Egypt decides between army and mosque In Egypt, sermons are broadcast through loudspeakers, so it is possible for non-Muslims to eavesdrop. Last Friday, I found myself in a dusty town in the middle of nowhere and, wondering what the imam might be saying to the faithful about today's presidential elections, I sat outside to listen. Was he raising hellfire, telling his congregation they were all doomed if they did not vote for sharia, as one newspaper columnist had warned me mosques were doing? Or would he meditate, like a wishy-washy Church of England vicar, on the nature of choice as a spiritual journey? What he said was an odd mixture of the fair-minded and the direct. After some worthy platitudes about the need for a president to be honest and God-fearing, with the strength to unite Muslims (but also, he added, to give non-Muslims their rights), he got to the point. "I don't ask you to elect a specific man," he said. But I would like to see the run-off between two Islamist candidates, or at least between one Islamist and one liberal. And the final battle should be decided by who can accomplish the word of Allah. I can only be in one place at a time, but I think it a fair guess that tens of thousands of mosques up and down Egypt were handing out a pretty similar message to the faithful, the 50 million voters who will for the first time have the chance to elect their leader. It is, whichever way you look at it, an inspiring thought, the idea that after several millennia of pharaohs, ptolemies, kings and khedives, placemen of Ottoman and British empires, and colonels with big voices and bigger tank corps, a people steeped in history should get to choose who will lord it over them from now on. It is also hard to blame the Islamist politicians of the Muslim Brotherhood, who have spent decades in various autocrats" prisons, for seizing their opportunity. But Islamists do not speak for everybody, so I sought an alternative view, from the local primary school headmaster. He thought it important I get a good selection of informed opinion, and gathered up some local worthies - the manager of the water station, a farmer, a former mayor. They told me something quite interesting: that after prayers were over, there had been a confrontation, that some of them had remonstrated with the imam, saying it was not up to him to tell people how to vote. Their position was quite different. Faith was faith and politics was politics, and Egypt needed a firm hand, a military hand. Since the revolution, it was not safe to walk the streets after dark. The economy was a mess, and what people really wanted, as the mayor put it, was to "keep the wheel turning." The country had had a chance to see Islamists in action in parliament, where they now had an overwhelming majority of seats. And it is true that, as the mayor said, most people had not been impressed by the high-flown rhetoric and vicious personal arguments they had witnessed, debates which make Prime Minister's Questions look purposeful and pragmatic. While this all made sense, it was also depressing. They kept referring to what everyone nowadays calls the Hizb al-Kanaba - not some new radical sect but the "Party of the Sofa," the silent majority who have only ever had the chance to watch politics unfold at a distance, including during the Tahrir Square revolution. The assumption of these elders was that they had to seize hold of the Sofa Party, or the Brotherhood would. They said that they themselves all intended to vote for Ahmed Shafiq, the fallen Mubarak regime's last prime minister and a retired general - and that once they had made that decision clear they expected 75 per cent of the town to vote the same way. The depressing thing is that the Brotherhood probably agrees that this is a vote to be captured by machine politics, rather than won over by argument, and given what we have learnt so far from opinion polls, they may be right. There is little consistency in the Sofa Party's ideology. In one survey, 67 per cent of the population thought democracy was "preferable to any other form of government," but when asked about the role of religion in politics, 61 per cent thought Saudi Arabia - nobody's democracy - was a better model than Turkey. This is a battle for tribal loyalties, with huge consequences for Egypt and beyond. Both the army and the mosque still attract popular support, even if the former acts with unashamed brutality and the latter seems to think that the modern world is a Western conspiracy. This week, one of them will win and impose their vision on society - neither as much of a disaster as the other side fears, probably, but the one lacking the will to institute proper controls over police and military power and corruption, the other clearly more restrictive of personal freedoms. It is not a pretty thought, particularly for the articulate young liberals who filled our television screens a year ago. Then again, should we Britons be so sniffy? Many of us are nostalgic for the time when elections mattered, when politics was tribal, when the great forces of class and ideology swung into action every five years. And one thing we do know: Egyptians have shown they will no longer put up with the lies that have been forced on them for the past half century, and they have at least a chance of holding their leaders" promises to account. No one said that democracy didn't produce bad governments - but, as a great man once put it, it's rarely as bad as the alternatives.