By Rami G. Khouri

When I woke up and read the headlines in the local Cairo papers yesterday, it took me a few minutes to sort out if I was following politics in the Egyptian capital or New Hampshire. That is a remarkable reflection of how quickly political developments have moved in Egypt since the revolution one year ago. Trends in Egypt and the wider Arab world capture both the beauty of political uncertainty anchored in electoral democratic pluralism, and the darker side of how assorted forces (financial, military, foreign lobbies) work in the shadows to shape democratic results.

The big story in Egypt is not about policies – such as peace or war with Israel, economic reforms, the role of women in an increasingly Islamist political sphere, or views of the United States. It is about process – the birth of a system in which political power is contested peacefully and in public, and a multitude of actors comes out of the shadows and compete to shape policies and even national values.

I was asked at a lecture I gave earlier this week whether I was worried about the rise of conservative, politically militant, Islamist groups in Egypt who will have over 60 percent of the elected lower house of Parliament. I replied that I was much more worried by the tone of the political debate and foreign policy prescriptions of the conservative militants who have been contesting power in Iowa and New Hampshire in The American Republican Party contests.

The key parallel in both places is that a range of conservative groups backed by many groups of citizens and quiet supporters are vying for control of a political system. That system in the U.S. is the Republican Party presidential nomination. In Egypt it is the governance system itself, comprising a combination of new and rejuvenated institutions such as Parliament, the presidency, and a 100-member committee to write a new Constitution. In New Hampshire the players in the political arena seek candidacy and incumbency; in Cairo they seek to configure the new structures of state, identity and power.

The American political system reached this point of a stable democracy anchored in the principle of the consent of the governed after nearly two centuries, a civil war, the genocidal decimation of Native Americans, centuries of the crime of slavery followed by long-term institutional racism, and regular bouts of anti-Semitism and discrimination against assorted minorities.

Egypt has been walking down the path to democratic, pluralistic, electoral and parliamentary governance for just nine months. It has reached a critical juncture this month, one year after the Jan. 25, 2011, revolution was launched in central Cairo and other cities across the country. The mass protests that overthrew the regime of President Hosni Mubarak and replaced it with his generals in the transitional Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have now been complemented by several other important indicators of national political sentiment: the three rounds of elections; the candidatures of assorted presidential candidates; intermittent street demonstrations by a wide range of mostly young people; and intense debate and contestation about the shape of the new Constitution.

The striking thing about Egyptian public life today is the wide range of actors and opinions circulating freely and competing intensely for power. The past year of real politics has flushed out groups that had existed in society covertly or passively, but had not organized for public politics – the Salafists, the revolutionary youth, secular liberals.

The political system now is dominated by three right-of-center groups: the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the more hard-line Salafist Islamists. This looks more like Pakistan than Iowa for the moment, but the moment is a fleeting one. Power configurations will stabilize later in the year, as parliamentary coalitions and backroom understandings shape Egyptian politics for years to come.

Other groups operate in society, but have had less impact. They include many youth groups that share similar sentiments but cannot form a single movement, a variety of zealous secular and Islamist revolutionaries, some thuggish street kids, the shadowy counter-revolutionaries who are thought to have funded the latest rounds of street fighting and attacks against government buildings, civil society activists, and a wide range of leftist and secular groups that only secured around 10 percent of parliamentary seats.

The criteria for success in Egypt are whether the system that is being built this year and in the years ahead responds to the key demands that one revolutionary youth organizer spelled out to me. His hope is for “an elected parliament that represents me, a president chosen by the citizens, an independent and fair judiciary that protects my citizen rights, and socio-economic policies that empower me.”
In Arabic these four phrases rhyme nicely. In any language they are music to the ears of any human being who values life in a free, democratic and responsive society.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR.