Still, come what may, there will be a civilian government on the other side. And though it may have a strong Islamic cast, it won't actually be Islamic. As the sole politically organized force in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood is likely to win a plurality of votes in the parliament, though no one has the faintest idea how large that plurality will be. Michele Dunne, who heads the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council, estimates that the Brotherhood will win between 15 and 40 percent of the seats allocated to political parties -- itself an unclear fraction of the whole -- with the rest divided among a wide range of groups and blocs: members of the former ruling party, the largely secular liberals who manned Tahrir Square, Islamic reformers who split off from the Brotherhood, and the Salafists, who follow a rigidly orthodox brand of Islam. The Brotherhood, catering to fears that it could dominate the new government, is not running a candidate for president, though it certainly could furnish the new prime minister. Without a constitution, it's impossible to know what the distribution of powers between those two offices will be.
The most hopeful scenario is that Egypt will have a very rough patch to negotiate but will come out more or less OK on the other side. El Amrani says that he is much more worried about the short term than the long term -- a refrain one often hears. Democratic transitions by their very nature are rocky and demand a great deal of patience from the activists who have sacrificed to make them possible. It will be harder in Egypt than in Tunisia because its politics are more divisive; but in Egypt, as in Tunisia, millions of people have been mobilized in the name of change and will not easily allow their revolution to be stolen.
I hope that's the case. New democracies usually have a grace period of several years to prove that they can deliver the basics of a good life more effectively than the autocracies they replaced. Egypt may need that time, and more. An inexperienced and internally divided government may find itself unable to deal effectively with immense social tensions and economic problems, not to mention an overweening military. Democracies fail all the time: Look at Venezuela or Ukraine. Establishing a democracy isn't hard; preserving it is.
What can Americans do to help? Not very much, it seems. Egypt is in a deeply nationalistic phase. Last month, the country turned down a $3 billion International Monetary Fund loan, apparently in a burst of anti-Americanism. The riot that engulfed the Israeli Embassy in Cairo this month shows how popular fury, long suppressed under Mubarak, has now been unleashed. That anger will only grow if the United States is compelled to veto Palestine's bid for statehood at the U.N. Security Council. Washington was the chief ally of Mubarak, as it is of Israel. Even U.S. military aid to Egypt matters much less than it used to, as Egypt's economy and defense budget have grown. Washington will have to be patient, accepting that though the revolution may be harmful to American interests in the short run -- and certainly harmful to Israel's -- in the end it will produce a more stable and more peaceful Middle East.
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