regime-dominated Supreme Constitutional Court, which will issue a binding judgment.
Regardless of which scenario was likely to take place, the only possible outcome was a constitution that is made in the generals' image. A Constitution that enshrines the army as a state within if not above the state and restricts the role religion plays in the polity and society. Naturally, this flagrant infringement was met with overwhelming opposition. The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist parties alongside many leftists, nationalists, and some liberal parties called for another million-man march in Tahrir Square on Friday November 18th. Hundreds of thousands of protestors poured into the square and other Egyptian cities in show of force unmatched since the early days of the January 25m Revoiution.
After the protest ended, scores of the Revolution's victims and their families an supporters decided t0 camp in Tahrir to draw attention to their suffering. The generals ordered the security forces and the army to violently break the sit-in. Many were outraged by the regime's brutality and came in large numbers to defend the square. A weeklong violent clash between the protesters and the police forced the SCAF to abandon the controversial proposal and to relieve al-Selmi from his post but not before several dozen protesters were killed and hundreds were injured. These decisions helped to calm the street for the first round of the elections, which took place with great fan fare and high turnout. After the Islamist parties' strong showing in the first round of the elections, the generals established a-thirty-member Advisory Council, yet another attempt to sell old wine in new bottle.
In a press brief to foreign correspondents in Cairo, SCAF member Major General Mukhtar Mulla stated again that the ruling junta would have the final say on the constitution. He also seemed to hint that the new Advisory Council would play a role in the selection of the constituent assembly, on the pretext that this would make the assembly more representative and balance the impact of Islamists' success at the polls.3 The FJP, which most analysts believe will emerge as the largest party in the new parliament, pulled its representatives out of the Advisory Council. The Generals recoiled, at least for the time being. Major General Mamdouh Shahin, the SCAF chief legal advisor, went on record to maintain that the advisory council, the government or the SCAF will have no role in selecting members of the constituent assembly and this recent controversy was put to rest.4
It is quite certain that generals are keen to create a constitutional system that mirrors the Turkish constitutional arrangements before the democratization reforms in recent years, initiated partly under the incentives created by the EU process. Under such arrangements, the army command in collaboration with their allies in other state institutions like the Supreme Constitutional Court, their protégées in the media, and 'friendly' political parties can influence the electoral contestation process. Toward this, the generals have been trying to engineer the establishment of puppet political parties and sought to coax a fractured parliament with no single party commanding anything near a majority.5
In a telling statement, General Shaheen offered a glimpse into the military's mindset, when he declared: "We want a model similar to that found in Turkey . . . Egypt, as a country, needs to protect democracy from the Islamists, because we know that these people do not think democratically." 6 Ironically, this is the same worn out Justification that has been incessantly churned out by Mubarak, Ben Ali, and other Arab dictators to legitimize despotism and tyranny for decades. Incidentally, what the army legal advisor intended by the "Turkish model" was not its latest version, but the pre-AKP model that undermined Turkish democracy for decades.7
In any case, it is unlikely that the generals will give up altogether their efforts to influence the process o