Egypt’s first ever, free, presidential elections are becoming a showdown between the two dominant forces that emerged from last year’s popular revolution – the ruling military and the country’s Islamists.

Monday, a day after nominations for the May 23-24 presidential vote closed, the military and the Islamists squared off in a series of confrontations that overshadowed the initial campaign moves of the election’s 23 declared presidential candidates.

Former dictator Hosni Mubarak’s former vice-president and spy chief, Omar Suleiman, set the tone of the coming campaign when he filed his presidential nomination papers just minutes before the Sunday afternoon deadline, relying on soldiers from the army’s Presidential Guard to protect him from thousands of well-wishers as he arrived at the election commission offices.

Early last week, General Suleiman announced he was withdrawing from the election because he didn’t have enough time to collect the 30,000 voters’ signatures he needed to endorse his candidacy. But by last Friday he changed his mind, saying he had to “answer the call of the people.”

Two days later, just as nominations were about to close, he submitted nomination papers with 112,000 signatures.

Widely regarded as Mr. Mubarak’s right hand man and an architect of repression during the final decade of the Mubarak dictatorship, Gen. Suleiman oversaw political crackdowns against Mr. Mubarak’s opponents and was appointed vice-president in a failed attempt to quell last year’s uprising.

Still, when he declared his candidacy Sunday, he insisted he would “complete the goals of the revolution” and “achieve the hopes of the Egyptian people, including security, stability and prosperity.”

That infuriated Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy leader and chief presidential candidate, Khairat al Shater, who spent 12 years in prison under Mr. Mubarak. In an interview with Reuters news agency, Mr. Shater called Gen. Suleiman’s candidacy “an insult to the revolution and the Egyptian people.”

“Omar Suleiman has made a big mistake,” he said. “He will only win through forgery and if this happens, the revolution will kick off again.”

The opposition newspaper Al Wafd greeted Gen. Suleiman’s candidacy describing him as “a loyal son of the [former] regime who spent his life torturing and threatening Egyptians and whoever stood in his way.”

Mahmoud Ghozlan, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, said if the elections are free and fair, Gen. Suleiman will lose.

“The Egyptian people hate him, they know his scandals and his animosity to the public,” he said. “He will either take a big fall or he will re-ignite the revolution.”

But political analysts predict Gen. Suleiman and his backers in the military may be able to tap into a motherlode of support from Egyptians who have become fed up with the political chaos of the last year and are worried about their country’s crumbling economy, crime and instability.

“There is a real constituency that now yearns for law and order and stability after the tumultuous period following the fall of the Mubarak regime,” said Michael Hanna, of the Century Foundation in New York.

People might vote for Gen. Suleiman, simply out of a yearning for the stability of the pre-revolutionary order.

“There has been a change on the Egyptian street,” Gen. Suleiman said Sunday. “The practices of the [Muslim] Brotherhood and their monopolistic ways and unacceptable pronouncements have contributed to the change in public opinion.

“The revolution has created a new reality and no one can bring back a regime which has fallen and which the population has rejected.”

Egypt’s Islamists control up to 70% of the seats in the country’s new parliament and have also appointed the majority of members of a committee charged with drafting a new constitution. But they have clashed repeatedly with Egypt’s military, after initially trying to coordinate their actions with the ruling military junta and the appointed transitional government that succeeded Mr. Mubarak.

Now that Islamist parties dominate parliament, they are demanding the military-appointed cabinet resign and make way for a parliamentary- led government. But the military is refusing to hand over power until after the presidential elections.

Many Egyptians feel their politics have degenerated into a power grab by the Islamists, while the country’s generals are still trying to cling to power.

Without ever having experienced a fair presidential election, they already anticipate attempts to manipulate the vote.

After insisting for almost a year that they would not nominate a candidate in the presidential elections, the Muslim Brotherhood now has two leading members in the running.

Mohamed Mursi, the chairman of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party submitted his own nomination papers at the last minute Sunday in anticipation his party’s main candidate, Mr. Shater, might be disqualified from running based on the criminal record he received when jailed by the Mubarak government.

Another leading Islamist, ultraconservative Salafist Hazem Saleh Abu Ismail, was ranked the second most popular candidate in the campaign in early opinion polls — after former Egyptian foreign minister and former head of the Arab League Amr Moussa — but Egypt’s Interior Ministry declared last Thursday that he is ineligible to run because his mother took out U.S. citizenship just before she died several years ago.

Presidential contenders have to be citizens with two Egyptian parents. They also need 30,000 signatures from voters in at least 15 of Egypt’s 27 governorates or have the backing of 30 MPs or a political party with at least one seat in parliament.

More than 500 people took out nomination papers, but only 23 completed the process and that number could be reduced further by April 26 as the election commission reviews their nomination papers.

Buthaina Kamel, a former television news anchor who ran a year-long campaign to become Egypt’s first female presidential candidate, withdrew in the end, saying she was unable to get the required 30,000 endorsements.

The first round of Egypt’s elections is scheduled for May 23-24, with a run-off round being held June 16-17 if needed.

The military has promised it will hand power over to an elected president by June 21. (© 2012 National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. 04/10/12)