CAIRO — A bloody night of running street battles outside President Mohammed Morsi's palace between the president's supporters and his outnumbered opponents upped the stakes in a two-week-old political crisis roiling Egypt and threatening the legitimacy of its first freely elected president.

Earlier this week, before violence erupted between pro- and anti-Morsi forces late Wednesday afternoon (Dec. 5), the crisis was primarily a political showdown over the disputed constitution that Morsi had rushed to a referendum vote on Dec. 15.

Decrees issued by Morsi on Nov. 22 put the Islamist president above oversight and widened rifts in Egyptian society about the direction of Egypt's political transition nearly two years after authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak was toppled by street protests. 

In the 10 days following Morsi's announcement of his new powers, protests held for and against Morsi showed the divisions had worsened. The sheer fact that the rival camps could each draw hundreds of thousands of their supporters to the streets of Cairo was a sign that neither side was backing down.