Crossposted from European Tribune.

If Saudi Arabia is the economic and religious center of the Middle East, Egypt is the cultural, intellectual, and in many ways, political one. It is also the closest US ally among Arab states and next to Israel, the prime recipient of US aid. Thus, when President Hosni Mubarak (77) announced yesterday that he would scrap the emergency laws that have curbed opposition for nearly 25 years if elected to a fifth six-year term in power, it was hardly unrelated to US pressure. The same goes for September’s presidential election - the first to feature more than one candidate.

There is just one little catch, however.

AP:

It certainly is, especially since Mubarak’s ironically named National Democratic Party controls some 90 percent of the seats in either house. This and other restrictions on the nomination of candidates have made most other parties refuse to field any.

Who is this tenacious nimrod? With a tenure to match the ancient pharaos, Hosni Mubarak is Egypt’s longest-serving leader since the late 19th century. Like all Egyptian heads of state after the army toppled the monarchy in 1952, he is also a military man. As air force commander in the 1973 war he was lionized for seeing through an Israeli trap involving an apparent radar gap; the Soviets, insisting on sending their own pilots on a bombing mission through the ‘hole,’ promptly lost all five. Rising to Vice President in 1974, Mubarak narrowly dogded the bullets undoing President Anwar Al Sadat in the 1981 hit by radical Islamists, whereupon he became President. Despite - or perhaps rather, due to - having survived a possible world record of at least six more assassination attempts, Mubarak has ignored the constitutional clause obliging him to pick a Vice President. After nearly a quarter century he claims to not yet having found the right guy for the job.

He has also run unopposed in four referendums, always with support rates above 90 percent. While none would dream of calling these polls free and fair, Mubarak is relatively popular with religious moderates for his pragmatism and championship of salaam - peace. And in a fine diplomatic balancing act he has been able to remain a US client to the tune of an annual $2,1 billion whilst overcoming the isolation of Egypt in the Arab world after its separate peace with Israel in 1979. Though economically liberal in a fashion, he has however been unable to effectively slash the bloated bureaucracy and huge unemployment. As things now stand, shrinking one would be likely to just further boost the other.

He is assuredly no liberal when it comes to political dissent. And here we are not only talking about the radical Islamists whose continuing insurgency has made Middle Egypt a no-go zone for tourists, or the various detainees his security services interrogate for the USA. He has also had human rights activists and democracy advocates jailed indefinetely.

One man allegedly harrassed by his regime is the reformer Ayman Nour, leader of the Tomorrow party (Al-Ghad), who earlier this year spent months in jail on charges of having falsified signatures for his party documents. Nour, a lawyer with a rather checkered past rife with accusations of fraud, is Washington’s darling and the only oppositional with sufficient name recognition to give Mubarak a run for his money in a free and fair election. His Tomorrow party calls for sweeping constitutional reform in favor of a parliamentary system of government. It also stresses secularism and the empowerment of women, who constitute 37 per cent of the founders, and even has a woman as secretary-general. Though sometimes billed as a center-right party, Tomorrow’s professed main concern is combating poverty, of which there is plenty in a country whose Arabic name, by a fitting coincidence, sounds a lot like ‘misery.’

But there are also other sharks plying the waters. The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon), which took part in the 1981 assassination of Sadat and of which al-Qaeda, Hamas and other radical organizations are offshoots, is the dark horse - and principal bugbear - of Egyptian politics. Though banned from official activity, it dominates Egypt’s civil society, including the professional associations, and has a powerful grassroot organization.

The Brotherhood declares that the ultimate haram (forbidden thing) is the non-application of the shari’a. Its symbol is a qur’an and crossed swords representing jihad against the kafir (infidel) armies; a hardline minority also support violence against civilians. All this according to their FAQ.

For now, the Muslim Brotherhood is not thought to be strong enough to field a successful presidential candidate even if allowed to; but that could change. If enabled to run in free elections, the Brotherhood would do well, and the parliamentary system championed by Tomorrow might give them quite some sway. Even Nour shies away from criticizing them, citing their popular appeal with approval.

Thus the Egyptian dilemma is the same as in the Arab world at large. The preference order, as seen from a Western-oriented viewpoint, is this:

Liberal democracy > Quasi-secular dictatorship > Islamist theocracy.

Sadly, however, attempts to move from the status quo - quasi-secular dictorship - to the ideal scenario risk ending up at the nadir of Islamist theocracy instead. And to be sure, an even more dismal outcome is thinkable. Many Iraqis can attest to the truth of the old Arab saying, attributed to Ibn Khaldoun, that one day of anarchy is worse than a thousand years of tyranny.