Lina Attalah's Madamasr.com post about the website Sisi Fetish (Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is the general who removed Mohamed Morsi from power and crippled his party, the Muslim Brotherhood), opens a kind of magic window onto the unsettled and turbulent region of contemporary Egyptian politics:

The question then becomes: Can Sisi’s popularity be sustained past the perceived specter of the Brotherhood? If Sisi is investing in his war with the Brotherhood to drum up more public acceptance every day, how far can he go? Wars are bound to end — especially as the Brotherhood is proving on a daily basis that it is in a deep crisis with regards to its own survival. Can politics be reduced to a constructed war on terror if the animosity that people who like Sisi feel toward the Brotherhood wanes as the latter slowly fade out of the political spectrum? What about urgent socio-economic questions kept on the shelf? How long can they be kept there once this war is over, at least in people’s minds? How long can a state define itself through an enemy once this enemy has ceased to exist?

And if Egyptians are given convincing options in the form of reformist politicians, would they glorify Sisi unconditionally because they like men with military ranks and hats? Time is better off answering these questions, but we had a sneak peek at the people’s political taste in the 2012 presidential elections, when a dozen men contested for the post. While Morsi made it to the presidency after a run-off with Ahmad Shafiq, a man with a military background, the first stage of the elections left us with an important, often overlooked figure. The total number of votes for the top three candidates after Morsi and Shafiq, none of whom represented the military nor political Islam in its strict form, exceeded those that went to either Morsi or Shafiq. This 43 percent, this majority, expressed its views differently when the political space was actively filled with negotiations and arguments.