Last week I saw on Twitter and Facebook what must have been a repetition of the Egyptian revolution last year. On Twitter there was a massive flow of practical information. Almost every minute one could follow where exactly which march would be in a couple of minutes. @Tareqramadan: “Mostafa Mahmoud march now heading towards Dokki Square”. So if you want to join the march heading for Tahrir, you know exactly where to go to. Or @Askarkazeboon: “Kazeboon 20 January Helwan, facebook.com/events/…” signalling a film event showing that the military leaders are liars (kazeboon). For more information the tweet refers to a calendar with all details on Facebook.

That was exactly the way it worked during the eighteen days of revolution in Egypt in 2011. Facebook was used for general appeals and overviews of information, while the minute to minute organisation happened via Twitter. It was on Facebook that Wael Ghonim called for a demonstration on the 25th of January and that Asmaa Mahfouz posted a video saying that only cowards would not go to Tahrir on that day. It was on Twitter, however, that the field hospitals and its supplies were organised and were people were warned about snipers on certain buildings or attacks of thugs in certain parts of the square. One year after Hosni Mubarak was toppled, we see again a million people on Tahrir. Not only to celebrate this huge accomplishment of the Egyptian people, but also to demand for more. The Egyptian revolutionaries are convinced that the revolution has not ended. The vast turn-out day after day proves social media still works as tools to continue the revolution.

Since a few months, however, Egyptians are writing a new chapter of the Twitter-history. Twitter is now not only used to organise a revolution, but also to control the result of that revolution: democracy. During the elections for the People’s Assembly Twitter was used all over the country to report violations and fraud. As real electoral observation was refused by the government, these tweets counted as the most reliable information. After the elections there started a perhaps even more fascinating story. Since 23 January, tens of thousands Egyptians are watching the sessions of the newly elected parliament. Whenever a Member of Parliament says something good or bad, it is all around on Twitter. Or as @Mostafa wrote: “The public has the right to know what each MP says about each and every bit”. Is one MP sleeping for a minute? The next minute a picture of his little moment of weakness is all over the internet.

In a parliamentary democracy the people are asked once every four years to give their opinion. In a Twitter-democracy citizens applaud and criticise whenever they decide to do so. And as almost all Egyptian politicians are on Twitter themselves, they feel the pressure of the citizens every single moment. They realize that walking of the path to a real Egyptian democracy, would immediately lead to a new revolution on Tahrir. The Athenian politician Pericles could never have expected that his famous phrase “the citizens are well capable of judging public affairs” would become reality through Twitter in Egypt.

The Muslim Brothers and the Salafis have three things in common. First, both are in favour of political Islam. Secondly, both Muslim Brothers and Salafis were surprised to win the first elections in Egypt that big. And the two first are the reasons why – thirdly – they deeply hate each other.

The Egyptian elections are organised in three phases. In each phase nine governorates vote for party-lists and for independent candidates in a majority system. The independent candidates need to have an absolute majority in order to be elected, which means a second round in most of the cases. On the elections of 28 November the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood had forty percent of the votes, the Salafis a surprising twenty four percent. And this in the most liberal governorates of Egypt.

Now (14-15 December) Egyptians have to vote in nine other – more conservative – governorates. The political battle is not anymore about a Islamic or a liberal state. Now it is clearly a brutal confrontation between the Muslim Brothers and the more extreme Salafis. That would be no problem, at least not a democratic one, if both parties would not use all possible means to gain votes. And if I say all, it means literally all means. I give you some examples of seen and reported frauds.

In Suez a judge (who is controlling the elections) is seen to sign ballot papers for voters, voting for El-Nour, the Salafi-party.
Also in Suez, Salafis were convincing people waiting in long rows to vote for them. Activists who were filming this forbidden campaigning have been arrested.
In another polling station in Suez voters were not allowed to put their ballot paper in the ballot box themselves.
In Gerla-Sohag, a huge banner of El-Nour was hanging above the entrance of the polling station.
In Giza (a more liberal area) a polling station has been closed down after there was gunfire around a very calm row of waiting voters.

This is just a limited list of irregularities which in normal democratic elections could only result in new, better organised elections, at least for those areas where the game wasn’t played by the rules. Now it is already clear that in the next few days a long list of electoral frauds will become public. There goes the illusion of so many Egyptians that the most conservative Muslims are also the most honest people. But more important is: what will be the consequence?

A couple of days ago the Egyptian writer, Alaa Al-Aswany, told me the military is using double standards. Where the liberals and revolutionaries have to follow the law scrupulously, the Islamist parties can almost do whatever they want. The liberal side has been accused of foreign money (which they have not) while nothing is done with the proven payment of 300 million Egyptian pounds of someone in the Gulf to an Islamist party. The Minister who made this payment public, told the press he forgot to whom it was paid.

I am not going to say that the liberal parties are losing the elections only because of this kind of Islamist fraud. They are too divided to be strong and their campaign is almost only concentrated on being against the Islamist parties instead of promoting their own plans for the future of Egypt. But if Egypt wants to be called a democracy, the rule of law must apply for all parties. Until now the Supreme Council of Armed Forces prefers the rule that all parties are equal but some are more equal than others.

When I woke up this morning a strange fog was hanging over my neighbourhood. It smelled like something was burning, but different still. Only after I entered Tahrir Square, I realised it was a cloud of tear gas. On Tahrir it was impossible to keep your eyes dry. Every five minutes tear gas was shot into the crowds. New and better equipment, activists told me, with the label “Made in the USA”. It is hard to think of a more efficient way for our American friends to destroy their fragile image even more… What happened on Tahrir in order to create a fog of teargas miles further down the city?

