Egypt's Presidential Race Is Haunted by the Past Egypt's presidential campaign has been full of startling moments. At one point, ousted President Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister rode into a rally on a white horse like a knight, promising to restore Mubarak-era stability and ensure secular rule. A veteran of the old regime, Ahmed Shafiq was himself booted from office by protests weeks after his former boss fell last year. Now he's a presidential candidate, his dramatic entrance before a cheering crowd typifying the choices facing Egyptians in this week's landmark vote, between voices from the authoritarian past and Islamists promising an uncertain future. Egyptians can choose from an unimaginable range of 13 candidates following decades of fixed contests that guaranteed Mubarak's re-election. Perhaps most surprising, the election is completely up in the air a day before voting starts Wednesday. No outright winner is expected from the two-day vote, so a runoff is scheduled for June 16-17 between the two top finishers. The winner will be announced June 21. The four front-runners show how - despite an unprecedentedly open race - the pool of politicians to draw from remains limited even after the "revolution." All of the candidates are firmly rooted in the old system, either from Mubarak's regime or from its traditional opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood. No prominent new figure clearly representing the revolutionaries' call for secular democracy has emerged. An Egyptian woman looks at clothes next to a poster of Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate, Mohammed Morsi with Arabic that reads, "Mohammed Morsi, for Egyptian presidency," in Cairo, Egypt, Tuesday, May 22, 2012. (AP Photo/Fredrik Persson) Close Of the four top contenders, Shafiq - a former air force pilot like Mubarak - appeals to those yearning for a return to the Mubarak era. Openly contemptuous of the Jan. 25-Feb. 11, 2011, revolt against Mubarak, he has seen a rise in recent polls. No Islamist will win this race. It is not right to have an Islamist for president," Shafiq told a popular TV program last week. He lashed out at the protesters that brought Mubarak down, saying they should stop assuming the moral high ground given the chaos since the 18-day uprising. What 18 days? ... After all that time, look at what is going on," he said. In a sign of how polarized things are, Shafiq is the only candidate who's had a shoe thrown at him on the campaign trail. The prospect of Shafiq making it to the second round infuriates both the revolutionaries and the Muslim Brotherhood, which had hoped to ride to power during the post-Mubarak transition. The Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, has sought to rally supporters by lashing out against "feloul" - the "remnants" of Mubarak's regime. He has enjoyed the backing of pro-Brotherhood clerics whose edicts declare it sinful to vote for such candidates - and the Brotherhood's well-oiled machine, which has campaigned neighborhood by neighborhood, urging the movement's tens of thousands of followers to recruit 20 new voters each. "We will step on them ... and then we will throw them to the garbage of history," Morsi said of the "feloul" at a rally Sunday night before the official end of campaigning. Marwa Mahmoud, a Brotherhood follower at the rally, called Shafiq "a silent devil." He's backed by the military and the government. Part of his plan may be to bring back all political prisons," she said. But this doesn't scare us. We were not scared before the revolution. We only got more fearless after the revolution.