1849

Looks like the tweeters lost the Egyptian presidential election. Strong performance by ancien regime candidate:

Shafiq's strong performance reflected widespread worries about crime and insecurity and a yearning for stability, improvements to the economy and public services.

"Polarisation is the main characteristic of Egyptian society," said a former Liberal MP. "Shafiq did much better than Moussa because all his discourse centred on security whereas Moussa talked about economic development. But the first concern is law and order."

There's your classic counter-revolutionary strategy. the people want freedom. Give them disorder and wait till enough come crawling back. The other consequence of this policy is to push people to the other pole, which in this case means the Ikhwan, whose candidate narrowly won the first round. The result of this mosque versus barracks contest will partly depend on how the Nasserist vote splits, which is actually sort of cool.

Comments

[johnf]

Looks as though they've been tweaking economic insecurity too. Inflation and unemployment were bad enough before the Spring, but have got worse.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18176900

[Igor Belanov]

As I said on Flying Rodent, I don't think they'll even end up with a leader as good as Louis Napoleon. For all the excitement of Mubarak's overthrow, I think we're stuck with a struggle between the army and the mosque.

[ajay]

That is kind of assuming that the military, who have been carefully assuring massive support for their chosen candidate in every election since, what, 1955? have now entirely given up the election-rigging game at the very time when they seem most likely to lose power, and that the unexpectedly high vote for Shafiq - substantially higher both than opinion polls suggested and than his faction received in the parliamentary elections - is entirely above board.

I am sceptical.