The Brotherhood, if anything, has mirrored the rhetoric of Egypt's military rulers, who reflexively blame dissent on nefarious "hidden hands." In a statement this week that sounded almost plagiarized from the propaganda of the military junta, the Muslim Brotherhood decried the "hysteria" over their electoral success, calling it a "treacherous" and "heinous plot against the stability and security of Egypt."

It's too early in the game to predict the alliances and policy agendas that will flow from the high-performing Islamist parties. Moreover, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces still holds all the cards. It alone appoints the government. The next parliament's job will be to help draft the next constitution, nothing more. As things currently stand, the elected parliament will select about 20 percent of the drafters of the next constitution. The military will appoint the rest. For the time being, the elected parliament will yield scant power, and the same would have been true had secular liberals won in a landslide.

The first-round election results are also creating a sort of moment of truth for secular liberal nationalists. The Egyptian Bloc, which included the two most popular and dynamic liberal parties, the Social Democrats and the Free Egyptians, bankrolled by Christian magnate Naguib Sawiris, won about 14 percent of the vote. The secular but hardly liberal Wafd Party, which thrived as a corrupt, sanctioned opposition party under Mubarak, won about another 10 percent. So, at a stretch, a quarter of the voters in round one went for secular parties -- and this in Cairo, Alexandria, and the Red Sea, all the most liberal urban districts in the country. Subsequent rounds will take place in areas that are more rural and religious demographically.

Secular liberals have made clear in the past that they're just as suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood as they are of the military, perhaps even more so. Followers of Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei were willing to accept new constitutional principles, issued undemocratically by military fiat, in advance of elections, so long as those principles safeguarded minority rights and rule of law -- in effect, liberal ends through illiberal means. That mistrust has broken out into the open now.

"We're all trapped between the Islamists and the army," said Hala Mostafa, an activist and spokeswoman for the Social Democratic Party. She fears that Islamists will take away her social freedom and her rights as a woman, while the military has already eroded her civil liberties and legal rights. "Even I think the Islamists are a bigger threat than the army. Nobody likes the SCAF, but I we have to choose between Islamist rule and the SCAF, I would choose military rule."

Perhaps the heat of the moment factored into Mostafa's glum assessment, but it suggests a shallow commitment to liberal ideas like representative democracy. Certainly, leading members of the Social Democratic Party have philosophically accepted the Islamists predominant role, and feel confident about their long-term chances. But they'll have to contend with a shrinking liberal constituency that values short-term security for the liberal lifestyle over long-term guarantees of liberal political principles. And perhaps that's a best-case scenario for Egypt's military rulers, who historically have goaded the elite opposition (and patrons in Washington) into silence by threatening that the only alternative to military dictatorship is Islamic rule.

Egypt is the Arab world's political center of gravity, and the time will come when it will experiment will authentic representative politics. As these election results indicate, those politics will be imbued with Islamic values and dominated by self-professed Islamist movements. Fear and expedient coalitions can forestall the rise of the Islamists but they can't put it off forever.

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