CAIRO, Egypt — Egypt’s landmark election for a new leader, in which voting took place for a second day Thursday, has brought out a generation gap in many families around the country, with elders looking to old, known faces and their children yearning for something new.
The result is a lot of squabbles and shifting alliances around dining-room tables and in front of living-room TVs showing endless candidate interviews.
For the young, a new face is a way to pay a debt to the revolution and bring a change in the entrenched ways of Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy. Without last year’s uprising, they argue, Mubarak would never have ceded the power he had held for 29 years and the doors never would have opened for the first real competitive presidential election in Egyptian history.
Many of their parents, however, crave stability after 15 months of painful transition since Mubarak’s fall, with street violence, collapsed security, a battered economy, surging food prices and rising crime rates.
Nearly a quarter of Egypt’s population of 82 million is between the minimum voting age of 18 and the age of 30. The generation gap is not cut and dried — every candidate boasts young supporters, and some elders will wistfully say it is time for new blood — but it does appear to be a factor, and it cuts across the polarization between Islamists and secularists.
Many of the young were turning to two “outsiders” among the front-runners. One is Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, a moderate Islamist whose inclusive platform has won him the support of some liberals, leftists and even some minority Christians. Abolfotoh is himself something of a rebel, having split with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The other is Hamdeen Sabahi, an activist who claims the pan-Arab, socialist and nationalist legacy of former President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. He’s the youngest of the front-runners, at 57.
Many of the older generation have looked to well-known faces rooted in Mubarak’s era. One is Ahmed Shafiq, a former air force commander and Mubarak’s last prime minister, who was booted out of office by street protests several weeks after his former boss. Another is Amr Moussa, Mubarak’s foreign minister for a decade before becoming Arab League chief.
In generational terms, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohammed Morsi fits somewhat in the same category, though he is Islamist, and Shafiq and Moussa are secular.
The Muslim Brotherhood said Thursday night that its candidate was leading in the election, citing the group’s exit polls. Poll workers began counting after stations closed at 9 p.m. Thursday. Official results are due Tuesday.
None of the 13 candidates is expected to garner the more than 50 percent needed to win outright. So, a runoff between the two top vote-getters will be held on June 16-17.
Murad Mohammed Ali, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, said the candidate was the leader in exit polls conducted by Brotherhood campaign workers nationwide. He declined to say what percentage Morsi held. The reliability of the exit polls could not be confirmed.
The Brotherhood joined the anti-Mubarak protests, touts itself as part of the revolution and has a strong youthactivist contingent. But in the eyes of some of the young, the 82-year-old, secretive Brotherhood led by septuagenarians is just as much a part of the “old regime” — it was Mubarak’s chief opponent during his rule, but the rivalry intertwined it in the system.
In the middle-class village of Kerdasa not far from the Giza pyramids, Mohammed Saleh looked dismayed at a polling center transformed into a beehive of Brotherhood supporters. For him, the group has “deceptive” ways that resemble Mubarak’s.
The young accountant said his mother was voting for Morsi. “I asked, ’Why, mom?’ She said a doctor treating her at a hospital told her to. This is how they brainwash people’s minds.
“They give people food at low prices. They sell cooking-gas cylinders for 5 pounds [80 cents], while outside it is sold for almost six times that price,” he said, referring to the Brotherhood’s extensive charity organizations, which critics see as a way of buying popular support.
Saleh and his three brothers were going for Abolfotoh, who by leaving the Brotherhood “proved to us that he can build himself from scratch.”
Outside a polling station in northern Cairo, Injy Khairi rested with her two young friends on a bench after standing in the long line to vote. Khairi told of friends who hid their parents’ national ID cards — which voters must show to poll officials — to keep them from voting for Mubarak regime candidates, branded by many as “feloul,” or “remnants.”
Khairi, fresh out of university and now working in a call center, said she tried to sway her older relatives to Sabahi, but failed. “The feloul listen to no one but feloul.”
The same story holds in their workplaces, she and her friends said — administrators look to Moussa or Shafiq, the young staff members to Sabahi or Abolfotoh.
Rafaat al-Gamal, an engineer in his 50s who backs Shafiq, said he doesn’t care if his friends call him “feloul.”
“This is Egypt, not a banana republic,” he said. “The president must be a warrior like Shafiq. Do you want to give it to Islamists,” who he said want to monopolize power just like Mubarak’s ruling party once did.
Opponents of Shafiq and Moussa fear that they will do nothing to dismantle Mubarak’s deeply rooted autocratic system, reliant on fear of police and riddled with corruption and patronage among officials, the military and businessmen. Shafiq is always remembered with a quote he gave during a TV interview saying, “My model is Mubarak.”
Many of the young said that if either of the two wins, sooner or later, protesters will return to the streets to demand change, as they did in the 18-day anti-Mubarak uprising centered on Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
“I told my parents, if Amr Moussa wins, you won’t see an empty inch in Tahrir Square,” so many protesters will turn out, said 28-year-old Ibrahim Haroun, a salesman living in Cairo’s Dar el-Salam slum.
“We are like a baby crawling toward democracy. ... The first thing is to get rid of old leadership, the old business class backed by the army,” he said. “My parents don’t see that.”
Reform leader Mohamed ElBaradei hailed the end of “the culture of fear” as Egyptians voted Thursday but said who wins is less important than establishing national unity.
That goal can be achieved only after Egypt’s poor are fed, have jobs and have roofs over their heads, said ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N. nuclear agency.
He also said he does not intend to run for Egyptian public office again after quitting the race for the presidency last year.
Becoming president has “never been my priority,” he said. “My priority is to make sure that we put the country on the right track. I think I am much more effective working outside the system.”
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah El Deeb and George Jahn of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 05/25/2012