Egypt's Presidential Race: Embrace Uncertainty

Essam Al-Amin has the most comprehensive analysis of what he calls “The Calculus of Egypt’s Presidential Race”. The fist part of the analysis deals with the past (skip it) while the last section deals with the five potential scenarios for the presidential race (worth reading). Below I share the three most likely scenarios from Al-Amin's article:

Scenario 1: The top two finishers belong to the Islamist camp. In this scenario the two final contenders would be the independent Abol Fotouh and the MB candidate Mursi. In such a two-man race, the majority of Egyptians would likely vote for the independent candidate over the MB contender out of fear of concentrating all political power in the hands of a single political party. 

Scenario 2: One of the top two finishers is from the Islamist candidates while the other belong to the fulool. In this scenario the fulool candidate would be Amr Mousa facing either Abol Fotouh or Mursi. In such two-man race in the second round the Islamist candidate would most likely win over Mousa, since a majority of Egyptians consider Mousa as part of Mubarak’s underlings.  

Scenario 3: The Elections Committee declares that top two contenders are from the fulools. This scenario is very unlikely and would only come to pass if through low voter turnout (very unlikely), while massive fraud for the benefit of Shafiq occurs undetected (also unlikely), followed by a muted electorate (extremely unlikely). As unlikely as this scenario might be, many political observers are concerned that this might be SCAF’s endgame since both candidates are acceptable. 

Source: Counter Punch