Why the 2012 Egyptian Presidential Elections Make Me Want to Barf

Egyptian elections are the day after tomorrow. This will be the first time in the history of Egypt that Egyptians will have a real say in who will be their president. This should be a time for rejoicing. For some Egyptians, it is. I am not one of those Egyptians.

As the elections near, more and more I have a feeling of foreboding. I have only two days left and I still do not know who I want to vote for. And I don’t know because I feel that all the choices are bad. Very bad. Not that the presidential candidates are bad people. There is no doubt in my mind that most of the candidates really do have good intentions. But no matter how many times I run the scenarios through my head of what if x wins, or what if y wins, we’re fucked. Seriously fucked. In my opinion, not one of them has the leadership skills necessary to navigate Egypt through a very very delicate process of deciding on what kind of a country we want to have. We’ve already had a sneak peak – more properly called a sneak freak – at what that process will look like. The Egyptian parliament, who we all hoped would guide us through the process of choosing a committee to put together a draft constitution, failed us in the most miserable way possible.

A Stranger In My Own Country

As time goes by, post-revolution, I’m beginning to realize more and more that every person who participated in the revolution had different dreams in their heads for Egypt. We all had one shared dream: we wanted to remove Mubarak and his regime. General chants calling for freedom and social justice were common among all. But my concept of freedom and social justice evidently is different from my neighbor’s concept, and his concept is different from the concept of our farmer friend down south.

When I was demonstrating between January 25 and February 11, I was dreaming of a more progressive Egypt. I was dreaming of an Egypt with less corruption, less bureaucracy, more freedom of choice, openness to information and knowledge. I’m surrounded by friends and family who want similar things for Egypt, albeit not always in the same exact way. But the differences between me and my friends and family are differences I can tolerate. They are small differences, not large differences. They are expected differences. When I thought of “democracy”, I thought of democracy between me and my friends. Sometimes I’d be part of the majority on issues and sometimes I’d be part of the minority. Either way, we’d all get along and we’d accept each other and the results of our overall democratic decisions. After all, the differences were always differences I could tolerate.

But I live in my own bubble. Too many of us live in our own bubbles.