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The Old Order Stifles the Birth of a New Egypt

Aladin Abdel Naby/Reuters

With the fall of Hosni Mubarak, center, a military council led by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, left, has run Egypt.

“This is the real revolution,” said Mohammed Aitman, helping at a first-aid clinic in a turbulent, roiling and, at times, ecstatic Tahrir Square.

The vestiges of Mr. Mubarak’s order — the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, or fragmented liberals and leftists — seem ill prepared to navigate the transition from his rule. It is an altogether more difficult reckoning that has echoed in the Arab revolts in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain.

The strategy that for so long successfully repressed public anger and sapped people’s will to rebel was no longer working. As a result, it is not at all clear what path Egypt will find to go forward. The authorities hoped that the protesters would exhaust themselves and go home, but they have not. The military tried violence, but it has not worked. It has tried limited concessions, but they did not work. And it has blamed foreigners for inciting the violence, and that did not work.

This may foreshadow a dangerous and prolonged period of unrest in Egypt, as the spectacular show of discontent on Tuesday in Tahrir Square demonstrates that there is no existing institution to channel their frustrations.

The military appears largely oblivious to the scale of the protests, and Islamist parties are single-mindedly pursuing their political goals as they predict a healthy showing in the coming elections. No leader, of any ideological bent, has emerged to channel the discontent once again spilling into the streets.

“Today, it is a failure of the political class,” said Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, a political analyst at Dar al-Hikma, a research center in Cairo. “People feel betrayed.”

One of the lasting accomplishments of so many Arab autocrats, some of them still in power, was their ability to co-opt, eviscerate or abolish the institutions that could guide the transition in their absence, as they played on social divisions to prolong their rule.

Ferociously oppressed for so long, Syria’s opposition has struggled to articulate a vision that inspires confidence in the country’s minorities. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s relentless destruction of Libyan institutions has left a country whose regions sometimes act like their own city-states and where tribe serves as the primary social structure. Bahrain’s monarchy stoked sectarian divisions so effectively that a once-cosmopolitan society may be too polarized to reconcile.

Egypt’s version of an autocrat’s legacy was on display Tuesday, as a military accustomed to decades of privilege refused to surrender real power, for now, and a political class cowed by years of authoritarianism — the Muslim Brotherhood being the most prominent example — seemed opportunistic, defensive or unimaginative.

To many in the square, politicians were either putting their parochial interests first or proving unable to deliver a vision that could stem the worst crisis facing Egypt since Mr. Mubarak was toppled on Feb. 11. The anger was so great that a Brotherhood politician was driven from a square by a crowd that, as in January, feels determined but leaderless.

“What we’re still dealing with is the system of Mubarak,” said Mustafa Tobgi, a 56-year-old government employee. “They’re all graduates of Mubarak’s school.”

Tahrir Square, a site iconic for the protests that overthrew Mr. Mubarak, was often a desperate tableau in past days, as youths battled with the police. Those fights became a sideshow on Tuesday to a far more jubilant and festive spectacle, whose numbers rivaled some of the biggest protests in the 18-day uprising against Mr. Mubarak.

“Leave,” people chanted Tuesday, as they did back then.

The breadth of the protesters’ demands — effectively an immediate end to military rule — and the military’s refusal, reiterated Tuesday, to surrender power until next year suggested that the discontent would persist. Suspicions ran so deep in the square on Tuesday that nothing short of a dramatic step seemed possible to stanch the protesters’ determination, or end the clashes that have left at least 29 people dead.