the best national organization of
poll watchers, said more than half of the 50 million eligible voters
turned out to vote on Wednesday and Thursday. Journalists and other
nonpartisan observers reported orderly lines and no evidence of
systematic abuses. At 9 p.m. on Thursday, the polls closed and ballot
counting started in each polling place, in the presence of observers
from the campaigns and monitoring groups. copy : http://www.nytimes.com
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