This is no doubt the first election in Egyptian history where no one knows what will be the outcome.

As banners go up around Cairo, and candidates travel the country to remote rural villages, pollsters say around 40 per cent of voters are still undecided. And most observers here agree that the polls cannot be relied on, especially because it is so hard to collect reliable data outside of the cities.

The Islamists are trying to exude self confidence: at an outdoor evening rally in Cairo for Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former Muslim Brother who presents himself as the "big tent" candidate, actors, Marxists, sports stars, ultraconservative Islamic salafis, and families crowded a fairgrounds near the Cairo opera. The same day, the Muslim Brothers tried to show their organizational muscle by staging a 470 mile human chain across the country.

Only a couple of days ago, most people I talked with believed the Islamists would win. At a dinner tonight, at an open air restaurant on the Nile, the verdict was that a secular candidate of the old regime had the best chance, because Egyptians were getting nervous about the lack of security and their tanking economy. At a meeting of 2000 women I attended Saturday morning, who were gathered to hear representatives of all the presidential candidates (all men), there was no clear pick among the several ladies I spoke with. Women leaders insisted they would not be pushed back by Islamists, and gave secular speakers a hard time as well when they felt they were being patronized.

Whatever the results this week, this will be an entirely new adventure for a people that has been given orders from leaders on high.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the new Egyptian politics is the rise of the ultraconservative salafists,  who want to restore Islam to the purity they believe existed in the first three generations of Islam.

To Egyptians’ great surprise, the Salafist Nour party won 25 per cent of the seats in parliamentary elections.  Previously opposed to taking part in elections, the salafists figured out that in the new Egypt, the ballot was the way to power, and plunged right in. Their vote tallies benefited from a large social network linked to salafi preachers and  mosques, and also from voter perceptions that salafists would be more honest than the normal corrupt pols because they were pious.

Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, whose party won 46 per cent of the vote, the salafists are very open, easy to access, and eager to meet liberals and moderates, and Westerners, too, perhaps in hope of converting them to the right path.  For now, at least, they seem ready to form alliances in parliament, where they have behaved quite pragmatically  so far (a far cry from the fire-breathing rhetoric spewed by radical salafi preachers on satellite TV channels funded by Qataris and Saudis, or the violent salafis who convulsed Egypt in the 1990s).   

I visited one Nour party member,  Ashraf Sabet,  now the deputy speaker of parliament, who discussed everything from why salafis think any interest on a loan above 1 per cent is usury,  to when and how young girls should be circumcised. He seemed convinced that this odious but widespread practice was a health issue, not a longstanding cultural practice banned by law. He was constantly looking at his I-pad, and was leaving soon for the Arab Emirates in an attempt to persuade some big investors not to pull their money out of Egypt.   

How this large parliamentary bloc will behave once it becomes clear that its puritanical religious precepts are not accepted by most Egyptians remains to be seen.

One of my most interesting experiences on this trip has been to talk to a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader who quit the organization in protest – in the midst of the Tahrir Square upheaval.  We spoke in his living room in a suburban Cairo apartment complex.

Mohammed Habib, a grandfatherly, white-bearded geology professor was, from 2004-09 the first deputy to the secretive  organization’s Supreme Guide;  like many Brothers he spent over six years in prison while the organization was banned under the Mubarak regime.

During past decades the Brotherhood often existed  as an underground movement,  passing from a violent phase to a strategy of peaceful pursuit of an Islamic state.  Yet, in a strange paradox, the Brotherhood had constant contacts, and intense relationships, with the Egyptian military and intelligence agencies, who sometimes saw it as a useful counterweight to other political movements.

Given the many years and intense loyalty required to become a member and to rise in the hierarchy, the resignation of such a senior figure was highly unusal.  But Habib quit because of his sharp disagreement over secret meetings between senior Brotherhood leaders and Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, during the Tahrir Square protests, after which the Brotherhood’s leaders asked their youthful members to leave the square. The young people refused.

Says Habib: “The SCAF (the Egyptian military armed forces council) managed to con the entire Islamic bloc, but the only force they could not con was the young people.  It was obvious there was a split between the Muslim Brotherhood organization and the rest of the revolution.”  

That drove Habib to resign. In our meeting he spoke at length of the characteristics of the Brotherhood leadership,  insights that are especially important at a time when they have a candidate contesting the presidential election.  I will post more of the interview soon. 

Women have been big losers so far in the Egyptian revolution. Thousands of brave woman – from educated professionals to veiled housewives - turned out in Tahrir Square. But only a handful were included amongst the council revolutionary youth leaders. To add insult to injury, male leaders of new political parties, including liberals, placed women so low on party lists in parliamentary elections that they won only 2 per cent of the seats.

“Women are now being marginalized not just by the SCAF ( the transitional military council ruling Egypt) or by the Muslim Brotherhood, but by the patriarchal mindset of our society,” says Dalia Ziada, a dynamic young social activist and executive director of the Ibn Khaldun Center, which promotes dialogue and democracy.

