High stakes at play in Egyptian roulette

"If we find that Scaf [the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] stands firm against us as we try to fulfil the demands of the revolution," said Fatema AbouZeid of the Muslim Brotherhood as the final results of Egypt's presidential election last week rolled in, "We will go back to the streets and escalate things peacefully to the highest possible level."

There's nothing like an election to make things clear. Now all the cards are on the table in Egypt, and the last round of bidding has begun. The army has opened with a very high bid in the hope of scaring everybody else off, and now the other players have to decide whether to call or fold.

Sometimes, even in long-established democratic states, the players simply fold in order to avoid a destructive constitutional upheaval. That's what the Democratic Party did when the United States Supreme Court awarded the state of Florida and the presidency to George W Bush in the disputed election of 2000.

It is possible that the Egyptian "opposition" - an uneasy amalgam of the secular and leftist young who overthrew the dictator Hosni Mubarak on Tahrir Square 16 months ago and the Muslim Brotherhood (which initially avoided direct confrontation with the old regime) - will just fold. After 16 months of upheaval, so many ordinary Egyptians just want "stability" that the army might win a showdown in the streets.

The problem is that the Egyptian army has bid much higher than the US Supreme Court ever did - so high, that if the other players fold, they lose almost everything. This is a brazen bid to revive the old regime minus Mubarak, and restore the armed forces to the position of economic privilege and political control that they have enjoyed, to Egypt's very great cost, ever since Gamal Abdel Nasser's coup in 1952.

On June 14, just 48 hours before the polls opened for the second round of the presidential election, Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court announced that last year's parliamentary election, in which Islamic parties won almost three-quarters of the seats, was conducted by rules that contravened the constitution.

There was a legitimate question about whether the political parties should have been allowed to run candidates in the seats reserved for independents. No, said the court, all of whose judges were appointed by the old regime. But rather than just ruling that there must be by-elections in those seats, they declared that the whole parliament must be dissolved.

Might there have been some collusion between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Supreme Constitutional Court in this matter? Is the Pope a Catholic?

Last Sunday, only three days after the court handed down its judgement and just as it was becoming clear that the old regime's candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, would probably lose the presidential election, the Scaf issued an "interim constitutional declaration".

It effectively gives the military legislative powers, control over the budget and the right to pick the committee that writes the new constitution.

Since that committee will not report until the end of the year, in the meantime there will be no election for a new parliament.

There will be an elected president but he will not even have authority over the armed forces: the army's "interim constitution" strips him of that power and no doubt its tame committee will write it into the new constitution as well.

The Scaf can't have come up with all this in just 72 hours after the decision of the Supreme Constitutional Court on the 14th. There had to be a lot of coordination between the military and the court beforehand. You could call this a "constitutional coup," but the more accurate phrase is "military coup." So what can Egyptians do about it?

They can go back to Tahrir Square, this time student radicals and Muslim Brothers together, and try to force the army out of politics. That will be very dangerous, because this time, unlike February of last year, the generals may actually order the soldiers to clear the square by gunfire. Or the opposition, aware that the mass of the population has no appetite for more confrontation and instability, may just submit and hope for a better day.

If it does that, the Egyptian revolution is dead.Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.