The country’s voters – and politicians – seem determined to prevent a theocratic takeover.

These Islamists could teach us a thing or two about democracy. When the Nour Party, which speaks for Egypt’s ultra-radical Salafi movement – the one with the long beards that wants no-questions-asked sharia, including bans on bikinis, booze, and Western bankers – set about deciding which candidate to endorse for the presidential elections, its leaders put together an 11-strong committee. On it were two practising psychologists.

One of the interviewees was Hazem Abu Ismail, a charismatic lawyer and preacher with a big grassroots following, who believes in all the things the party believes in, and who everyone assumed would get its backing. But the psychologists threw in a spanner. He was too emotional, they said: too egotistical to be president. The one thing the party knew, its sharp-suited spokesman Nader Baker told me, was that the era of the strongman was over.

“Abu Ismail was someone who could be another dictator,” he said. “He thought his point of view was right even if 10 people were trying to persuade him to the contrary. The appraisal was that he had a big ego, and that he could be very dangerous.” The last thing Egypt needed, he added with a shudder, was an idealist. The people had suffered too much from politicians who tried to inspire them.

The Arab world is not the only place that might benefit from psychological check-ups for potential leaders. But this fear underlies a lot of popular talk on what is so dismissively termed “the Arab street”. And it is one of many reasons why the Egyptian election campaign, which formally gets under way today with the publication of a final candidates’ list, has been so surprising.

Since the events of the Arab Spring, there have been a number of remarkable developments. Three months ago, the country shocked the world by electing a parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and the even harder-line Nour. It set off a raft of “told-you-so” comments from inside the country and out. Naive young liberals, cheered on by a gullible Western press, had been turkeys voting for an early Christmas, driving out Hosni Mubarak and his thugs only to let in a fundamentalist theocracy.

That may still happen – but almost everyone seems determined to prove otherwise. Mr Baker, who says the Iranian model is “absolutely wrong”, has acquired the Twitter nickname of “Nader the Apologist”, so often does he slap down Brotherhood members who suggest extreme ideas, such as the MP who wanted to ban English from the curriculum.

The most startling symptom of this fear of renewed dictatorship – of whatever kind – is that the Brotherhood itself, the mothership of political Islam, is suddenly tarnished. Its election triumph after decades of persecution was hailed as a “Nelson Mandela” moment, but when it used that parliamentary strength to install an Islamist majority on the committee drawing up a new constitution, there was an outcry. It then went one step further, reneging on a promise not to put up a presidential candidate, given precisely to allay concerns about its ambitions.

Earlier this week, I attended one of the first rallies for its eventual candidate, the round, bespectacled Mohammed Morsi. The event in Mansoura, a city in the Brotherhood’s Nile Delta heartland, was well organised to an extent rarely seen in Arab politics. The audience was segregated by sex; the student stewards wore suits and ties; and the event began with a volunteer reciting the Koran. Yet Mr Morsi’s explanation of how the movement’s volte-face squared with its vaunted “moral clarity” was met with discomfort.

Outside the auditorium, other students held a counter-protest. “I used to be a sympathiser,” Ahmed Raafat, a psychology graduate, told me. “But now we’ve seen their real face.” The Brotherhood had the same mentality as the ruling military council, he said, to nods from his friends.

In a turnaround that once seemed impossible, the polls suggest that Mr Morsi will not be one of the two candidates to go forward to the French-style run-off after the first round of voting next month. When the anti-American rabble-rouser Abu Ismail was excluded – for the rather comical reason that his mother turned out to have had a US passport – the main beneficiary seems to have been a rival Islamist, a Brotherhood defector called Abdul Moneim Aboul Fotouh. His moderation puts the others’ in the shade: he says he wants a pluralistic, liberal democracy and has talked of appointing a female vice-president. Confusingly for those who equate “moderate” with pro- Western, two of his principal advisers are not religious scholars but a Marxist and a Left-wing economist.

A second round between Mr Aboul Fotouh and Amr Moussa, the third front-runner, would have rather a simple Left-Right feel. A foreign minister under Mubarak and the Establishment candidate, Mr Moussa offers continuity to ordinary Egyptians afraid of crime and instability, and security to Christians and secularists who suspect that even rebel Brothers would impinge on their freedoms.

A defeat for the Brotherhood would hardly mean that political Islam has had its day. In fact, its manifestations – from the wearing of the veil to tough talk on Israel and the West – will continue to grow whoever wins (as they did under Mubarak). And everything could yet go wrong: there are still far too many clerics spreading ignorance and anti-Semitism. But so far, Egypt’s politicians seem to need to appear accountable to the voters. That has to be a change for the better. (© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012. 04/26/12)