The results of the runoff election between Ahmed Shafiq (unacknowledged but obvious candidate of SCAF, the military junta) and Mohammed Morsi (the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood) are due to be announced officially on Sunday 24 June. Preliminary pre-appeal tallies have indicated that Morsi holds a slight edge over Shafiq, at ~50.75% to ~49.25%. Shafiq, meanwhile, has expressed confidence that when the count is done and the Supreme Presidential Elections Commission (SPEC) has certified the final numbers he will emerge as the winner.
Today we have the first indication that Shafiq may be declared the winner by SPEC, whose decisions (it should be noted) are immune from appeal:
Government sources said today that the Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission (SPEC) is set to announce Ahmed Shafiq winner on Sunday evening. Western diplomats in Cairo also said they received similar expectation from cabinet members during the last three days.
Just a few notes, then, reiterating some observations in Part VII.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), through Shafiq, is playing a long-game to ensure that both their behind-the-scenes political power and their economic fiefdom are unassailable. The political trajectory within Egypt over the past sixteen months or so has transformed from an initial and perhaps illusory struggle between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces to one between two pre-revolutionary forces: the military and the Muslim Brotherhood.
One of the largely ignored stories I've been following is a lawsuit questioning the legality of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the Brotherhood. The lawsuit, calling for the dissolution of the FJP, the dissolution of the Brotherhood and the seizure of Brotherhood assets, was meant to be heard this past Tuesday but has now been postponed until early September.
To this observer, SCAF's recent manipulation of the political system and the looming "threat" of the lawsuit against the Brotherhood's political existence is beginning to read like a slow-motion version of the events of 1954 that culminated in the banning of the Brotherhood. SCAF may no longer be satisfied with simply hamstringing the political power of the FJP, but may be working slowly to excise the Brotherhood from the political system altogether. Such a stratagem would compel the Brotherhood to either abandon their political projects or work outside of electoral politics where, to be sure, SCAF can exert police and military power.
This is all preliminary conjecture, but it is increasingly difficult for me to view these elections as anything other than a skirmish in the half-century old existential struggle between Egypt's military leadership and the Muslim Brotherhood, between competing and irreconcilable visions of a military-security state and a civilian state.