Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) candidate for the presidency went into the mid-June run-off against Mubarak's last prime minister with a lot to his advantage, and against his rival.
Mr. Morsi, by looks and conviction, was the more conservative candidate in a country that saw a visible turn to religiosity over the past four decades. He represented the group that suffered most (though not alone) from the excesses of Mubarak's police violations and disregard of rule of law. His group was still able to step in with the needful social services the state failed to furnish. And, having emerged as the contestant against the representative of "old regime," Mr. Morsi was the de facto "revolutionary candidate," and was grudgingly accepted, and endorsed, as such, even among the ranks of many liberal and leftist groups, such as April 6 Movement.
So a landslide victory for the MB was all but assured.
It didn't happen. Indeed Mr. Morsi has won out, but only with a slim margin, 51.7% to his rival's 48.3%. What to read into such an outcome, in terms of how it came about as well as what it tells us about political trends in Egypt?
To begin with, a win is a win, and Mr. Morsi's is (almost) as good as any. But the slim-margin victory, despite the loose (but active) coalition that stood behind Mr. Morsi, shows a common-sense feature about the MB (and any political grouping, for that matter) that seems to escape many among their detractors: there are limits to the mobilization powers of the Brotherhood.
A more precise reflection of those limits was the number of votes Mr. Morsi garnered in the first round, which stood at about 5.5 million votes, or 12% of those eligible to cast their votes (but about 25% of those who did cast their votes). In that round, Mr. Morsi ran against twelve candidates, two of whom with varied visions of political Islam. It's thus probably fair to conclude that Mr. Morsi has then exhausted all the circles of Brotherhood influence, from the innermost nucleus of hard-core doctrinaires to the outermost circles of uncommitted sympathizers.
Then came the run-off round. Obviously the MB mobilization machine was in full-throttle. Endorsements came from unlikely quarters too -- either directly, or implicitly, as in rejecting Mr. Morsi's opponent but stopping short of endorsing him outright. The result was over 13 million ballots for Mr. Morsi, placing him ahead of his rival by less than a million votes.
There is bad news in this, as well as good news. Let's begin with the latter: apparently fallacious is the widely held perception that the MB has, not only fed or treated, but also indoctrinated the masses of Egyptians who fell outside the realm of interest of the state.
Instead, what appears to have happened is that the crowds have, rationally, assessed the performance of the MB (as well as their ideological cousins, the more-conservative/puritanical Salafis) in the Parliament and then determined to vote for others. That is reflected in the plummet from around 40% for the MB in the parliamentary elections in late 2011 and early 2012 to 12% in the first round in the presidential contest in late May 2012.
Granted, the dynamics of parliamentary elections are different from the (national) presidential ones. But it's still likely that the fortunes of the MB have dwindled in the interim.
The good news in this is that the common-folk Egyptians are practicing politics. They make choices, review the outcomes of those choices, and are then prepared to change course if outcomes are not what they intended or hoped for. That should be good news, even for the MB who are now confronting ideological outbidding from the Salafis.
The bad news is that the propaganda machine of the "old regime," seems to have swayed many to vote for Mr. Shafiq. The problem is not that some media outlets, through high-quality, fact-based journalism managed to influence people's presidential preferences. Rather, many commentators and post-uprising TV channels have peddled egregious lies about the MB and their candidate. Most outrageous among those is the one that the Brotherhood have killed, not defended, the protesters in the "battle of the camel" in Tahrir Square in early February 2011, at the height of the uprising.
No country is immune to foolish TV or widely viewed/followed nuts (Glenn Beck comes to mind). The problem in Egypt is that mind-boggling lies seem able to penetrate easily into the mainstream consciousness.
That should serve as a reminder to the new president that democracy functions better as people become more rational, more able to tell truth from falsehoods. If/when that happens, it will serve him well too.
