The biggest challenge to the Egyptian government resides in a sweltering fifth-floor office in a crumbling building in downtown Cairo. It’s paper—millions of pieces of paper, sorted into stacks and piled on chairs and balanced atop cardboard crates. Each is a signed petition calling for the removal of President Mohamed Morsi and new elections, labelling Morsi “a failure in all the meanings of the word … unfit to administer a country the size of Egypt.” The petition charges the country’s leader with betraying the revolution, destroying the economy, and begging for foreign aid to keep the country afloat. Fifteen million Egyptians have signed it, which is two million more than voted Morsi into office a year ago. Many are expected to join mass protests on June 30th.

The movement known as Tamarod, which means “rebellion” in Arabic, has come out of nowhere to become the strongest and most convincing challenge to the Muslim Brotherhood since it took power. Organized by longtime street activists and run by volunteers, Tamarod has energized a fractious opposition, which until now had done little to capitalize on the Brotherhood’s waning popularity. The group began circulating the petition, written by its five founders, in late April. “We got two million signatures in our first ten days,” says Ahmed Adel, a twenty-seven-year-old graphic designer with a goatee and an unruly ponytail who is one of the group’s founders. “After that, every foundation and every party came to find us and said, ‘How can we help?’ ”

On a recent afternoon, the mood at Tamarod’s headquarters was electric, celebratory, and a little disorganized. A press conference was on for that afternoon; it was off; it was on again. News that the number of signatures had passed the fifteen-million mark drew cheers. Reporters and photographers piled up in the entry, where two glass tables had been pushed together to form an improvised waiting area. Anyone with authority was under thirty. The prevailing style was Revolutionary Casual: long hair, T-shirts with clenched-fist logos, hand-rolled cigarettes.

Is this the future of Egypt? In fact, Tamarod represents a big step backward in the country’s political evolution. In the two and a half years since the revolution that ousted Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood has won every election: parliamentary polls at the end of 2011, a Presidential vote last June, and a referendum, in December, on a constitution drafted by Brotherhood members and their allies. Dissatisfaction with the government is growing, due to a stagnant economy, rising prices, fuel shortages, and power cuts. Three million Cairenes and a million Alexandrians have signed the petition, but so have two and a half million residents of Upper Egypt, where the Brotherhood has traditionally enjoyed strong support. (Egypt’s population is eighty-three million.)

But established opposition parties have done little to build political organizations and grassroots networks that might exploit this discontent. Instead of pushing for new parliamentary elections (the previously elected parliament was dissolved after a court ruled that some seats had been illegally contested), opposition leaders have already said they will boycott any new elections. Their default mode is to call for street protests when things don’t go their way.

The Tamarod movement is an extension of this civic disengagement. The group has no visible leaders, no political program, and no plans to turn its support into electoral victories. Its founders don’t plan to enter organized politics. “Tamarod is just a popular movement,” Adel told me. When I asked how the group might translate its popularity into political action, he looked puzzled. “It’s the opposite of what you say,” he answered finally. “We are trying to turn political parties into expressions of the popular will.” The Egyptian constitution does not allow voters to recall a sitting President—the petition’s principal demand—but no one seems overly concerned about this. “The legal basis is the popular will,” Adel told me.

Following the June 30th protests, Tamarod organizers are calling for a prolonged sit-in and boycotts of payments to the government of electricity, water, gas, taxes, and certain taxi fees. If the President does step down, the group proposes that the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court serve as acting President until new elections are held in six months. In the lead-up to the protests, Islamist groups have announced that they will hold rival rallies in support of the President. The Minister of Defense, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, warned in a speech Sunday that the armed forces will not stand by if Egypt descends into violence—a statement ambiguous enough to be welcomed by both sides. So what will happen on June 30th? “God knows—the toppling of the President,” Adel said. Then he smiled. “But of course, let’s be realistic. The Muslim Brotherhood is a bloody group. We’re sure there will be violence.”

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In conversations with opposition politicians over the past six months, I have been struck by two things: their vehement hatred of the Brotherhood, and their inability to articulate solutions to the country’s problems. People speak in vague terms about social justice and democratic values. I have yet to meet a politician with a substantive plan to overhaul a system of food and fuel subsidies that eats up almost one third of the budget, or to reform the education sector, or to stimulate foreign investment. Voters appear equally frustrated. A recent survey by Zogby Research Services showed that seventy-four per cent of eligible voters lack confidence in the Brotherhood, and seventy-five to seventy-eight per cent lack confidence in the leading opposition parties.

“It’s not enough to state that you are against Mohamed Morsi,” Amr Hamzawy, a political scientist who was elected to the now disbanded parliament, said when I met him at the end of last year. “Citizens do not like to hear the same message every day, especially the negative message that their leaders are not doing well.” He blames a stunted political culture, bred of long years of autocracy. “One of the duties of a political party is to articulate and spread a political program. But Egyptian political parties like to stick to generalities, to avoid the hassle and the damage of taking a stand on issues.”

After two years of watching politicians on both sides of the fence squabble and prevaricate and fail to improve their lives, Egyptians appear to be rejecting representative democracy, without having had much of a chance to participate in it. In a country with an increasingly repressive regime and no democratic culture to draw on, protest has become an end in itself—more satisfying than the hard work of governance, organizing, and negotiation. This is politics as emotional catharsis, a way to register rage and frustration without getting involved in the system.

On the day of the constitutional referendum last December, I met a forty-seven-year-old woman named Rolfidan Shaban, in the working-class neighborhood of Bulaq Abul Ela. She had read the draft document in its entirety and liked its provisions on health insurance for the poor, though she admitted there were sections she didn’t understand. Still, she felt comfortable voting in its favor. “If we disagree with anything in it,” she told me, “we can always go out into the streets and demonstrate again.”

Photograph by Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty.