Egyptian election more fascinating all the time

Presidential campaign posters are everywhere, Egyptians are listening and talking politics, and it’s all quite moving.

I was just told at a luncheon that the results of the absentee ballots were announced today (why do that prior to the general election?), and the person at my lunch table said that Aboul Fotouh and Moussa did finish first and second among the Egyptian voters abroad. But I haven’t been able to find anything online yet to confirm that.

The conventional wisdom has been that Aboul Foutouh and Moussa are the front-runners, and the conventional contrarian counter-wisdom in the past week has been that Mohamed Morsi (Brotherhood) and Ahmed Shawfik (Mubarak’s replacement Prime Minister towards the end of the Revolution) were sneaking up on us under the radar due to powerful campaign organizations. And certainly, the Morsi campaign has been extremely visible around Cairo in the past week with their countless posters and banners.

Morsi is not an acceptable candidate to me for two reasons:

1. He has promised to apply Islamic Law, the only candidate to make that claim.

2. The Muslim Brotherhood already dominates the Parliament, and the last thing Egypt needs right now is another one-Party state after nearly 60 years of it already.

As for the two frontunners, Aboul Fotouh is getting the support of both the Marxist Left and the Islamist Far Right (and more Christian voters than I thought, but still not that many). Moussa seems to be getting the working class “the Revolution was fun, but it’s time to go back to law and order” vote, including among some very religious people.

you can read a positively-spun article on Aboul Fotouh HERE. An acquaintance of whom I think very highly is working as a Moussa advisor.

It’s coming up next week, though there will almost certainly need to be a June runoff election between the top two vote-getters.

A financially knowledgeable person was also telling me at lunch that the Egyptian Pound is safe until the new President’s inauguration, since the Army doesn’t want to lose its luster (or what little is left of that luster) with an unpopular currency devaluation. But the new President, whoever it is, will probably have no choice but to devalue.

At any rate, it will be good to have the Army out of power. Tanks on the street used to be a fascinating curiosity, but are starting to feel more and more oppressive.