Egypt’s Election Commission has just announced Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi winner of the second round of the Egyptian presidential elections.
The results have followed weeks of protests and accusations of corruption not only from the two parties but from the rest of the political groups in the contest.
According to the Electoral Commission the Muslim Brotherhood candidate has received 13.2 million votes (51%) while Ahmed Shafiq, the final prime minister under Hosni Mubarak and the candidate of the army, received 12.3 million.
Where did the secular protests in Tahrir square go? Evan Hill from Al Jazeera points:
Faced with the prospect of being ruled by an all-powerful military fronted by a president with deep ties to the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s secular pro-revolution political forces have struck a tenuous alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in one final push to wrest back the momentum of the transition.
In a press conference on Friday to announce the pact, Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi said the new front of ideologically opposed parties “represents the unity of all political forces and affiliations in Egypt”.
Will Morsi’s victory be a simple change of persons or a change of regime? The future relations between the Egyptian army (the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or SCAF) and the newly elected President are very unclear. As reported by Al Jazeera:
Shortly before the polls closed last week, the generals issued a decree sharply limiting the powers of the new president. It permitted him to declare war, for example, only with the approval of the military council.
SCAF will also keep control of legislative power, and the budget, until a new parliament is elected. Egyptians went to the polls in November to elect a legislature, which was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, but it was dissolved earlier this month after a high court ruling found parts of the electoral law unconstitutional.
(···) But it’s unclear whether the Brotherhood ultimately accepted those decisions in exchange for the presidency.
Either way, the military council – which has promised to hand over power to a civilian government on June 30, in a “grand ceremony” – will remain a powerful force in Egyptian politics, despite the election of a civilian president.
It is also unclear what steps will the new government take towards Israel, or the impact it will have in Palestine, especially in Hamas run Gaza. Egypt has promoted the reunification between Hamas and Fatah, in talks for more than a year on a widely acclaimed and seriously feared unity government in Palestine.
Whatever it happens, what is sure is that millions of people not only in the Middle East but around the world will be following the new steps of the Islamists in the most populated country of the region and the consequences it will have in the international arena.
[من فلسطين] 