Muslim Brotherhood Candidate Morsi Wins in Egypt

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MSNBC Reporting:
By NBC News and msnbc.com news services

Updated at 11:14 a.m. ET: CAIRO - Islamist Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected president of Egypt with 51.7 percent of last weekend's knife-edge run-off vote, defeating former Mubarak accolyte Ahmed Shafiq, the state election committee said on Sunday.

His victory followed speculation and anxiety about back room deals and suspected interference by the ruling military council in determining the outcome in favor of Shafiq, widely seen as the candidate of pre-revolution Egypt.

In the end, Shafiq polled 48.2 per cent, with 12,347,380 votes against Morsi's 13,230,131.

Thousands of Brotherhood supporters burst into cheers on Cairo's Tahrir Square, waving national flags and chanting "Allahu Akbar!" or God is Great, greeting a dramatic victory. Morsi will be sworn in on July 1, according to the election timetable.

Morsi, a 60-year-old, U.S.-educated engineer who spent time in jail under Mubarak, won the first round ballot in May with a little under a quarter of the vote. He has pledged to form an inclusive government to appeal to the many Egyptians, including a large Christian minority, who are anxious over religious rule.

The military council will retain control of the biggest army in the Middle East, whose closest ally is the United States. Morsi has said he will respect international treaties, notably that signed with Israel in 1979, on which much U.S. aid depends.

Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, who heads the military council that has ruled Egypt for more than 16 months, congratulated the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate on Sunday after his presidential election win was confirmed, state television reported. The report, made in a brief headline, did not give further details.

"President Morsi will struggle to control the levers of state," Elijah Zarwan, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in Cairo.

"He will likely face foot-dragging and perhaps outright attempts to undermine his initiatives from key institutions. Faced with such resistance, frustration may tempt him fall into the trap of attempting to throw his new weight around," Zarwan told Reuters. "This would be a mistake.

"His challenge is to lead a bitterly divided, fearful, and angry population toward a peaceful democratic outcome, without becoming a reviled scapegoat for continued military rule."

Egypt's ruling armed forces were on alert on Sunday as fears of violence mounted in the final hours before the state election committee named the winner of last weekend's presidential vote.

Sunday's result - five hundred days after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak - is historic for the Middle East, but will not end power struggles between the army, Islamists and others over Egypt's future.



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"We want the military council to announce the real results without forgery," said Hassan Eissa, 43, an accountant from north of Cairo who was demonstrating on the square ahead of the result.

"They have no right," Eissa said. "Egyptians shouldn't be under any kind of guardianship after the revolution."

The generals, who oversaw Mubarak's departure on Feb. 11, 2011, have repeatedly said, both to Egyptians and to their close U.S. ally, that they will return to barracks and hand over to civilian rule. But they present themselves as guardians of Egypt's security and long-term interests and moved to block the Islamists from taking more than a share of power.

The son of a peasant farmer, Morsi has spoken of a simple childhood in a village in the Nile Delta province of Sharqia, recalling how his mother taught him prayer and the Koran. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Southern California in 1982 after earlier studying at Cairo University.

Following his studies in the United States, he returned to Egypt in 1985. Two of his five children hold U.S. citizenship.
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