Hours after the official results are announced in Egypt’s first-ever competitive presidential election, Ihab Badawi, a 28-year-old lawyer, is standing amid a throng of protesters in Tahrir Square. He holds aloft a cardboard placard bearing the smiling faces of the top two candidates—Mohamed Morsi and Ahmed Shafik—crossed out with a pair thick black Xs. Traffic snarls around the crowd as he echoes chants rising above the cacophony of angry car horns. “We do not accept this outcome,” Badwai says. “We are here to send a clear message to the military council and the rest of the corrupt ruling regime: the Egyptian people will not be silent.” Less than two miles away, a group of protesters breaks into and vandalizes Shafik’s campaign headquarters in the residential district of Dokki before setting it ablaze. Demonstrations erupt in other cities across the country, including Alexandria, Port Said, Ismailia and Suez. In the wake of the first round of Egypt’s landmark presidential election, the country is as polarized as ever, with two candidates sitting on opposite poles of a divide that has characterized Egyptian politics for decades.
Some 23 million Egyptians cast ballots in last week’s poll, a turnout of 46 percent. Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, came in first out of thirteen candidates with 24.3 percent, followed closely by Shafik, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, with 23.3 percent. The two will face each other in a June 16–17 runoff to become the first democratically elected president in Egypt’s history.
Yet neither man is considered a revolutionary candidate; one representing a decades-old conservative Islamist opposition group, the other with strong ties to Mubarak, who was ousted in a popular uprising fifteen months ago. “A substantial number of people who are ‘pro-revolution’ had hoped for an outcome that wouldn’t be this binary choice that Hosni Mubarak had warned of for so long: if it’s not him, it’s the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Issandr El Amrani, a Cairo-based political analyst. “A lot of people were hoping for a wider opening.”
Full Article: Egypt’s Polarizing Presidential Election | The Nation.