“Men don’t believe women are an essential part of democracy,” she says. “But there will be no Arab Spring without women.”  When she ran for parliament on the ticket of a liberal party called Al Adl, or Justice, its leaders insisted a woman could not head the list in her district. “It doesn’t make sense,” she says, “to marginalize 50 per cent of the population and claim to have a democracy.”  Too true.

Ziada has long campaigned against circumcision of young girls – a practice still widespread among all classes in Egypt.  The practice is African, not Arab or Islamic in origin, she says, but its cultural hold is so strong that her mother had it done to her, even though her father opposed it.

Ziada  is angered that members of new Islamist parties, which together hold a majority in parliament, have defended FMG (female genital mutilation).  Islamist parlimentarians have also discussed rescinding a law that makes it easier for a woman to get a divorce.  She worries about what will happen to women if an Islamist candidate wins upcoming presidential elections.

But Ziada believes that, since the revolution, Egyptian womens’ rights groups are getting stronger, propelled by their outrage at being pushed out of the democracy arena.   She hopes Western governments  will offer training courses for Egyptian women that will help them learn to campaign more effectively.  She is fighting on.  

Egypt is conducting the most historic election the Arab world has seen, much more important than the purple thumb ballot that got so much attention in 2005 in Iraq.

The presidential race pits a Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi,  against two secular candidates, Ahmed Shafiq and Amr Moussa, who had links to the old regime and one moderate Islamist, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who has broken with the Brotherhood because he felt they were too rigid and insufficiently pluralist.

In my first day here, talking with human rights activists and liberal journalists like Hani Shukrallah, managing editor of Al Ahram Online, I heard a deep despair that Egypt may be sliding towards a conservative Islamist future in which the Muslim Brotherhood controls the presidency, the parliament, and through them the education system and interior ministry – home of the dreaded police.  In the background, is the Egyptian military, which has been the paramount power in the past, but whose legitimacy is diminishing.

“The new Egypt is scary, grim, grim. For the time being the revolution has been betrayed,” Shukrallah told me, in his book lined office, as his staff tapped busily away on their laptops in cubicles nearby.  Many liberals are supporting  Aboul Fotouh because he has tried to bridge the secular-Islamist divide.  But the Brotherhood, with its vast organization network, honed during decades of social work for the poor, is in better position to deliver the votes, especially in the vast stretches of rural Egypt, where people care most about their daily bread.

The campaign is being waged with huge rallies, TV ads and endless talk show discussions – campaign headquarters are invisible, mostly operating out of apartment buildings, and costly billboards are clustered around major bridges and intersections.

But make no mistake.  This is an election whose results could shake the Middle East. 

Outgoing Russian President Dimitri Medvedev caused something of a stir Monday when he ordered a review of the case of Russia’s most famous political prisoner, former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But every knowledgeable Russian with whom I’ve spoken dismisses the move as a PR gesture as Medvedev prepares to step aside for Vladimir Putin to take up his third term as president.

Medvedev might want to free Khodorkovsky, but Putin has all the power.
       
Khodorkovsky angered Putin several years ago by entering opposition politics despite warnings not to.  As a warning to others who might have similar ideas, Khodorkovsky was charged with tax fraud and embezzlement – in blatantly political trials – and convicted in 2005 and 2010 ; he still faces years more in prison and his giant oil company was effectively nationalized by the state.

Facing  opposition at home,  Putin is less likely than ever to free Khodorkovsky, whose  release has become a key demand of Russia’s new protest movment.   But the case has also become a symbol of whether Putin is ready to reform a corrupted political and economic system under pressure from a new opposition movement.  

“I’m absolutely certain that so long as Putin is in power, Khodorkovsky will stay in prison,”  says Natalya Gevorkyan,  noted Russian journalist and author of the new book about the trials of Khodorkovsky - Prisonnier of Poutine. (Published in French and soon in German, it will hopefully be translated into English; not clear if any Russian publisher will dare touch it.) 

Putin clearly has a powerful and personal grudge against Khodorkovsky. Indeed, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, told me that, when he and a small group of opposition leaders met recently with Medvedev, and he inquired about the chances for Khodorkovsky’s release, Medvedev told him frankly: “That is not my case.”  Adds Gevorkyan, “This is Putin’s case.”  And there’s no sign Putin is willing let his nemesis out of jail.

It didn’t take long after Vladimir Putin’s controversial reelection to the presidency on Sunday for him to turn on the middle class opposition that has sprung up over the past five months.

Clearly last fall’s massive protests against election fraud in parliamentary elections infuriated Putin. So did the fact that – although he won a majority of votes in Russia (the numbers apparently much padded by vote fraud) - he didn’t win a majority in Moscow.

So, on Monday evening here, Putin was eager to remind these upstarts who was in charge.

At the first post-election opposition rally on Monday in Pushkin Square, a fifteen minute walk from the Kremlin, the area was walled off by a solid phalanx of special forces, clubs in hand. They were backed up by trucks standing ready to transport demonstrators to prison.

