This past fall in El-Balyana, a remote district in Upper Egypt, there were nineteen candidates for two seats in the new national parliament, and none of them seemed to enjoy the campaign more than Yusuf Hasan Yusuf. He was a big man in his mid-forties, with smooth, dark skin that was set off by a white galabia. He had nine children, a jewelry shop, and a farm where he grew wheat, corn, and sugarcane. He campaigned entirely door-to-door—in his opinion, public political activity served no purpose. “If you have those rallies, it’s fake,” Yusuf told me. He had no platform, and he didn’t talk about issues, policies, or potential legislation. He never made a single public campaign promise. In the past, he hadn’t enjoyed the support of any party or other institution, and yet he had built a successful political career. Once, I asked a rival candidate how he did it.

“Yusuf is lucky,” he said, somewhat grudgingly. “Yusuf is a simple, kind man, and he’s lucky.”

Yusuf first won a seat in parliament in December of 2010. Running as an independent, he defeated the local candidate from the National Democratic Party, which had ruled a de-facto one-party state for more than thirty years. Less than two months later, the revolution began on Tahrir Square, and soon President Hosni Mubarak resigned from office, the parliament was cancelled, and the N.D.P. was disbanded. Afterward, Islamists were allowed to form political parties for the first time, and they won more than seventy per cent of the seats in the next parliamentary campaign, in the winter of 2011-12. In El-Balyana, though, Yusuf received many more votes than the local candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood’s political organization, the Freedom and Justice Party. Once again, Yusuf travelled to Cairo to take office, and once again the parliament was soon cancelled, this time by a court order. In the summer of 2013, after nationwide protests, the military forcibly removed the country’s first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, who had been a leader of the Brotherhood, which was quickly banned as a terrorist organization.

When I asked Yusuf what he had learned from these events, he had trouble answering, and I realized that the question assumed a logic that doesn’t apply to Egypt. From Yusuf’s perspective, losers of elections tended to see their organizations banned or dissolved, whereas winners joined a lawmaking body that also tended to be banned or dissolved. “I didn’t know what really happened, whether it was a legitimate court order or something else,” Yusuf said, of the cancellation of the second parliament. Since then, the government had repeatedly delayed elections, and Egypt had had no parliament for three years. In the meantime, Yusuf continued to do what he does best. “I’m always campaigning—it never stops,” he told me last June, months before the new elections had even been scheduled. Two other local parliamentarians had remained on leave from their jobs since 2012, in part so that they could campaign more or less continuously.

El-Balyana sits on the Nile’s western bank, about three hundred miles upstream from Cairo, where the narrow river valley is surrounded by high, barren bluffs. Beyond the bluffs, in both directions, the desert is uninhabitable across all of North Africa. Upper Egypt is densely settled—about forty per cent of Egyptians live in the south—and it’s the poorest and the most neglected part of the country. Over the years, Upper Egyptians have responded to national dysfunction by effectively creating their own system for elections. Even under N.D.P. rule, Upper Egyptians developed local versions of parties, and they devised indigenous campaign traditions. This informal system survived both the Arab Spring and its aftermath; in some respects, it’s as stable as any other Egyptian political institution. These southern election campaigns reflect how, in a repressive but weak state, the problem isn’t just the ways in which the government prevents political freedom. It’s also the flawed organizations that people build when left entirely to their own devices.

In El-Balyana, Yusuf’s main rival was Rafat Mohamed Mahmoud, who was his opposite in almost every respect. Rafat had belonged to the N.D.P., but after the revolution he became an independent; in 2012, he narrowly defeated the Brotherhood candidate for the district’s second seat, behind Yusuf. For this election, Rafat had again changed affiliation: he joined the Free Egyptians Party, which had been founded by Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian who is one of the richest men in the country. Rafat himself came from a wealthy extended family, known as the Abu’l Khair, and on the first evening that I observed his campaign he travelled around to private homes with an entourage of a dozen relatives, in a Mercedes sedan, a Jeep S.U.V., and two other vehicles.

One member of the entourage was in charge of terminating each home visit. His name was Abu Steit, and he was a short, pudgy man with a toothbrush mustache who carried a wooden cane and wore a turban. At every stop, the group was escorted into the dawar, the traditional rural Egyptian reception area, where the family’s elders waited. At the entrance, the young men of the family had lined up to greet the visitors. Each of them offered a cigarette to every guest—sometimes I was formally presented with twenty cigarettes in rapid succession. Throughout the visit, the young men brought trays of drinks for the elders, although Abu Steit often waved them off and shouted, “Halawa!”—sweets. In Upper Egypt, social engagements run late, and by midnight I had lost track of how many chocolate bars Abu Steit had consumed. As his blood sugar rose, so did my fascination: there was something magnetic about a little man with a Hitler mustache who, after tossing away an empty candy wrapper, would suddenly pound his cane on the ground and yell, “Al Fatiha! Al Fatiha!” The Fatiha is the first Surah of the Koran, and it was recited to bless Rafat’s departure. A home visit might last for half an hour, or it could be finished in a minute; only Abu Steit seemed to know the appropriate duration.

Many visits were characterized by long stretches of silence. There was no stump speech or formal introduction, and Rafat rarely spoke. He was a tall man in an expensive pin-striped galabia, and often he sat in the place of honor, staring into space, until Abu Steit mercifully called for the Fatiha. Nobody ever mentioned Rafat’s N.D.P. past or his current political affiliation, whose benefit was primarily financial. In El-Balyana, a Cairo-based party like the Free Egyptians might pay for posters and other campaign expenses, but it had no local office or network. There was no functioning local press that allowed a party to promote specific issues or policies. This was one reason that candidates campaigned entirely door-to-door. El-Balyana consists of two small cities and thirty-three villages, with a population of around six hundred thousand, but candidates were able to cover this large region in part because they had started long before the official election season. On the fifth day of the campaign, I met a person whose home had already been visited by ten candidates.

Instead of parties, the campaign revolved around two local tribes: the Hawwara, to which Yusuf belonged, and the Arabs, a tribe that included Rafat. When I first began visiting El-Balyana, in early 2013, these groups impressed me as indistinguishable: they spoke the same dialect of Arabic; they dressed and lived the same way; they looked like members of the same ethnic group. All of them were Muslim; most of them were farmers. I had never thought of Egypt as having a tribal society—unlike other parts of the Middle East, it’s always been an agricultural country. But most people in El-Balyana were adamant that they had descended from nomadic tribes.