Dina Ezzat wonders what Mohamed El-Baradei's options are now he has withdrawn from the presidential race Mohamed El-Baradei is planning to join hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who are expected to take to Tahrir Square to commemorate the 25 January Revolution. In a press statement on Sunday, El-Baradei said he would join "should the security conditions allow it". "He would not want to be part of any confrontation between the demonstrators and security forces -- police or army," said a source close to El-Baradei who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly on condition of anonymity. But according to a statement made by MP Zeyad El-Eleimi, a key political advisor to El-Baradei, the decision to take part in the demonstration has already been made. "He will certainly be in Tahrir on 25 January," El-Eleimi confirmed early Monday evening. Should El-Baradei go to the square it will be his first public appearance following the weekend announcement that he was withdrawing from the presidential race. On Thursday morning El-Baradei cancelled a press conference and met instead with a group of followers and leading columnists to break the news: "I cannot, with a clear conscience, run for president under a political system that has yet to embrace democracy," he said. El-Baradei lambasted the military's management of the transitional phase following Hosni Mubarak's removal from the presidency on 11 February in the wake of 18 days of mass demonstrations. It was in 2009, following the end of his third term as director of the Vienna-based International Agency for Atomic Energy, that El-Baradei began to lend his voice to calls, growing since 2005, demanding an end to Mubarak's rule and to any succession plans for his younger son, Gamal. At the time El-Baradei repeated on several occasions that he would only present himself as a presidential candidate if firm democratic guarantees were in place. On Thursday he made it clear that he did not believe this was the case, and was therefore withdrawing from the race. His decision was lamented by Amr Moussa and Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, two frontrunners in the presidential race. In separate press statements both praised El-Baradei's contribution to promoting reform in Egypt. Though El-Baradei says he met with some members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) a few days prior to his announcement and was asked by them to delay making his decision public till after the 25 January commemoration, the military council has made no comment. While some activists and commentators qualified El-Baradei's decision as heroic, others -- including some of his supporters -- suggested it was a result of political realism. El-Baradei, they said, had realised that he commanded too little popular support to run a successful presidential campaign. "When I quit the campaign two months ago over frustration with El-Baradei's performance and his reluctance to follow our suggested campaign plans my assessment was basically that he had no chance of winning," said a former member of the El-Baradei for President Campaign. Samer Suleiman, a close associate of El-Baradei and professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, says El-Baradei and his advisers were well aware of his low popularity levels. They were, both Suleiman and El-Eleimi argue, a result of the ongoing campaign of vilification against him first launched in the state-owned media in 2009. "But there were other serious concerns that informed his decision," says Suleiman, not least the likelihood of intervention in the electoral process in favour of whichever presidential candidate SCAF might wish to boost. "I am not saying that there is an active decision to rig the presidential elections. What I am saying is that the apparatus of intervention has yet to be eliminated. We saw signs of it in the parliamentary elections, and obviously the next president is much more crucial to SCAF than the composition of parliament." A military source speaking to the Weekly on condition of anonymity said such allegations were "political hallucination". El-Eleimi, for his part, argued that irrespective of SCAF's real intentions towards the presidential elections El-Baradei's decision -- which "he considered for six weeks" -- became inevitable in the absence of the basic democratic parameters that would have allowed him to pursue the calls for change that he had committed himself to and to which he remains committed. What, then, might be El-Baradei's next move? "There is nothing very clear at the moment, but there are several possible options," says Suleiman. They include establishing a political party or forging a political coalition of several parties in preparation for the next parliamentary elections. El-Baradei might also consider taking a job, "maybe as prime minister", under whoever becomes the next president providing they see eye to eye on the necessary reforms. And if the next constitution stipulates a parliamentary, or a mixed parliamentary- presidential system, then according to Suleiman El-Baradei might pursue the prime minister's job to promote the changes he has been advocating. The most likely scenario, though, according to El-Eleimi, is that El-Baradei will continue to advocate reform from a non- partisan, unofficial position. Political activist Khaled Abdel-Hamid, who attended the meeting at which El-Baradei announced his decision to quit the presidential race, says the former presidential candidate "did not offer any clear alternatives". Abdel-Hamid complains that El-Baradei reached his decision "without sufficient consultations with those who supported him and counted on him". It is hard to see, says Abdel-Hamid, how El-Baradei, who ultimately, if not exclusively, represented Tahrir Square, the beacon of the 25 January Revolution, will be able to induce change from outside the formal set up given how few Tahrir Square revolutionaries made it to parliament.
