Surprise! Baradei Will Not be Next President of Egypt

As most people in the West figured out a while back, and as anyone in Egypt who hadn't been hitting the goza too hard figured out early on, Mohamed ElBaradei's not going to win the Egyptian Presidential elections.

When this whole flurry was beginning late last year, when ElBaradei stated his conditions for running for President as if the government were required to negotiate with him and he were De Gaulle demanding conditions, I noted:

. . . his conditions include an independent national committee to oversee the elections, absolute judicial supervision of the vote, and international observers.

And rainbow-colored unicorns in the inaugural parade, I suspect. Okay, Mubarak senior and junior will surely agree to all that. No problem there. What else? Sorry if I'm so cynical, but has ElBaradei 1) just been out of the country too long, 2) let the whole idea go to his head, or 3) been celebrating getting free of the Iran nuclear issue a little too hard?

That may have been too hard on him, but I'm not so sure. Lately, he's been an absentee candidate, or non-candidate (since under current rules he can't run), spending a lot of time in the US and Europe. Some of his supporters have been disillusioned.

Now he's apparently recognized the inevitable: under present conditions, he won't run. The cards are stacked against him, and he now says he never wanted to run anyway.

Especially in this period of transition, he couldn't have changed the electoral laws without a massive populist campaign. Not a politician to begin with, he'd been out of Egypt too long. As a respected critic of the regime, he can still have clout, but even if someone had found a loophole to let him run, he couldn't have won. He may be a stronger critic from outside the system.