Some Disdain Both Options in Egypt’s Narrowed Race
By KAREEM FAHIM and LIAM STACK
CAIRO — Faced with what seemed like an impossible choice — between a conservative Islamist with a rigid social agenda and a former minister with deep ties to the Mubarak government — Ahmed Abdel Fattah, 33, said he planned to sit out the remainder of the voting for Egypt’s president and hope for better choices in four years.
“I am not going to play in this dirty game,” Mr. Abdel Fattah, a subway worker, said Friday, explaining why he could not support either Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, orAhmed Shafik, President Hosni Mubarak’s final prime minister, who will compete in a runoff vote next month. “This is not democracy. These elections are a joke.”
For some voters, the bubbling enthusiasm that ushered in the country’s landmark presidential election has given way to anger and apathy since candidates who generated excitement, with charisma or progressive appeals, were eliminated from the race.
Sensing the disillusionment, and the likelihood that many voters could stay home, Mr. Morsi and Mr. Shafik moved Saturday to widen their support, courting disqualified candidates and portraying themselves as more centrist — sometimes by drastically reversing their previous positions.
At a news conference in Cairo on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Shafik, who had in the past compared Egypt’s youthful revolutionaries to a disrespectful child, now praised the “martyrs” of the uprising and promised to return the fruits of the “glorious revolution” to the youth.
He urged people to vote in the June runoff, and spoke kindly about several of his competitors, including Hamdeen Sabahi, the founder of a Nasserist party whose populist campaign drew millions of voters, giving him a surprising third-place finish in the unofficial vote tallies.
Saying he was willing to collaborate with other Egyptian political forces, Mr. Shafik also sought to quiet fears that he represented the government of his friend Mr. Mubarak, saying, “There is no turning back.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, tried to ease a different strain of voter anxiety: fears that the Islamist group, which holds roughly half the seats in Parliament, will dominate Egyptian politics if Mr. Morsi is elected. Brotherhood officials were trying to meet with several of the disqualified candidates on Saturday to discuss a possible coalition to challenge Mr. Shafik.
But that effort seemed to run aground, as two former candidates, Amr Moussa and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, released statements saying they were not endorsing Mr. Morsi or any candidate, though they did not say whether that would change in the future.
And Mr. Sabahi, whose supporters are coveted by both remaining candidates, seemed to be trying to keep his own campaign alive on Saturday. A lawyer representing him told Reuters that the campaign had appealed to the presidential election commission to halt the runoff for reasons that include allegations of “irregularities” during the first round of voting.
Also on Saturday, former President Jimmy Carter, who led a delegation that monitored the first round of the elections, said there were “many violations” but added that they did not “violate the integrity of the elections as a whole.”
Speaking at a news conference in Cairo, Mr. Carter said restrictions placed on his organization by the Egyptian authorities were the strictest the group had faced in 25 years, and as a result it was not able to certify the process as “proper.”
He added, “The Egyptian people have accepted the process we have seen over the last few days as quite successful.”
Even so, many Egyptians threw up their hands at the results. Some argued that the outcome was inevitable: that an electorate battered by a chaotic transition and under temporary military rule would easily reach for candidates who appealed to fear rather than hope.
“They made the people reach the level where all they can think about is security and food on the table,” Mr. Abdel Fattah said.
Nadia Ibrahim, 34, a housewife, articulated a common concern, that the election was threatening to pull Egypt backward.
“I can’t bring myself to vote” in the runoff, she said. “If the Muslim Brotherhood wins, they will be another N.D.P.,” she added, referring to the National Democratic Party, the former governing party, whose burned-out headquarters on the Nile is a testament to the revolution’s anger.
“If Shafik wins, the N.D.P. will be back,” she said. “This is a decision I can’t bring myself to morally make.”
Hussein Gohar, 45, a gynecologist who is a leading member of the liberal Egyptian Social Democratic Party, argued for a different approach, saying that voters whose candidates lost needed to think strategically about Egypt’s future, and pick their battles.
“I’d rather fight against Shafik,” he said.
“If I fight the Muslim Brotherhood, I’m the minority. If I fight against Shafik, I have more revolutionary forces with me,” he said, arguing that the opposition needed to unite.
For many other people, though, the election worked exactly as it was supposed to.
Mohammed Abdel Moneim, 35, a taxi driver, said that though he was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he and his family had been impressed by its appeals during the campaign.
“They’re organized, they have a project and they’re not thieves,” he said, adding that if the Brotherhood performed poorly, Egyptians would surely make their displeasure felt, perhaps by returning to protest in Tahrir Square.
“We’re no longer afraid,” he said. “If they’re not good, the square is always there.”
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