Two years ago Egypt stunningly experienced its first truly free, competitive presidential elections. They managed to somehow be as exciting as they were nerve-racking (and painfully hard to predict), not only for Egypt and the region but internationally. 

Candidates represented the breadth of the political spectrum. There was the old guard, such as former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman (who suffered a highly questionable last-minute disqualification), former Mubarak Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq and — the presumptive winner at the time — Mubarak former Foreign Minister and former Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa. There were Islamists, including the more extreme Salafist Hazem Abu Ismail (also disqualified to the relieved sigh of many), the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and more moderate figures like lawyer and “Islamic thinker” Selim el-Awwa. On the secular revolutionary front there were candidates such as Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi, rights and labor lawyer Khaled Ali and leftist Abul-Ezz el-Hariri. Abdel-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, a former Brotherhood leader, tried to run on a nonideological national unity platform and ran a unique campaign that managed to rally a wide diversity of figures behind him.

Each of these candidates ran heated campaigns, their platforms unabashedly sparred. Some scrambled on the ground toward grassroots campaigns to get the needed 25,000 proxies, others relied on official party endorsements or member of parliament support, as per the options for becoming a candidate present in the constitutional declaration at the time. Public figures were substantially divided in endorsing the different candidates. When the runoff stunningly became between Morsi and Shafiq, the entire nation came to a standstill, followed by the most dramatic showdown in which Morsi won. The victory was only made possible through a coalition of multi-ideological revolutionary forces that backed him with (predominantly) varying degrees of nonexcitement rather than his opponent, who was seen as the objectionable face of the past. Non-Islamists who voted for Morsi in the runoffs satirically referred to the act as the “squeezing of the lemons,” a reference to squeezing lemon juice over bitter food to make it more palatable.

By the end of the elections, many of these campaigns had launched into full-fledged political parties and movements, a vibrant political space further sprung into life.