One thing I haven’t so far been fortunate enough to experience is participating in an election. I have Egyptian citizenship, which means I am part of a system of duties and obligations agreed on by all—theoretically, though not in reality.

One thing I haven’t so far been fortunate enough to experience is participating in an election. I have Egyptian citizenship, which means I am part of a system of duties and obligations agreed on by all—theoretically, though not in reality. That is because Egypt, an autocratic state like all the other Arab, Islamic, backward countries, has arrived at a formula that allows it to avoid being tainted as a dictatorship while, at the same time, dodging any obligation to abide by the mechanisms of a democratic system-with accountability to the people and the rotation of power at the head of the list.

Prior to the revolution, under Mubarak, the good citizen was the one who steered clear of the ballot boxes, who disdained to engage with the power struggle they mediated, and who knew that the results they gave had nothing to do with him. He was not faintly curious about what took place in the voter booths. Forgery was commonplace, very commonplace—it was practically out in the open—and marking ballots was the job of the state-appointed election officials at the voting stations, as the hundreds of witness statements, videos and articles from this period testify.

After January 25, the citizen’s attitude towards elections changed. His political consciousness meant he was ready to defend his right to vote, while the authorities realized that the blatant, primitive deception of former years was no longer fit for purpose. Direct violations of voter law now meant disturbances, outbreaks of violence, rebellion and strikes. The people forced the authorities to move up a level in the political game—to impose their will by more refined methods: faking figures; casting doubt on the opposition and removing them from contention; electoral bribes.

In the first elections that were held one could observe thousands of infringements, the very least of which were enough to invalidate any electoral process. A genuine and valid electoral process is one which grants all candidates an equal opportunity to convince the electorate of their views, and secondly, it must guarantee voters the ability to cast their ballots in complete freedom, without any pressure or attempts to impose one view at the expense of others, while ensuring access to all information concerning the candidates, voting station committees, election officials and monitors. This set of conditions was comprehensively disregarded during the five elections that have been held since January 25.

The first of these was the referendum on constitutional amendments in March 2011, which marked the official beginning of the direct appeal to religion: “Yes” meant Paradise, “No” destined you for Hell—a systematic deployment of religion that, hand-in-hand with accusations of treason, the arrest of activists and assassinations, put an entire slice of the political scene out of contention then removed it from the scene, leaving the same two teams that had dominated the contest since 1952: the army and the Brotherhood.

I was out of the country at the time and I decided to boycott, a position I’ve stuck to ever since. Many of my friends described my stance as “negative” and perhaps that does describe how I’ve felt at times, but I had no other choice. To participate implicitly validated the transition from forgery to fraud, while the boycott was an attempt by a group whose position I’d adopted to push for the reform of the electoral process. But it wasn’t a majority view. Those who decided to boycott were far less numerous and vocal that the eager clamour for change, an eagerness that didn’t do much good, I’m afraid. The results came out as expected and the authorities had settled on the approach to electioneering that they will follow—or so I believe—for some time to come.

As I write, we are on the threshold of new presidential elections, elections that will be dealt with using exactly the same logic as in the previous five. We’re not holding elections so that we can ask people to choose, we’re holding them to confirm a previously agreed-on result. We want Field-Marshal Al-Sisi to be president of the country, and regardless of what I might think of the man or his manifesto (which is yet to be announced), these pre-determined elections and all the skulduggery that surrounds them are, in my estimation, nothing more than a collective apology for the January 25 revolution—an apology for a worldview, for a period in which we as citizens participated in running the country.

It’s not important who brought us to this point. (Was it the Brothers? The Army? Both?) Of course the authorities were complicit and played enough dirty tricks and games to equal all the political conspiracies in Egypt’s history. But in the end that’s what the authorities always do. The wolves in fairy-tales chase the lambs, and should the quarry stop in the middle of the road to rebuke their pursuer, well: they’re going to die. We are like those lambs. We have decided to stop in the middle of the road. Perhaps it is that we’ve lost interest, grown tired of all the trumped-up hysteria in the press—The country’s going to hell! Foreign plots! International treaties to carve up the region! Fundamentalism is back and worse than ever! Maybe part or even all of that is true, but that doesn’t mean we should surrender; it doesn’t mean that we should accept things being worse than they were before.

The problem with the current elections is not that they are like a play whose end we’ve read before it even begins. It is not the characters that will return to bestride the stage—the old state, the army, the feloul—and not the part the Brotherhood will play after the voting’s done. These are details. For me, the most dangerous aspect of all this is that we, as citizens, have lost our desire to be the most important player in both politics and the process of political development that was just getting back on course when it was aborted—we have abdicated in favour of a dictatorship whose features are still obscure, but which certainly wants to take full charge of everything.

From hereon out there is nothing to ensure that the regime must tread carefully for fear of being held to account. The opposition have been pushed aside, or stepped down, or fallen in behind the Field-Marshal. Why? Because this, they say, is a critical moment. Fine: look back over history and you’ll see that each and every moment has been critical and required us to “stand together as a nation”. The most calamitous thing about these elections—aside from the fact they aren’t elections at all—is that this time the authorities are offering the silent majority nothing in return. Since 1952 the regime has always given people some compensation for abdicating their role, but this time the new president has nothing to offer, and nor are his supporters demanding that he should. Take us back to the days before January 25, the majority implore: Let us forget, and we’ll hail you leader.