Over the past two years, much of foreign media and punditry have had a disproportionate focus on Egypt’s Islamists movements (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood) compared to any writings, academic or journalistic, on Egypt’s opposition. Some of that, of course, is understandable. The greatest hope, and fear, effectively lay with the Islamists. It was finally their moment of truth, answering the long-suspended question of whether or not all the anti-democracy and anti-human rights claims against them were essentially hyperbolic or in some way justified. They were the mystery that was finally surfacing and also evolving, rapidly and towards uncertain directions, as well as an increasingly fashionable subject of writing. In some ways, they still are.

But the second reason for this disproportionate interest in Islamists was the relative lack of interest in, if not even scorn for, some of the alternative opposition. For many, the opposition pretty much represented a considerably weak, largely immaterial, and very disorganized, incoherent entity whose influence on Egyptian politics was hardly worthy of interest. True influence was with the Islamists and the military, observers quipped, and they were not entirely wrong in that account. Secular and progressive political groups remained largely underdeveloped in street presence and internal organizational development, they lacked mutual coordination and alliance, were vague in messaging and effectively were presented to the public as just the non-Islamists rather than having their own complete project. 

The very first test for the opposition’s influence was in the March 2011 referendum, having pretty much united against the proposed constitutional amendments, demanding instead an immediate focus on writing a new constitution for Egypt before any parliamentary elections took place. Islamists (and tacitly, the military) supported the opposite, and won a landslide 77% in the national referendum. Of course, this massive approval was also partially a result of many non-politicized voters believing that proceeding with the elections would bring a modicum of stability. Months later, parliamentary elections provided the opposition “civic” current as a whole, as they are euphemistically called within Egypt, with only about one-third of parliament compared to the Islamists who took more than two-thirds combined. Observers and commentators who bet and primarily focused on Islamists and saw the opposition with relative irrelevance felt quite vindicated.

But then, things began to change a bit. The first real indication that there was a genuine and significant shift in local political leanings came with the presidential elections, with more than 75% of the votes in the first round going to liberal or progressive candidates. The second round of the elections did indeed see the victory of current president Mohammad Morsi, but only by a meager 51.7% compared to a self-described “liberal” candidate who even had strong ties with Hosni Mubarak and was chosen as his crisis-time (and final) Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafiq. In fact, Morsi’s victory was only assured with the support of many civic-minded revolutionary and political figures and movements who saw that a Muslim Brotherhood victory could be better than the victory of a former Mubarak Prime Minister and yet another military man. While part of the rise of Shafiq could be attributed to some voters seeing him as the security-credentialed and more politically experienced candidate in a time of extreme national uncertainty, the other big part was reflective of an increasing dissatisfaction with the performance of Islamists in the short-lived parliament, as well as of a rising concern towards the political and local conduct of the Islamists.