CAIRO — The two surviving presidential candidates appealed Saturday for support from Egyptian voters who rejected them as polarizing extremists in the first round even as they faced a challenge from the third-place candidate, who contested the preliminary results.
Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, vowed that he won’t revive the authoritarian regime as he sought to cast off his image as an anti-revolution figure. Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi reached out to those fearful of hard-line Islamic rule and the rise of a religious state.
Many votes are up for grab. The candidates will have a tough battle wooing the middle-ground voters amid calls from activists for a boycott of the divisive vote.
Adding to the uncertainty, Hamdeen Sabahi called for a partial vote recount, citing violations that he claimed could change the outcome, a prospect that might further inflame an already explosive race. Sabahi, a socialist and a champion of the poor, came in third by a margin of about 700,000 votes, leaving him out of the next round to be held June 16-17.
Many Egyptians were dismayed by the early results, which opened a contest that looked like a throwback to Mubarak’s era — a rivalry between a military-rooted strongman promising a firm hand to ensure stability and Islamists who were repressed under the old regime but have become the most powerful political force in post-revolutionary Egypt.
Steven Cook, with the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said the outcome of the battles between the two extremes is hard to predict. “Egypt is following the classic pattern of revolutions,” he said. “People who made them get frozen out.”
Shafiq spent much of his campaign for the first round criticizing the revolution that ousted his former boss. But on Saturday, he vowed that there would be no “re-creation of the old regime.”
“I am fed up with being labeled ‘old regime,’ ” Shafiq said at a news conference in his campaign headquarters in Cairo.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter also said Saturday that his center was restricted in its monitoring mission, but the process was generally acceptable and he believes that violations won’t affect the runoffs.
