Egypt: el-Sissi supporters embrace return of a Strongman to the Presidency

Posters of former army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi hang everywhere on the streets of Egypt. In Cairo, his face lines highways and bridges and towers over city squares. In Alexandria, loudspeakers blast down the Mediterranean seaside road with songs praising him as the next president and a gift to Egypt after years of turmoil.

The campaign for next week's presidential election looks a lot like Egypt 2005. That was last presidential election under Hosni Mubarak, when the longtime autocrat agreed for the first time to allow candidates to run against him. After a campaign in which his opponents' faces were rarely seen in the streets or media, Mubarak swept with an official 88 percent of the vote.

Like Mubarak then, retired Field Marshal el-Sissi is a certain winner, though few think the vote will be plagued with fraud allegations like the 2005 one.

El-Sissi enjoys a massive mobilization of media and business interests supporting the man who last summer ousted Egypt's first democratically elected leader, Islamist Mohammed Morsi. Almost universally, newspapers and TV stations hail el-Sissi as the only one capable of guiding the country through a crippling economic crisis and violence by Islamic militants. His only opponent in the race, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, has had little such enthusiasm.

The tone of the campaign reflects how, after the turmoil since Mubarak's 2011 ouster, many exhausted Egyptians are going full circle to embrace a strongman who can bring stability no matter what the worries over the future for democracy. The sector of society hailing el-Sissi — crossing rural-urban and rich-poor divides — has embraced the fierce crackdown on Islamist protesters that has killed hundreds and arrested thousands, welcomed the increased prominence of the once-hated police forces and had no problem with a broader clamp-down on other dissenters.

"People want a military man. We have already seen that a civilian president can't do much," Shaimaa Abdel-Hamid, a 26-year-old woman at a pro-el-Sissi rally in downtown Cairo this week. Unabashedly, she said she cried when Mubarak was toppled.

"We want security. Sure, health and education and all. But we want security first," she said.

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