“FOR the first time in living memory we won't know the result beforehand,” said a liberal campaigner, as he prepared to vote in a referendum on Egypt's constitution. In the event, on March 19th, more than 14m said yes versus 4m who said no. The turnout of 41% of the country's 45m eligible voters was the highest on record. It was also the first time for nearly six decades that Egyptians had been offered a genuinely free choice on any public issue.

The referendum marked a big step towards sending the army, which has been running Egypt with broadly popular consent for the past five weeks, back to barracks. A general election was proposed for June, though the date may slip, followed by a presidential one, probably in August or September. If the new president or a majority of members of parliament so desire, a constituent assembly of 100 or so people will get the job of writing an entirely new constitution, which could be enacted within a year. With luck, Egypt will then be well on the path to democracy, albeit with many a pitfall along the way.

The amendments endorsed in the referendum include limits of two terms of four years each for Egypt's next president and an easing of restrictions on competing for the post, though candidates may still not have dual nationality nor, more oddly, may they be married to a non-Egyptian. Other amendments decree that the next president must appoint a vice-president within 60 days of taking office—something Hosni Mubarak studiously failed to do until the last few days of his 30 years in power. Elections will be overseen by judges, independently of whatever party is in power. And a clutch of counter-terrorism laws that were widely abused under Mr Mubarak will be revoked.

So why did Egypt's secular liberals and left-wingers, leading lights in the mass demonstrations that toppled Mr Mubarak, vote overwhelmingly against? In a televised debate sponsored by a Qatari foundation and held in English in the upmarket American University of Cairo, 84% of the audience said no. Many objected to a lack of openness and the haste with which the amendments had been written by a faceless committee chosen by the equally faceless 19-man Supreme Military Council now ruling Egypt. Others complained that, though you might disapprove of some clauses and approve of others, it was a take-it-or-leave it package.

But another big reason was that the diffuse democracy movement that emerged from Tahrir Square has not had time to form a coherent political front or to set up solid party structures. As a result the speedy timetable laid out in the new deal may help the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, among others, to dish secular liberals and other fledgling parties in any early poll.

The Muslim Brotherhood did indeed endorse the amendments. So did notables in the long-established liberal Wafd party and the rump of Mr Mubarak's disgraced but still surviving National Democratic Party. The size of the yes vote suggests that these old forces may hold quite some sway. The groups that performed so brilliantly on Facebook and Twitter have so far looked amateurish, unfocused and ill-organised as they try to transform themselves into parties equipped to take on the old guard.

In any event, the secular middle class, especially in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt's second city, remains deeply wary of the Brotherhood, even though it has gone out of its way to present a tolerant, undoctrinaire face. “The Turkish model [of government] is not far from our ideology,” says Muhammad Abbas, a prominent young Brother. The movement hopes, he says, to get a third of the seats in the new parliament, perhaps contesting 40% of them. It will not put up a candidate for president. And he says he wants a broad alliance, including secular socialists, liberals and even Christians, to form a new government.

Yes, say the liberals, that is the image of “the smiling Brother”, Essam el-Eriani, a ubiquitous spokesman who is a model of decorum on the rostrum. But delve into the conservative villages in the Nile delta, they say, and you see a different picture. There, say the liberals, the Brothers have little concept of democracy or pluralism, and are haughtily hostile to Copts (Egypt's main Christian sect, numbering 8-10%) and other minorities. Secular-minded Egyptians recall that for the first three decades since its founding in 1928, the Brotherhood espoused violence in pursuit of its holy writ; more recently, many Egyptian jihadists started out as Brothers.

In sum, many Egyptians still feel that the Brotherhood cannot be trusted to take part in a secular, open, tolerant society. Given the suffering inflicted on the movement over the years, with many thousands of them locked up without trial and tortured under Mr Mubarak, most secular Egyptians think they should be given a chance to prove their good intentions. But they feel queasy about them all the same.

What frightens many Egyptians even more is the emergence of true radicals, thousands of whom have been freed from prison, including jihadists and Salafists, who hark back to a fiercely puritanical interpretation of Islam, insisting that women should be veiled, infidels subject to special taxes, and the harshest version of sharia law imposed, including stoning for adultery and amputation for theft. Such fundamentalists are now merrily riding along behind the cloaks of the Muslim Brothers.

Many Egyptians are still worried about the army too. Since forming the supreme military council to oversee the government, it has signally failed to explain itself to the people, bar issuing a handful of decrees. Field-Marshal Muhammad Tantawi, the 75-year-old transitional head of state, who was minister of defence for the previous 20 years, has kept out of the limelight. Though the replacement of an air force general by a civilian as prime minister on March 3rd was widely applauded, no one seems to know who is really running the show or who is accountable to whom. There is a sense of vacuum.

On March 9th some 170 demonstrators who had insisted on staying in Tahrir Square were arrested by the army. Many of them were tortured. The army authorities, who have given themselves the right to try alleged thugs (known as baltageya) in military courts, have since proved unable or unwilling to explain what happened or to respond properly to the inquiries of human-rights monitors, who have also complained that the mainstream Egyptian media have shamelessly ignored the episode, either under military duress or through an ingrained habit of self-censorship.

The army, in sharp contrast to the police, who have gingerly returned to the streets, is still fairly popular. But the generals are far from being natural democrats, which is perhaps why many Egyptians voted for the referendum, despite the shortcomings of the amendments, to get the army out of the way. But few people are certain who or what will come next.