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“We’ve been working in this society for 25 years and have done well in parliamentary elections in Minufiyya since 1987.” They agreed that anti-Brother rumors, money, the security services and police, and the strength of the old ruling party had factored into the result. Yusuf added that many army privates are recruited from Minufiyya.

The local councils in this country are nests of the old system, with corruption up to their knees. It’s time to cleanse these sites because this is where the day-to-day interactions with the people happen

more autocratic reconfiguration than political transition

The three separate entities are not coequal in power. As the presumed champions of the old order, the SCAF remains a leviathan with national support despite its deep unpopularity among activist networks. The SCAF miscalculates all the time but never in ways that endanger its tightening grip over the Brothers and the third forces.

the Brothers will likely fall prey to the SCAF’s ultimatums, as they clearly are not up to the task of wresting power from the military

If Mursi moves to favor the street, the generals could mobilize the state and anti-Brother discourse in the media to paralyze his presidency. Should Mursi instead cut a deal with the SCAF, he will enrage the protest movement, parts of which were involved in swinging the election his way. And, given the constitutional declaration, Mursi’s presidency has an asterisk beside it before it even begins. [5]

plenty of dubious activity probably happened away from polling stations. In all nine of Minufiyya’s electoral centers, the Muslim Brothers told the same story, lamenting the amount of money that had filtered into the local towns and villages. Many of the people allegedly distributing cash were local council representatives from the former ruling party. The Shafiq campaign also lodged complaints against the Brothers, but they were less convincing, such as the claim that a Brother had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a shopkeeper. At any rate, along with the high stakes, the aggressive campaign tactics on both sides are one reason why the runoff’s turnout eclipsed that of the first round (46 percent)

comparisons with the mighty Pakistani army are not misplaced. [6]

Since Mubarak’s ouster in Feburary 2011, the SCAF has called the Egyptian people to the polls five times. Three occasions have been particularly momentous: the March 2011 constitutional referendum, the wintertime parliamentary contests and now the presidential runoff. In each of these three instances, the generals have pulled a bait and switch, gutting the voting of meaning after it was over. Ten days after the referendum, which received 77 percent of the vote, the SCAF unilaterally decreed an additional 54 amendments that the public had never seen. Then the parliamentary elections helped to construct an elite arena that excluded the revolutionary forces from negotiations over a pacted transition. [7] The elections thus produced two parallel universes: one of the transition and one of revolution. [8] Key political forces, including the Brothers, kept the country stable while the SCAF reestablished the state’s control over the street. Finally, minutes after the presidential polls closed, the SCAF mooted the last exercise with its second constitutional annex.

what happens when an electoral exercise does not yield a predetermined result or an absurdly large margin of victory for the incumbent? Is it unequivocally about voter choice? Does it cease to be a spectacle? The experience of post-Mubarak Egypt to date suggests that choice and spectacle are not mutually exclusive. The outcomes have not been preordained; in the presidential race, the rulers’ preferred candidate lost. Yet the hubbub surrounding the elections has assisted in ingraining a supra-constitutional force into the political system while promoting an image of Egypt as polarized between two, and only two, views: the fuloul and the Brothers. In the medium term, at least, the SCAF will aim to play these poles off one another in monarchical fashion while simultaneously tamping down the politics of the street. This deleterious outcome -- rather than democratic empowerment -- is likely to be the legacy of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential election.