Many of them pine for Mubarak’s return and back the candidate whose résumé most resembles his.

But not Basheer.

“What did he do for this country? It’s one big dump,” he says in the garage of his three-story building on Sadat Street, named for the autocrat, Anwar Sadat, who preceded Mubarak.

And yet, this group of young activists, which can still be mobilized for street protests like the recent demonstrations in front of the Defense Ministry, has failed to turn itself into a meaningful player in post-Mubarak electoral politics. Granted, this group did not represent the vast bulk of Egyptians, who remain less educated, socially conservative, and rural. But surely a liberal, modernizing leader could have appealed to the hopes of many Egyptians for economic growth and political freedom, and placed at least within the top four presidential candidates?

We will have to await more information and analysis about the election, including the degree to which it was manipulated, before we can fully answer this question. It seems clear in retrospect that Mubarak’s ouster constituted much less of a revolution than met the eye; the military still remains a powerful institution unwilling to give up substantial power.

But part of the blame lies with Egypt’s liberals themselves. They could organize protests and demonstrations, and act with often reckless courage to challenge the old regime. But they could not go on to rally around a single candidate, and then engage in the slow, dull, grinding work of organizing a political party that could contest an election, district by district. Political parties exist in order to institutionalize political participation; those who were best at organizing, like the Muslim Brotherhood, have walked off with most of the marbles. Facebook, it seems, produces a sharp, blinding flash in the pan, but it does not generate enough heat over an extended period to warm the house.

This week, Egyptians go to the polls to choose their first democratically-elected president from about a dozen candidates. Though they’ve had several other votes in the past year, this is the one that will largely determine the outcome of the country’s dramatic revolution 16 months ago. The young liberals who ousted longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak after 18 days of protests – the bloggers, the tweeters, even that widely-admired Google executive, Wael Ghonim -- have since been sidelined. In the cluster of frontrunners, the battle is now between Islamists and felouls – literally “remnants” of the old regime.

That sharp divide has allowed Abou el-Fotouh, a physician by training who is married to gynecologist, to stand out as a more nuanced character. He certainly is an Islamist. Abou el-Fotouh served for 25 years on the leadership body of Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood – the oldest and most well-organized Islamic group in the region--before parting ways with the group last year.

But he is more liberal and less doctrinaire than the other Islamists in the race – he rejects initiatives to ban alcohol or impose the veil on women, for instance. His vision of Egypt as an Islamic democracy run by technocrats rather than ideologues has prompted comparisons to Turkey and created an aura around Abou el-Fotouh as Egypt’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It has also helped him win some disparate endorsements, from the arch-conservative Salafi party on one side of the political map and from Tahrir leftists on the other, including Ghonim himself. The latest polls show Abou el-Fotouh running neck-and-neck with Amr Moussa, who served for a decade as foreign minister under Mubarak and later as head of the Arab League. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the votes, a run-off will be held next month.

But even as the demonstrators held up posters of their banned candidate, the Salafi preacher Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, others described a broader reason for the protests: a rising fear that the military council which has ruled Egypt since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak more than a year ago will refuse to cede power to civilian leaders next month.

The council, known by its acronym SCAF (Supreme Council of Armed Forces), is assuring Egyptians that its rule will end on June 30, after the second round of presidential elections. Since SCAF assumed power 14 months ago, Egyptians have already elected two chambers of Parliament.

The presidential vote, which starts later this month, will largely determine the outcome of the Egyptian revolution. 

Abul Fotouh was long a vocal critic of the Mubarak regime and a moderate, senior member of the Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood. He left the organization last year when the group disagreed with his decision to run for president.

The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party has since decided to field an official candidate, Mohammed Mursi. Other contenders in the elections include former Egyptian foreign minister and Arab League head Amr Moussa and Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmad Shafiq. Moussa, a liberal and a secularist, is the current frontrunner, but he is struggling to shed his ties to the former regime.

And no one here is willing to make predictions in a race that has already seen several twists and turns.

This is not the first time Egyptians have been consumed with Suleiman’s presidential prospects. Toward the end of Mubarak’s reign, when the leader’s unlovable son Gamal appeared poised to succeed him, many Egyptians thought Suleiman would make a fine alternative. He was, after all, a soldier in a country that lionized its military men, was untainted by the younger Mubarak’s neoliberalism, and—most important for those allergic to the Muslim Brotherhood—he hated Islamists.

But that was then. Suleiman used to warn that democracy would bring the Islamists to power, and recent parliamentary elections seem to have borne him out. But they also show how hopeless his candidacy is. Does he really think the voters who just packed the Parliament with Islamists are now going to elect a president who is political Islam’s sworn enemy?

Some fear that the ruling generals will rig the election in Suleiman’s favor. But it’s not clear that the junta wants him that badly, and given Egyptians’ newfound propensity to protest, the generals must know that such a scenario would end inauspiciously. Instead, Suleiman’s only chance is to exploit the discord that has emerged among the country’s political forces.

The allegation is decidedly inconvenient, given that according to Egypt’s election law, candidates cannot register if they have foreign parents.

But after a week spent staving off a flurry of negative headlines, the radical preacher was thrown a lifeline earlier this week when a court ruled that Egypt’s authorities must provide proof of his mother’s nationality—effectively tossing the ball back into the election commission’s hands.

His supporters immediately took the streets of downtown Cairo in celebration, letting off fireworks and chanting their support for the preacher.

The remaining quarter of Parliament is divided among liberal, secular leftists and independent members. A handful of women make up about 1 percent of the assembly. Very few parties—religious or secular—promoted them as candidates. “Women have been marginalized for a long time,” said Saad. But, said fellow protester Nagwa El Ashwal: “We will work with society and try to change the culture, to change how people look at women, to show women can do anything, that they can be in Parliament or run ministries.”

Aside from the low profile of women, the parliamentary elections were marred by many irregularities and by the widespread use of religion during campaigning. But local and international election observers have described them as a step forward and as generally valid.