But this was no collection of street toughs or radicals (unlike the nationalists who were allowed to parade near the Kremlin with no police interference). In the crowd of 15,000, were professionals, business people, and many, many students, who were born after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and wanted a president who would treat them with respect.

My Russian companions said the atmosphere was far more nervous than at the first, huge, opposition demos in December, and the crowd was much smaller.

Medical student Andrey Biloborodno told me, “People don’t trust that something can really change, after all the election falsification.” His friend Katya Isayeva, added, “We want change but it is very hard.” After Putin’s victory on Sunday, she said, “A lot of people gave up.”

And yet, despite their doubts, a crowd came to the square to demand honest elections.

It is hard to convey how astonishing it is to hear young people shouting “Russia yes, Putin No,” in central Moscow, something unimaginable five months ago.

“Five years ago we were afraid,” 17-year-old medical student Anastasia Muryseva, told me, “but now we feel we have a voice. We are against the system. In the past twelve years Putin showed us he’s unable to be fair or uncorrupted.” “This election was so fake,” her friend Anastasia Krimskaya chimed in. “It was a selection, not an election. Young people will keep on protesting.”

No wonder Putin is nervous.

A generation too young to feel the fear that their parents and grandparents absorbed in the womb, is questioning everything that was never meant to be questioned in Russia.

They know they are still a a minority in the country – where an army of bureaucrats, the poor, and residents beyond the large cities fear losing the economic gains that Putin has bought them (with high oil prices). But they live in the capital city from which Putin must govern, and he knows that a majority here want him to go.

So it wasn’t surprising that, as most of the crowd was leaving the square, the special forces moved against the small number who decided to stay on.

When I reached my hosts’ home, my friend Valentina called one of the rally organizers, who abruptly said, “I cannot talk to you now.”

Minutes later we heard on the independent Moscow radio station Echo of Moscow that this man, and most of the rally organizers, had been arrested.

Among them was Alexey Navalny, whom I wrote about in my last blog post.

They were roughly dragged from the stage, dumped in the waiting vans, and taken to jail.

Putin has charged that these young people are agents of the West, being paid to make a revolution. But in fact they are demanding an end to the official corruption that undermines the economy and society.

“He thinks we are paid, because so many of those who support him [at huge rallies] are paid,” said Krimskaya, “but we are here because we care about the country.”

Putin may have the troops to repress this generation in the short term, but these students have time on their side.

MOSCOW - On election day I interviewed the most interesting figure in the new, exciting, youthful Russian opposition movement, the 35-year-old Alexey Navalny. A lawyer and blogger, he had made a name for himself by unearthing and publishing on line incredible details about massive governmentl corruption schemes.

In a country where official corruption rivals that of Nigeria, and undercuts the economy, efforts to build up small and medium private businesses, and every aspect of daily life, his online work has been little short of astonishing.

But when he was arrested and jailed after leading a protest against rigged parliamentary elections in January, his visibility suddenly skyrocketed. He is the opposition figure the Kremlin fears the most, because his good looks, charisma and anti-corruption fight appeal to disaffected nationalist youths as well as to liberals.

I will be writing more about him, and the interview in a column this week, but he is the figure to watch as the opposition works to keep street protests ongoing, and peaceful, in an effort to open up Russia’s political system. Prior to these demonstrations the Kremlin would no doubt have sought to sideline him, whether by violence or trumped charges that land him in jail. Whether his new visibility will protect him is anyone’s guess.

MOSCOW - The center of Moscow, during today’s presidential elections, looked as if the Kremlin was preparing to fend off an invasion by an enemy army. Hundreds of huge trucks, some white, some black, with bars over the windows, blocked off street after street, surrounded the huge square in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, and barred access to Red Square; they were flanked by legions of special security police.

When I asked one policeman, in furry hat and grey uniform, what they were all doing, he replied, “ We are protecting against any provocation. We have to keep Moscow safe.” It was all in keeping with the effort by victorious candidate Vladimir Putin to portray the middle class youths who have recently mounted peaceful protest rallies, as a dangerous threat to stability – and the state itself.

Indeed, in his victory statement, as he strode in black jacket and jeans onto a stage in front of thousands of supporters in front of the Kremlin walls (bused in they had no trouble penetrating the security ring), Putin struck up the “defeat our enemies” theme. “Nobody can impose their policy on us,” he shouted. “Our people could recognize the provocation from people who want to destroy us.” My mind flashed back to an afternoon spent with young people planning to act as election observers at polling places, and I wondered if he really thought these youths were going to invade the Kremlin.

Then he dropped the punchline, saying, “The orange scenario will never work here.” His reference was to the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, in which street protesters force out a pro-Kremlin leader who had won via a rigged election. Putin is obsessed with the idea that the United States funded the Orange Revolution, and other “color” revolutions in former Soviet states, as well as the Arab Spring in Egypt. Clearly his hostile rhetoric had two targets: the tens of thousands of peaceful youths who protested rigged parliamentary elections – and will protest this skewered election on Monday – AND his favorite bogey-man, the United States.