Call for Egyptians to boycott election Lifting a placard showing a mouse dangling on a string above a chunk of cheese under the slogan: "The election is a trap," Ibrahim al-Sherif, an Egyptian political activist, tried to persuade passers-by in central Cairo to abstain from voting in this weekend's presidential poll. The telecoms engineer, campaigning with other young activists for a boycott of the vote, argued that the election would only give legitimacy to the military council ruling the country since last year's revolution which toppled Hosni Mubarak as president. The powerful generals who control the security services would continue to pull the strings from behind the scenes, no matter who was elected president in the June 16 and 17 election, he said. "The soldiers will not hand over power," said Mr Sherif. It may look like they are doing it, but they will just be placing a man on the presidential seat as a front like they did with the 500 members already elected to parliament. The election of a president is intended to be the final step in Egypt's transition to democratic rule but the boycott campaign is a sign of the deep mistrust of many Egyptians in the continued role of the military in the country's politics. It also signals the likelihood that unrest will continue no matter who is elected. Mr Sherif and his colleagues, mostly young middle-class activists who risked their lives at the forefront of the revolt against the former dictator, say their objective is to weaken the mandate of the next president to prevent any attempt to restrict dissent. "Abstaining will weaken the election and its result," said Salma Said, a boycott campaigner who runs a collective of "citizen journalists" documenting human rights abuses by the police and the ruling military. Participation will strengthen the president, who at all events will come to repress the revolution and clamp down on street action. The campaigners are sceptical of both candidates: Mohamed Morsi, backed by the long repressed Muslim Brotherhood group which won parliamentary elections and is now the rising force in Egyptian politics; and Ahmed Shafiq, a former military man and a stalwart of the Mubarak regime who does not hide his admiration for the ousted leader. Expat vote favours Islamist Egypt's Islamist presidential candidate decisively beat his secular rival among Egyptians voting at embassies and consulates abroad, the state news agency reported. Mohamed Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, received 74.8 per cent of the nearly 300,000 votes from Egyptians who live abroad, mostly as migrant labourers in the Gulf states. Egyptians will choose at the weekend between Mr Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq, a former aviation minister who briefly served as prime minister last year. Mr Morsi trounced Mr Shafiq in Saudi Arabia, which has the largest community of expatriate Egyptians, amassing 90 per cent of the vote. Overall, he received 81 per cent of the 250,000 votes cast in the Arabian Peninsula. Mr Shafiq, running on a law-and-order platform, won a quarter of the expatriate vote. He beat Mr Morsi in the US, receiving 67 per cent of the 13,440 votes cast in the Egyptian embassy and four consulates. Mr Morsi eked out a victory among Egyptians living in the UK, collecting 52.5 per cent of the 3,309 votes cast. Though the expatriate votes do not necessarily make up a representative sample of Egyptian voters, Mr Morsi's surprise first-place showing among expatriate voters in the first round of the election was an indicator of his subsequent success. Mr Shafiq ultimately won nearly a quarter of the vote, placing him second. One researcher and statistician projected that Mr Morsi would beat Mr Shafiq with 55 per cent of the vote based on a comparison of the results of the first-round expatriate vote to the ultimate results. But opinion is split within wider activist circles over the boycott. Many fear that failing to support Mr Morsi, even if they distrust the Brotherhood's conservative agenda, would spell the death of the revolution. "It's a no brainer," said Wael Khalil, a secular activist who said he will vote for Mr Morsi. The Brotherhood is not a danger to the revolution, even if it is a challenge. But Shafiq is a threat, and his backers in [Mubarak's] security state are now scenting blood. His election will be a green light for every police chief in the country to go back to the repressive practices of the past. The two presidential hopefuls are widely seen as the most polarising of the dozen contenders who ran in the first round of the election. To many Egyptians, the choice is between either the return of a regime they loathed, or an unpredictable future under the leadership of a secretive and closely knit Islamist organisation they do not fully trust. For the supporters of a boycott, a vote for Mr Shafiq is out of the question because of his links with the Mubarak regime. But they see in the Brotherhood a fickle ally which threw in its lot with the revolutionaries when it was convenient, and abandoned them to face police violence during clashes which threatened to derail their political advantage in elections in November and February. The Islamists, who have felt since the uprising that they are closer to power than at any time in their history, have tried not to compromise their chances by fighting what they consider unnecessary battles with the military council . At times, this has meant trying to silence criticism of the ruling generals, and sidelining the revolutionaries and their demands. "They [the Brotherhood] said that those in Tahrir Square were thugs when we were being shot at," said Lobna Darwish, an activist standing in the midst of a crowd of passers-by, which included Brotherhood supporters trying to refute her arguments. "We were targeted with bullets and buckshot, but Brotherhood parliamentarians denied that police used live ammunition," she said. They even stood up to salute the interior minister. If this is not betrayal, I don't know what is.