If anybody thought that the presidential elections, held 18 months after the 25 January Revolution ousted President Hosni Mubarak, was going to deliver the beginning of a democracy, they need to think again -- and again. "Shocking" is the word most used by commentators and activists across the political spectrum to describe the outcome of these elections, whose first round was conducted on 23 and 24 May after long procrastination on the part of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and against the backdrop of the heavy application of old and new undemocratic electoral tricks by the still acting agents of the defunct National Democratic Party (NDP) and its security apparatus. The exclusion of the two candidates that were put at the top of every single opinion poll, Amr Moussa and Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh, who both, each in his way, solicited the support of citizens from across the social spectrum, was not the only shock coming out of this electoral tour. What is most shocking is that the two candidates who made it to the run-off are Mohamed Mursi, the second choice runner of the Muslim Brotherhood who openly said he joined the presidential race as a back-up to the Brotherhood's strongman Khairat El-Shater, and Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister of Mubarak who openly said, "it was unfortunate that the revolution had its way" and whose spokesman's first reaction to the victory of his candidate was "the revolution has ended." Neither Mursi nor Shafik were considered by most opinion polls as potential run-off material despite the obvious rise in the approval ratings of both due to the heavy financial support that was plunged into their campaigns by the Muslim Brotherhood's diverse resources and the hidden wealth of the NDP tycoons. It is thus the old game of the NDP versus the Muslim Brotherhood all over again, except that the Brotherhood is now in the lead. It is all over again, the story of the Mubarak years: a remote semblance of a civil state versus an Islamist scarecrow. It is truly what the Facebook/Twitter community is calling "being caught between a rock and a hard place". Neither Mursi nor Shafik, in the order they came in the first round, can deliver the demands of the people as reflected by the January Revolution. They both lack required credibility and they both bring many fears, each in his way. The feeling that comes with Mursi as president of Egypt is an ambiguous and hard to define fear -- rather phobia -- of an Islamist state whereby the humble rights of women and Copts will inevitably be undermined. The fear of Shafik is more concrete, a much more ferocious version of the police state than what was under the second half of Mubarak's three-decade rule. It is the fear of the victory of illicit money, illicit security and illicit intelligence at the expense of a revolution whose victory was only made possible by the lives and endless sacrifices of young men and women so that all of Egypt, those who took part in the revolution, those who sympathised with it, and those who opposed it, can have a better life whereby violations will not remain the norm. It is unfortunate that the choice has boiled down to Mursi and Shafik. However, boycotting should not be an option simply because it amounts to a vote in favour of the candidate whose success would never have been possible with the support of the state bodies. Neither Mursi nor Shafik offers a good image as the president of Egypt, post the January Revolution. Neither the NDP, which monopolised the political scene for the last decade, nor the Muslim Brotherhood who are now in all but full control of parliament, have a solid reason to solicit support for. However, one has been tried and proven devastating for three decades. The other is more feared than known. It is a tough choice; a worst-case scenario, between the reinstitution of a reviled, albeit more polished version of the Mubarak regime, and the introduction of a suspicious regime that has an Islamist name with maybe no content at all.
