June 16, 2012
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and KAREEM FAHIM
CAIRO — Voters cast ballots on Saturday for the first competitively elected leader in Egypt’s history, even as a last-minute grab for power by its ruling generals raised questions about whether the election would be a milestone in the transition to democracy or a facade obscuring the re-emergence of the old order.
Voters faced a stark choice between two faces of the past: Ahmed Shafik, a former air force general and stalwart of former President Hosni Mubarak who promised to restore order and thwart the rise of an Islamist theocracy, or Mohamed Morsi, a veteran of the once-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood campaigning as a defender of the revolution against a return of the Mubarak-era autocracy.
The ruling military council that took power after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster 16 months ago had pledged that this weekend’s two-day presidential runoff would be the final step in the transition to civilian government before the generals were to cede power.
The day before the vote, however, they dissolved the democratically elected, Islamist-led Parliament that had been the chief accomplishment of the revolt so far. Acting on a rushed ruling by a court of Mubarak-appointed judges, they declared they would be the sole lawmakers, even after a new president is elected. And they began drawing up a new interim constitution that would define the power of the president whom voters were choosing on Saturday.
“This is the end stage of the whole transition,” said Mahmoud Ismail, 27, a political activist in the Nile Delta who said he would vote for Mr. Morsi. “To be or not to be.”
The military’s seizure of Parliament precluded the possibility of the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood taking control of both the legislature and the presidency. Now, if Mr. Morsi wins, he will face a prolonged struggle for power against the generals, while Mr. Shafik — who had long been considered one of Mr. Mubarak’s likely successors — could emerge as a new military-backed strongman unrestrained by either a constitution or Parliament.
Mr. Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, has made no public comment on the dissolution of Parliament. He cast his ballot on Saturday in the style of his former boss, arriving at a polling place in an upscale suburb surrounded by a heavy guard of military and police officers. The lines were pushed aside and guards immediately closed the facility for his private use.
Crowds of his supporters were waiting both inside and outside the polling place. “The Brotherhood is dissolved,” they chanted, cheering at the dissolution of the Brotherhood-led Parliament. State media reported that a cameraman in a military vehicle filmed Mr. Shafik’s trip to the ballot box, apparently to preserve it for posterity.
Mr. Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood sought Saturday to cast the election as the last chance to beat back the full revival of the Mubarak government. He waited in line for more than two hours in the nearly 100-degree heat to cast his vote in the Nile Delta town of Zagazig, where he used to teach engineering. “God is great,” a throng of supporters cried as he emerged, and he shouted over them to salute those killed while demonstrating against Mr. Mubarak.
“Today is the day of the martyrs,” he declared. “There is no place at all for Mubarak’s helpers.”
Across Egypt, the streets were calm, but enthusiasm was low and turnout had fallen sharply from the first round.
The two candidates, however, revved up the battle-tested political machines that helped them advance past last month’s first round of voting. Mr. Morsi turned to the Brotherhood’s system of local cells and charities built over 84 years of preaching and politics. Mr. Shafik, who surged to roughly tie Mr. Morsi in the first round of voting, scarcely a month after he announced his campaign, relied instead on the network of local power brokers, including retired army officers and former leaders in Mr. Mubarak’s defunct ruling party.
In Mr. Shafik’s campaign offices in Menoufia, in the Nile Delta, staff members said that they were enjoying the novelty of Egypt’s first competitive presidential race. “This is a good feeling, if you don’t know what will happen,” said Tarek al-Warraqui, a campaign volunteer who previously helped manage local elections. “Before, we knew.”
He cataloged the Brotherhood’s missteps and touted his colleagues’ proficiency in the bare-knuckle politics of the district.
“We have a network,” he said. “We have someone in every village. The Brotherhood’s experience is different,” he said. “We worked in the light. They were underground.”
He handed out fliers throughout the district calling the Brotherhood members liars and Mubarak cronies. A photograph on one showed the Brotherhood’s speaker of Parliament accepting what appeared to be chocolate candy from Ahmed Ezz, a fellow lawmaker and steel tycoon reviled as a symbol of the old elite’s corruption. Several pictures captured Brotherhood leaders sitting or shaking hands with the American ambassador.
It was an extension of a campaign of bold inversions that Mr. Shafik himself has leveled against the group. The Brotherhood was Mr. Mubarak’s principal opposition and then a mainstay of the Tahrir Square protests, but Mr. Shafik has accused it of collaborating with the Mubarak government and directing the shooting of Tahrir Square protesters.
In his last television interview before the vote, Mr. Shafik even claimed credit for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
“I’m the one who proposed the idea of stepping down, and I proposed it insistently,” he said. He had proposed it in a meeting with the top military leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and former Vice President Omar Suleiman to plot a response to the uprising, he said, and it took “perseverance” to persuade Field Marshal Tantawi to carry it out.
Eman Youssef, a housewife in the Nile Delta town of Shibin al-Kom, was ready to believe him about the Brotherhood. “They accomplished nothing with the power we gave them in parliamentary elections,” she said. “I hate them.”
The Brotherhood scrambled to respond to dissolution of Parliament, previously the group’s power base. Seizing on the appearance that the military-led government was out to thwart them, Brotherhood leaders held news conferences accusing Mr. Shafik and his allies in government of schemes to rig the vote, such as busing plainclothes security officers, who were legally barred from voting, to the polls.
None of their accusations could be proven. But Mr. Morsi and Brotherhood leaders around the country sought to use the threat of voter fraud to rally voters to the polls.
“Egyptians, defend your will, continue to vote heavily,” the Brotherhood declared in a statement, urging voters to stand up against “any attempt to waste the gains that you have achieved with your free votes in the people’s assembly and the presidential elections.”
After a meeting between Mr. Morsi and top Brotherhood leaders, the group acknowledged for the first time that the military had shut down Parliament, and demanded a national referendum on its legal status.
“The military council is grabbing the legislative power without any right, as well as the executive authority it is supposed to hand over to civilians in two weeks,” the group said in a statement. “It is a coup against the entire democratic march, and it sends us back to square one.”
Their warnings, too, found sympathetic ears. Heba Mahmoud, a 30-year-old resident of the Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba, said she was voting for Mr. Morsi mainly to stop Mr. Shafik and to remove the military council. “I’m not voting for the Brotherhood,” she said. “I’m voting for regime change.”
However, another Imbaba voter, Izzat Eissa ibn Mahmoud, 53, said he voted for a leftist in the first round but swung to Mr. Shafik this time. He had just closed his business making crafts for tourists because the instability had decimated it.
“We all want change,” he said. “We’re not stupid, and we know this isn’t ideal.” But, he added, “I can’t afford it. I can’t afford real change right now. Real freedom is too hefty a price.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: June 16, 2012
An earlier version of a picture caption in a home page slide show appearing with this article incorrectly referred to Ahmed Shafik as a veteran of Ehud Mubarak’s regime. He was an official in the government of Egypt’s former president, Hosni Mubarak.
Note: See Pixs at Websource
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