Recently, there was quite a bit of talk of how "moderate" Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh was uniting both liberals and ultra-conservatives behind him and would provide Egypt with a very sane head of state, with a mandate to lead. This was based on some flawed polling data, which occasionally showed that he was taking 20-30% of the vote in a very crowded field. In the end, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, who was regularly polling in the single digits, ended up in 1st place with about 28% of the vote (based on data so far, the count has not been finalized). The two lessons from this should be:
1. Never draw conclusions from a poll in which the most popular answer is "undecided".
2. Never trust a poll taken in a dictatorial state (which Egypt still is) where people might not want to tell complete strangers what their politics are.
The runoff is likely going to be between Morsi and either Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi or Ahmed Shafik. I think odds are the eventual winner will be the Morsi, giving radical Islamists control of the Presidency, the Parliament and rewriting the constitution, which will be very bad news for the United States and for Israel, which will have to reinforce it's Southern Command even more. The other two candidates do have a chance but I'm not sure if things will end well regardless of whether they win or not. The Brotherhood is likely to be very upset if their candidate doesn't win and has already promised to take it to the streets, especially if Shafik, a Mubarak holdover, wins. Sabahi might mean less blood in the streets but he has been critical of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty since the time of Sadat so I don't think he would be good news regardless.
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