When a few youthful organizers of the Tahrir Square revolution brought their democracy road show to this graceful Suez Canal port one recent evening, an animated throng rushed the tented stage as the speeches ended.
Some merely wanted to touch the Tahrir icons or take snapshots with them. But many shouted questions in a cacophony that drowned out the chill wind rattling the palm fronds on Port Said’s main square:
¶“Are you worried about Egypt’s future?”
¶“Why are the ruling generals so slow in implementing the people’s demands?”
¶“Are you running for president?”
¶“What about reforming the education system?
¶“What about a political party?”
The organizers could not possibly answer them all, but one of them, Amr Hamzawy, a 43-year-old political science professor, responded to the question about a political party. “We are still searching for a good name for a party and an idea that attracts people’s attention,” he said.
A nucleus of about 15 men and women who helped guide the popular movement that toppled President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11 now must complete the unfinished work of the uprising: to dismantle the entire authoritarian system. To do so, they are trying to build a national political organization in minimal time, not least to prevent more established political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood from filling the political vacuum they helped to create.
Scenes like the one here unfold almost nightly up and down Egypt. “They did well on Facebook, but now they have to take it onto the streets,” said Michael Meunier, a political organizer and consultant.
The Tahrir activists inspired millions to pour into the streets in protest, of course. But they are finding that translating a protest movement into votes and a permanent voice in national affairs is a far more grinding task.
They have no headquarters — a few camp out in a backpacker hostel in what was once a glamorous apartment house in downtown Cairo that has seen its best days. They meet endlessly in smoke-filled rooms, and sweat to find an original name (on Friday, a coalition of groups settled on the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, which won out over the Square, a reference to Tahrir). They have little money, although offers are coming in. Perhaps most difficult of all, they have to figure out how to present a largely leftist, secular ideology in language that will appeal to a conservative, religious society.
“If you want to change the political life, you have to transform it from one about individuals to one about institutions,” Nasser Abdel Hamid, 28, told a rapt audience of about 40 well-to-do men and women in a Cairo hair products salon converted to a political salon for the evening. Instead of the top-down model prevalent in the Arab world, he said, “this is the only chance to have a party that grows from the bottom up.”
The young activists demur when asked if they represent the Egyptian people or even the young; rather, they want to carry the revolution forward. They face their first electoral test on Saturday, when the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has scheduled a national referendum on eight constitutional amendments to lay the groundwork for legislative elections in June and a presidential vote in August. At nightly rallies the activists try to muster the “no” vote, to create public pressure to delay the process by at least six months to give the democratic forces more time to organize.
Barring that, they are preparing a national list of candidates for the parliamentary vote, though they do not expect to be able to pull their disparate supporters into an organized party by then.
The young liberals have split into two groups, divided mostly by economic issues. The more left-wing have come up with a few planks focused on social justice issues, like pushing for a minimum wage of $200 a month, said Sally Moore, 32, a half-Irish, half-Egyptian Copt psychiatrist. (It is currently about $35 and widely ignored.) They struggle to define a party that can appeal broadly to all Egyptians, including minority groups like the Copts, the Nubians and the Sinai Bedouins.
Take the idea of being a secular party. In recent years, the jihadists have successfully distorted the word “ilmani,” a direct translation of “secular,” into a synonym for “kufr” or infidel. “The word secular does not go over so well,” Ms. Moore sighed. Instead, they tell audiences that their goal is a modern, civil, democratic country.
This tension dates back over 100 years, to the birth of Egypt’s independence movement.
Tarek Heggy, a businessman also organizing a party, loves to talk about the experience of Ahmed Lutfi Sayyid, among Egypt’s pioneer advocates of Western-style democracy. During the 1923 campaign for Parliament, his opponents started a whispering campaign that “democracy” was a Western term for wife-swapping. So at a major rural rally, the audience stormed out after a farmer asked Mr. Lutfi Sayyid whether he was a democrat and he proudly declared, “Yes!”
That such ignorance persists prompted the April 6 Movement, one of about 10 groups in the Revolution Youth Coalition, to try to become a political watchdog organization rather than a party. The group plans to assess government performance and press for democracy.
“We must launch political education campaigns to pave the way for a sound political life here,” Ahmed Maher, one of the movement’s founders, told a recent rally in Ismailia, another Suez Canal city. He said that people in another governorate asked him how to persuade Cairo to replace its Mubarak-appointed governor. “My question to them was: Why don’t you go to his office and kick him out?”
The Muslim Brotherhood, operating sub rosa since it was banned in 1954, seems the most prepared for the elections that are expected over the next 18 months. Its members radiate barely suppressed glee that their moment has come, even though they have promised not to contest the presidency and to seek only 35 percent of the parliamentary seats.
Egypt still lacks a political party law, but the Brotherhood threw itself a huge coming-out party last weekend in Cairo anyway. Spotlights raked the sky and swooshed across a huge banner hung on the front of a conference hall that read “Muslim Brotherhood Celebration” in Arabic and English. Formerly such a sign would have been a recipe for instant arrest.
Given widely voiced trepidation that its members are ayatollahs in sheep’s clothing, the Brotherhood remains on message about national unity.
“The Muslim Brotherhood welcomes all social and political segments: Muslims, Christians and all political powers,” said Khairat al-Shatir, the keynote speaker, who recently emerged from jail. “We welcome all those who were oppressed under Mubarak. We must join hands to solve the problems of this country.”
With some six religious parties in the making, however, even the Brotherhood faces competition for its base. The others range from a party built around Amr Khaled, a populist Muslim preacher, a sort of Egyptian Pat Robertson, to Gamaa al-Islamiya, a militant group previously dedicated to Mr. Mubarak’s violent demise.
Outside the religious faction, it is a jumble. “Every five people are forming a party,” said Mr. Meunier, the political consultant. Former members of Mr. Mubarak’s rejected National Democratic Party are said to be working the words “youth” and “Jan. 25” (the date of the first demonstration in Tahrir Square that culminated less than three weeks later in Mr. Mubarak’s fall) into their new party names.
Egyptians bubble with curiosity about politics, even if the absence of political party laws and experience means the political sphere exists in a kind of twilight.
“I cannot believe myself that we are standing on the banks of the Nile in Cairo, meeting an Egyptian citizen who decided to run for president!” roared Mohamed el-Sawy, the impresario behind a popular cultural center where Amr Moussa, the long-time secretary general of the Arab League, held the first town hall-style meeting of his nascent presidential campaign.
The crowd roared back, and Mr. Sawy was soon begging for calm, suggesting that perhaps 100 people should not try to grab the microphone at once to ask questions. The area in front of the stage became a giant mosh pit, with young Egyptians hurling accusatory questions at Mr. Moussa about his entire career.
Many find the process bewildering.
“All of a sudden, you are expected to have a democratic opinion when you never practiced democracy — in fact before, you were expected not to,” said Zeinab Farouq, 33, who attended the Moussa event.
In Port Said and elsewhere, audience members kept repeating that they came to see the Tahrir Square veterans because, having succeeded in toppling Mr. Mubarak, they expected the young activists to rescue them from the political wilderness.
“We trust their opinion,” said Mohamed el-Sayed, 31, a middle school English teacher. “These people are the leaders, the teachers who will lead us to a new democratic life in Egypt.”