UNFORTUNATELY, EGYPT WILL VERY LIKELY ELECT AN ISLAMIST PRESIDENT

Barry Rubin talks about the coming election for a president in Egypt, and the likelihood that a Muslim will ascend what's really just a throne for autocracy:

Has the Brotherhood’s success in parliamentary elections gone to its head? Has the weak international response to its ascendancy emboldened the Islamists to seek total power now rather than to go slow and be patient? It’s starting to look that way.

The Muslim Brotherhood has announced once again that it will not run a candidate for president in the elections projected for June: “The Muslim Brotherhood will not support Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh or any candidate,” says Muhammad al-Badi, the leader of the Brotherhood.

But this is misdirection. The Brotherhood’s influential spiritual advisor Yusuf al-Qaradawi is supporting Abul-Fotouh. And guess what? The Brotherhood is going to support Abul-Fotouh “unofficially.” How? Simple: through the “independent” Justice and Development Party supporting an “independent” presidential candidate. Brotherhood leader Muhammad al-Badi now says that the president must have an “Islamic background,” and by that he rules out any “secular” candidate.

Egyptian voters who backed the Brotherhood — giving it 235 seats, 47 percent of those in parliament — will vote for someone. The Brotherhood doesn’t own their votes, but presumably most of these voters will support an unofficial Brotherhood candidate.

The Salafists, with 121 seats — almost 25 percent of parliament — will probably have their own candidate.

While this seemed impossible last year, it is now conceivable: the two leading presidential candidates will be Islamists, and thus Egypt will have an Islamist president.

In other words, it's a lose-lose situation no matter how you cut it. The electorate, already brainwashed enough in Egypt and Muslim by default, if capable of giving the majority of their vote to the Islamists as a parliament, are equally capable of giving more than 2 thirds of the vote to an Islamofascist. Sad but logical.