The Tahrir Divide

Everybody in Cairo loves the revolution. But not necessarily the revolutionaries.

It’s Monday morning, just after 8 a.m. and Khaled Fawzy stands in line to cast his vote for the Egyptian parliamentary elections. He has a copy of The Economist in hand. That is a good thing. He is likely to be here a while.

Fawzy is a 32-year-old businessman and a Cairo-born-and-raised graduate of Louisiana State University. His polling station is inside a local middle school. Fawzy arrived nice and early. But so did a lot of other men.

Voting in the new Egypt is taking place in separate polling sites for men and women.

All in all things are going really well during Egypt’s very first election since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in early February. Fawzy is delighted. And he is far from alone. He tells me there is no comparison between the current scene here in Ma’adi and the poor excuse for elections that used to take place under Mubarak. Those affairs were poorly-attended, violent and pre-ordained.

“What’s happening right now,” Fawzy said. “This should really sideline the people in Tahrir.”

Fawzy sees the big turnout at the polls this week as a direct repudiation of the recent demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and several other places in Egypt. Protestors were calling for Egypt’s military rulers to step down. They would be the 20 generals who make up the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, also known by its rather ominous sounding acronym of SCAF.

But Fawzy believes the generals are doing their best to hand over political power to a civilian government as quickly as possible. He says he supports SCAF. And he even turned out for a recent pro-SCAF demonstration in Cairo.

I actually met Fawzi the day before elections got started, in his office near downtown Cairo. He works for a shipping and logistics company. He seems quite well-off, which makes him different than the typical Egyptian voter.

Something like 40 percent of the country of about 85 million people lives on less than $2 a day. Egypt is poor. It is aid-dependent. Its economy is also in a shambles. But all those of those factors have led Fawzi to believe that the time for demonstrations is over.

He says he is happy that Mubarak is out of power. He participated in the early phase of the uprising that toppled the dictator. Fawzy went to Tahrir Square and stayed there for days. But at this point, he says things have gone too far.

“The people [in the streets] don’t know what they want, they don’t know how to get it and they won’t give the benefit of the doubt to SCAF,” Fawzi says. Tahrir Square was still occupied by demonstrators as parliamentary elections proceeded. It is hard to see an end game for the occupation that does not involve the use of violent force. But Fawzy thinks that might be for the best. The military should stop this cycle of appeasing the revolutionaries, he says. “It’s time to bring about some stability.”

I have heard similar sentiments from Egyptians in the last two weeks. Hotel workers say the demonstrators should go home. Taxi drivers say enough is enough. A well-known publisher told me SCAF has made one mistake after another, but Egypt has no other option. Except for chaos.

I got a very different view when I visited the giant new desert campus of the American University in Cairo last week. More than a hundred students cued up at the university clinic to donate blood for the victims of the violence in Tahrir Square. One woman told me that SCAF is primarily to blame for Egypt’s suffering economy, the human rights violations, the lack of civil rights and failure to bring real reforms this year.

The revolutionaries in Tahrir Square, several people have said to me in recent days, represent the best hope for Egypt’s future.

Many Egyptians worried that the stark divide between the Tahrir crowd and the rest of the country would erupt in violence during elections. That did not happen. But the divide is still there and it will have an impact on the country’s political future.