The political trajectory that Egypt followed in 2004 and 2005 was a perfect illustration of this dynamic. The aging autocrat, President hosni mubarak, was coming under growing domestic pressure from an unusually broad opposition coalition known as kifaya (meaning "enough which succinctly summed up the country's mood ") as well as from U.S. president George W. Bush, who was also pushing for more open and competitive presidential and legislative elections. Reluctantly, Mubarak agreed to allow a contested presidential election and then more transparent legislative election in 2005 but the presidential "contest" was still grossly unfair , and within three months of the vote (which official figures claim was won by the incumbent with 88.6 percent ) Mubarak's opponent, Ayman Nour, was sentenced to five years in prison. By then, the regime had also intervened in the second and third rounds of the parliamentary elections to undermine independent administration of the vote, neutralize civil society monitors, and halt the tempo of opposition victories by Muslim Brotherhood candidates running as de jure "independents." Not long thereafter, the ruling party embarked on a campaign of constitution "reform" to ensure against any political "accidents" in the future, while a demoralized and divided opposition, weakened by arrests and intimidation, watched helplessly with little in the way of concrete support from the Bush administration. The institutional maneuver was part of a general Arab pattern of "managed reform," in which Arab autocracies adopt the language of political reform in order to avoid the reality, or embrace limited economic and social reforms to pursue modernization without democratization.
To the extent that political competition and pluralism are allowed in these Arab regimes (which include Algeria, jordan, kuwait, and Morocco as well as Egypt), it is within rules and parameters carefully drawn to ensure that regime opponents are disadvantaged and disem powered. Electoral practices (such as jordan's use of the Single Non-Transferrable vote, or SNTV) are chosen and tilted to privilege personal ties and tribal candidates over organized political parties, especially Islamist ones. parliaments that result from these limited elections have no real power to legislate or govern, as more or less unlimited authority continues to reside with hereditary kings and imperial presidents. Yet opposition parties face serious costs whether they boycott these semi-charades or take part in them. If oppositionist particpate in elections and parliament, they risk becoming coopted or at least being seen as such by a cynical and disaffected electorate. Yet if they boycott the "inside game" of electoral and parliamentary politics, the "outside game" of protest and resistance offers little realistic prospect of influence, let alone power. Caught on the horns of such dilemmas, political oppositions in the Arab World become divided, suspicious, and torn from within. they are damned if they do and damned if they don't Even the Islamists in countries such as Egypt, Kuwait and Morocco are fragmented into different camps, along moderate and militant (as well as other tactical and factional) lines. Islamist parties that stand resolutely outside the system, while building up social-welfare networks and religous and ideological ties at the grassroots, garner long-term bases of popular support. Secular parties, by contrast, look marginal, halting and feckless. Caught between regimes that allow little legal space ... and popular Islamist movements that are clearly in the ascendancy ... they are struggling for influence and relevance, and in some cases even for survival.