Once Upon a Revolution (32 page)

A week after those Final Friday clashes outside the Defense Ministry, most of Egypt watched the two perceived front-runners interrogate each other on live television in the nation's first-ever debate: Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the doctor and former Muslim Brother, versus Amr Moussa, Mubarak's former foreign minister and recent head of the Arab League,
the diplomatic forum for the Arab states. In classic Egyptian style, Aboul Fotouh was a half hour late to the studio because of traffic, and the debate itself stretched nearly four hours, long after midnight. In a polity where pointed questions had been extinct in political life, the debate was a revelation. The former diplomat and the former Muslim Brotherhood strategist went after each other high and low. Aboul Fotouh embarrassed his opponent by asking how he had acquired his expensive home and large fortune after a lifetime as a public servant. Moussa cornered Aboul Fotouh over his historical ties to radical Islamist positions that he still had never repudiated. In the cafés, people followed attentively. Audiences seemed to love that the candidates were exposed, but they hated the candidates themselves. The polls that established the two men as front-runners were suspect in the first place, but after the debate, both of them lost support. Once people saw their prospective leaders chafe at critical questions, they seemed to reject them. These consequences were so distressing to the other candidates that they all cancelled the debates they had scheduled for the following week.

After the vote, the first-round results surprised everybody except for the Brothers and the
felool
. Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's uninspiring backup candidate, finished first, and almost even with him was Ahmed Shafik, the bumbling man who had all but spat on Tahrir at its beginning and who, as prime minister, had declared among his achievements that he had killed and been killed. Morsi and Shafik each drew on well-organized constituencies, enough to put them atop a crowded field. People who yearned for stability—including Christians who saw a grim future for themselves under Islamist rule—had gravitated to Shafik's hard secular law-and-order rhetoric.

It was a dispiriting result. The most regressive candidates had come out ahead. No matter how one sliced the numbers, the revolution had screwed up. Aboul Fotouh and Sabbahi, the two overtly revolutionary candidates, had failed to merge their campaigns. Together they could have dominated the race. Apart, they finished third and fourth, a million votes behind Morsi and Shafik. People had voted in droves, and a decisive majority had voted for candidates who explicitly supported a secular state, and against the old order in the person of the
felool
candidates. And
yet, divided among themselves, the reformist, revolutionary public hadn't managed to back one single candidate for the presidency. Therefore, they were left with no one.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the National Democratic Party would go to a runoff. It was a choice between two evils, both soundly rejected by the majority. The Muslim Brotherhood had been Mubarak's insurance policy. He had erased all other opposition so that he could tell his critics: It's either me or the Islamists. Now Egypt faced a choice of Mubarak's devising: his handpicked successor or his handpicked opponent.

Moaz was distraught. A vote for Shafik was impossible: the man embodied everything that January 25, 2011, had opposed. Reluctantly, Moaz would vote for Morsi in the June runoff, but he knew the Muslim Brotherhood cared nothing for the revolution, only for its own power. “In one year, I have lost everything,” he said. “I lost the Muslim Brotherhood. I lost the revolution. I lost our country.” All he had left was his family, with whom he spent less and less time.

For other revolutionaries, especially the secular ones, a vote for Morsi was impossible as well. “We don't want to trade the old fascists for new fascists who claim God is on their side,” Basem said. “Shafik will bring out the old weapons. We can deal with them.” The Islamists, he feared, had more potent tricks in store.

“If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, they will put Islamists everywhere,” Basem said. “They will take to the streets and call us infidels.” Even if the old regime retained power, he believed, it would be vulnerable because it had no legitimacy. The Islamists were different, because they could reimpose authoritarianism while claiming democratic legitimacy; they could tyrannize secular Egypt and say they were doing it in the name of the people.

In parliament's last session before the election, Basem made his first speech. He addressed the Muslim Brothers as hypocritical authoritarians.

“You used to say you wanted consensus,” Basem said. “But in the back rooms and at the negotiating tables, you always talk about the majority. We will never again follow you and fight your battles.” Immediately afterward, he was slammed in the Muslim Brotherhood press.

Shafik was campaigning on people's fear: of instability, of greater poverty,
of Islamism. He had all the style and confidence of the old regime, with the added fuel of the real concerns about the Brotherhood. The Islamists purged their own organizations of any internal dissent and pluralism; how, then, would they be able to tolerate pluralism and dissent in the country as a whole, especially if they found themselves suddenly in the control room with all the levers and buttons at their disposal? Shafik promised to at least keep Egypt secular, if not free.

Two days before the presidential runoff, two momentous rulings came from the Supreme Constitutional Court, which, like the US Supreme Court, was the final arbiter on matters of law in Egypt. The first was a decision on whether Shafik's membership in the old ruling party disqualified his candidacy. The second was whether to shut down parliament because of flaws in the way it was elected.

Long ago, Egypt's judges had earned a reputation for independence and legal dynamism. Mubarak had eroded that critical streak steadily, and by the end of his reign, the courts remained powerful but reactionary. Now the Supreme Constitutional Court was unapologetically connected to the military and the old regime. Its vice chair had made herself one of the most prominent public voices arguing that the military should take a stronger hand and should outlaw all Islamist political parties. Even before the new Muslim Brotherhood–dominated parliament was sworn in, she told a friend of mine, “Don't worry, we've written a legal decision disbanding parliament. It's in a drawer waiting until we need it.”

