The unexpected happened in last week's first round of the presidential elections, with the frontrunners being dropped in favour of candidates with apparently lower approval ratings, writes Dina Ezzat Placed by almost every opinion poll at the head of the presidential race, and enjoying name recognition, touring the whole of the country and expanding their supporter base, in the first round of Egypt's presidential elections none of these things proved to be enough for the two frontrunners. Amr Moussa and Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh were rejected by the voters in the elections in favour of winners Mohamed Mursi and Ahmed Shafik, who came first and second in the poll, respectively. During the early hours of the first day of last week's elections, there were already indications that Mursi could be in the lead, not unexpectedly given that he was the official candidate of the widely supported Muslim Brotherhood, which had built up a great deal of experience in campaign management. However, both Moussa and Abul-Fotouh were still reported to be doing well, coming second and third, or third and second, depending on the source. The same overall estimates were being bandied around on the morning of the second day of the elections on 23 May. However, by the evening of the 23rd, word was out that Shafik was making unexpected headway, and ousted former president Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister, a man whose term in office was cut short as a result of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square during last year's January Revolution, did indeed overtake both Moussa and Abul-Fotouh. This came as a shock to campaigners, but the explanation, commentators say, may not be hard to seek. Abul-Fotouh was running in the elections against the will of the Muslim Brotherhood, in some ways his natural supporter, and as a result the Brotherhood did everything it could to damage his chances of winning, having previously expelled him from the association. According to Abul-Fotouh supporters, the Brotherhood did its utmost to sabotage his campaign, using personal defamation, the funding of his opponents, and the infiltration of areas where he had significant support in attempts to discredit him. Salafi support for Abul-Fotouh may also have damaged his support among liberal and Coptic voters. In the end, the figures showed that Abul-Fotouh, who had worked hard to present himself as a unifying figure, had come fourth in the race, where his own worst-case scenario had put him only at number three. For his part, Moussa hardly had better fortunes, and though he declined support from leading figures from the now-dissolved former ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), including from the relatives of imprisoned party tycoons, he came in at only number five in the list of candidates. Moussa's adversary would have been the interest groups that invested large amounts of cash, estimated by several sources to be well over LE100 million, to defeat his candidacy and to push their own candidate forward. Moussa, whose popularity had in any case been declining, was alleged to be the favoured candidate of Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), though in fact the SCAF was more likely to be giving the nod to leading families and tribes across the nation, as well as Egypt's Copts, to support Shafik, whose approval ratings increased dramatically on the eve of the elections. Leading families in Lower and Upper Egypt may have been encouraged to vote for Shafik instead of Moussa. "The situation was clear: people who were supposedly working for the Moussa campaign were openly saying that they were now deferring to Shafik. As a result, we did the same, as we always want to support the state and the government," a representative of one leading Upper Egyptian family said. His family's vote for Moussa would have been based on the former presidential candidate's reputation, experience and wisdom, he said. "But as we did not know whether he in fact had the backing of the state, this changed the situation." As a result, while the Muslim Brotherhood took care of undermining Abul-Fotouh to the point that he only got around 4.5 million votes out of the eight million he had expected, the state machinery and various interest groups did their best to dilute Moussa's expected nine million votes into a meagre 2.5 million. Supporters of Moussa and Abul-Fotouh say that the damage done to their candidates was premeditated and that it was unstoppable given the powers behind it. However, they also acknowledge that their candidates made mistakes, quite similar mistakes, surprisingly. The two candidates' performances in the first ever presidential debate aired three weeks ahead of the elections was catastrophic, according to accounts from both sides. Moussa came across as easily irritated, while Abul-Fotouh seemed a rather limited man. Both candidates got too engrossed in attacking one another, instead of offering a coherent vision for the future. Abul-Fotouh endlessly referred to Moussa's service as foreign minister during the Mubarak governments of the 1990s, while Moussa endlessly referred to Abul-Fotouh's past association with the Islamist movement, including its militant wings. As a result, both candidates looked worse after the debate than they had before it, and it was jokingly said at the time that the real winner of the debate had been Hamdeen Sabahi, the Nasserist candidate. Sabahi himself made a surprising breakthrough in the elections, to the point that he was placed number three, after Mursi and Shafik and ahead of Abul-Fotouh and Moussa. According to his supporters, Sabahi's rise was inevitable, given the unimpressive performances of Moussa and Abul-Fotouh. It was also the result of fears of the growing levels of support going to Mursi and Shafik, due to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and that of the state machinery and interest groups. Independent sources say that Sabahi's support also came from adversaries of Moussa and Abul-Fottouh, who knew that he would not make it through to the run-off elections, but thought that he could erode the share of the vote given to Moussa, especially from anti-Islamist voters, and Abul-Fotouh, especially from the revolutionaries. Following the official announcement of the results of the first round of the elections, both Moussa and Abul-Fotouh held press conferences to address their supporters. Both cast doubts over the handling of their campaigns, and both promised to keep working for the causes they had associated themselves with. They also refused to offer their support for either of the candidates now standing in the run-offs.
