"It started 16 months ago with a bang — one hell of a wonderful euphoric bang that left me giddy for months," wrote Ashraf Khalil, an author and correspondent based in Cairo who covered the Egypt elections for Al-Monitor. “Now it feels like it’s ending with a whimper,” he wrote, capturing the sentiment across the Twittersphere on #EgyElex.

Over the weekend, Egyptians cast their votes in the runoff election for president between Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, and Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak's last prime minister. The turnout was lower than expected, due to a combination of, among other factors, low enthusiasm and high temperatures. 

Despite the differences between the two potential presidents, one a stalwart of the old regime, and the other a part of the principal opposition, disappointed observers said on Twitter and Facebook that neither represents a break with the past. Instead, they often wrote, the revolution has come to an anticlimactic end.  

A female taxi driver who took Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, from point A to point B, put it well when she wondered whether the Arab Spring in Egypt was to become an Arab Winter.