Apparently the time had come. With the possibility of a Muslim Brother in the president's office, it wouldn't do to have a Muslim Brotherhood majority in the legislature. There was ample historical precedent for the court to send an entire parliament home. It had happened several times before, under Mubarak. Politicians had figured that the court, despite its tremendous power, would leave the status quo intact, allowing Shafik to run but also leaving parliament in place. Instead, late in the day, the court announced that Shafik was fine, but the parliament had to go. As if to emphasize that true power still remained in that ill-defined constellation of security forces, bureaucracy, and anonymous officials
that formed the deep state, the SCAF announced that it would assume legislative powers in the parliament's absence. It was in every sense of the term a judicial coup, and perhaps it was a precursor of worse to come. If Shafik won, the deep state would have an ally in Ittihadiya Palace, and the SCAF now had insurance in case its preferred choice didn't make it. A victorious Morsi would come to an office with castrated powers.

For liberals, the real battle was over the constitution, and the court's decision made it even harder to imagine a new charter that would exile the military from politics forever. Yet some were glad to be rid of the Islamist parliament, even if its demise came by an illiberal judicial mugging. “I'm happy,” Basem said as soon as he heard the news. “You cannot imagine how much we suffered under the aggressive Islamist majority.” I thought he should have been worried about how his desired result came about.

That night, Moaz joined a delegation of revolutionary youth who met with Morsi.

“Drop out of the race,” they told him. “These elections are a sham. Even if you win, the military will not let you govern. They control everything.”

Morsi refused. As the Brotherhood entered this round against the regime, its members felt so sure of victory that they didn't even bother to court the young revolutionaries. They had made it to the brink of power despite never once joining wholeheartedly with the revolution. The Brothers hadn't consulted or communicated with the revolutionaries at any of the vital junctures, and they didn't plan to now.

Moaz felt stymied, facing two enemies at once: the Muslim Brothers and the old police state. “How can we make strategy,” he asked, “when our only weapons are strikes and protests, but they have guns?”

That weekend, Egyptians made their choice between Shafik and Morsi. A devil's choice, but twenty-five million voted. The 52 percent turnout was the highest in any presidential election in the country's history. Egyptians were assuming their new role as citizens with agency. In the delta province that both Morsi and Shafik were from, the party organizations
ran strong. I talked to people whose votes were bought for fifty pounds—about nine dollars—and to people who gave their votes freely. Some had high hopes for their candidate; others voted for the lesser of two evils.

Abdelrahman Ayyash was boycotting. The court decisions had killed his last shards of faith in the transition. He took me along to interview rural voters. Ayyash came from this region of the delta, but among the
galabiya
s and
abaya
s, the baggy pleated pants and the polyester dress shirts and trucker caps, he already looked, in his striped polo shirt, like an envoy from the elite in the capital. In this area, all the Christians had voted for Shafik; all the Islamists for Morsi. Most people explained their votes in thoughtful ways, but there was an alarming undercurrent of unsustainably high expectations; supporters of both candidates expected an economic boom within months of the election. They were sure to be disappointed. At the end of the day, we paid a visit to Ayyash's uncle, who ran a language school in the provincial city of Zagazig.

“We are lost!” his uncle cried theatrically, wiggling his eyebrows. “This is the worst choice. We thought when we removed Mubarak, we had removed the biggest stone.”

“It's all a game,” Ayyash agreed. “The president won't have power over the SCAF.”

The results were not even in, but already the Tahrir chapter was drawing to a close.

As Egypt voted, Zyad had gone on vacation to the beach. He returned to Cairo late on the second day of voting, just in time to despoil his vote in protest. Across his ballot, he wrote: “Shafik is a criminal and Morsi betrayed us. My vote is for the martyrs.” He posted a picture of his vote online.

What made Zyad a useful revolutionary made him a flailing reformer. He mistrusted all leaders, including himself. However, he said he would probably run for parliament again in the next election, unless he was in prison. He wanted in, but he also wanted to be considered an outsider. He would remain on his party's ticket, but as an adamant party skeptic. Whoever was in charge, he'd prefer to be in the opposition. Zyad's reflexive dissidence could go only so far in the effort to design a new order. As he put it himself, “We learned how to destroy the tyranny. Now we have to learn how to construct an alternative.”

Basem had long settled on his preferred method for building that alternative. On the first day of the presidential runoff, he boycotted, not even bothering to go to the polls to cast a null vote. He didn't mind if Shafik won, and he thought that even an Islamist victory, while more complicated to contend with, would have the benefit of precipitating the Brotherhood's downfall. He was confident that Egypt eventually would embrace his brand of Third Way secular socialism.

In the coming months and years, Basem believed, Egyptians already disgusted with the old regime would grow equally disenchanted with Islamists when they saw how they behaved in power. The long race would go not to the swift or the popular but to the diligent and organized. Eventually voters would look for politicians with realistic ideas, and Basem was sure that a plurality would finally support the liberals, including his party. He was ready to go to prison under any regime, he said, and he wasn't worried about the decay of revolutionary ideas and the absence of dialogue between secularists and Islamists. When there was a need, Basem thought, Egyptians could come together as they had in Tahrir. Right now what was needed was something else, something boring but crucial: new identities, new ideas, and institutions to nourish them. “Once the Islamists make a big mistake, it will be easy to gather people in Tahrir Square and make a revolution again,” he said. I wasn't so sure.