Last night, on November 19, I received a lot of disturbing messages from friends of mine who were on the square. In the morning the police cleared the square in a brutal way. There was no reason for this violence as protesters were just sleeping in their tents. After that security forces started with a severe crack down in which some thousand people were injured and two even killed.

It is not the first time that the military clears Tahrir Square. For security reasons. It is after all a major crossroad in Cairo. But this time the people don’t accept this anymore. The army is the one that refuses to abolish the emergency law and the military trials where already more then 12.000 people have been sentenced. It is the army that hesitated very long to give clarification about the electoral process. It is again the army that wants to have “extra-constitutional rights” by which their budget would stay secret and by which they could cancel any law adopted by the Parliament. And last but not least, it is the army that refuses to set a date for the presidential elections which would end their military rule. Today the Supreme Council even announced they would hand over their power by the end of 2012 if (!) the chaos would end.

The Egyptian people didn’t risk their life to end the rule of Mubarak and get another military one instead. That is why they are angry and why they won’t leave Tahrir that easily anymore. Many even talk about a second revolution in order to obtain real democracy. Are we witnessing the start of this second revolution right now? It is hard to predict. But one sign in that direction might be that whereas the mass demonstration of last Friday, 18 November, was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, I witness right now that Tahrir is filled again with the young and secular activists, the ones that were at the heart of the first revolution on the 25th of January. The EU should notice this as well and be faster than during the first revolution to support the demonstrators and their demand for freedom, democracy and the end of the military rule without delay.

On one of my sleepless nights, surfing on Youtube, I found a film of a disco in Tunis where people were dancing to the so-called Gaddafi song. It is a great mix of the mad speech Muammar Gaddafi gave some months ago to warn the Libyan opposition would hunt them down wherever they go: “Dar, dar, beit, beit, zenga, zenga” meaning in Arabic “house by house, apartment by apartment, alleyway by alleyway”.

In the past two months the roles were reversed. The rebels where hunting Gaddafi dar, dar, beit, beit, zenga, zenga.

Last Thursday on 20 October they found him in Sirte, in a pipe. When some rebels dragged him out, he asked one of them: “What have I done wrong to you?” The guy must have been too baffled to answer this appalling question. What have you done wrong to me? Um, well, where to begin? Being the last words of one of the most cruel dictators of our times, they tell us a lot about how this madman’s mind functioned. Probably, he really thought that murdering, torturing, raping and starving people was for the best of his country.

But now that the dust is settling, the biggest challenge for Libya is about to begin: The building of a new country on the ruins of the old one. More than 40 years of leadership from the frere-guide, the King of Kings of Africa, the leader of the revolution, have left behind a country without political parties, without intellectuals, without trade unions, without political structures and without civil society. Libya is a political desert.

Luckily, there are also wise and strong people like Mahmoud Jibril around. Without trying to be party-political, the Alde group can still be proud of the fact they were the first to invite Jibril to Europe, the first to recognise the Transitional National Council and to support its demand for a no-fly zone.

But two strong people are not enough. An entire new political structure has to be built. No wonder that even as Nato gets out of Libya, a new Western army comes in: the army of democracy builders. They will give all possible support to constructing a parliamentary democracy, based on models in the West.

At this point, we must be brave and dare to ask if trying to export our own parliamentary system is really the best thing to do?

It is a question all the more urgent since our system is currently facing its own problems. Nobody can deny we have problems of legitimacy, problems of inability to give proper answers to the financial and economic crisis. Thousands of Indignados are filling the streets of our capitals. In short, we must dare to admit that our system of democracy needs some rethinking.

So instead of trying to introduce our rules of politics in Libya, would it not be more adequate to use the Libyan political desert to create a new democratic oasis? A system with more participation of citizens, more involvement of people in the decision-making process, a stakeholder democracy, a system in which the “heart of power really is empty”, as the French philiosopher Claude Lefort put it.

Instead of lagging behind, Libya could become a model of a new kind of democracy. There are some-sharp thinking Libyans who want to give experiments a chance and to give the people in the street the opportunity to co-build a new country. Let us think together with them how to build a zenga zenga democracy.

On Monday (10 October) I received a message from a friend of mine, a true Muslima, as she calls herself. The message said: “Two of my friends died last night. I am breaking down. One of them was to get married in a couple of months. His friends sent me a picture of his fiance holding his dead body. Mubarak was a curtain, SCAF is the monster we unveiled!”

This is only one of the many messages of despair I received after what happened on Sunday. A peaceful demonstration of Copts during the evening was interrupted by unknown people throwing stones at the demonstrators. Half an hour later soldiers arrived, together with the police, and started a hallucinatory crackdown. Firing live bullets, driving tanks into crowds. Leaving 24 dead and 150 wounded behind. One dozen people died under the wheels of a tank. The pictures are very disturbing.

Why? The Copts were demonstrating peacefully against the fact that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) is not reacting properly to attacks on Coptic churches. Not life-threatening for a government, is it? Moreover, there are demonstrations every week. No wonder that a lot of questions and theories are popping up. Why are the attackers of the Coptic church last week in the region of Aswan not brought to court? This is a valid question, certainly if you know that since February this year already 12,000 people have been sentenced by military court for disturbing the public order. It was not a massive attack. Only a dozen of Salafis, which are Muslim extremists, sacked a little church, not knowing someone was filming them. The fact that one of the guys on camera was not a Salafi, but an officer from the Ministry of Interior of course did explode the amount of conspiracy theories.

One of the most popular theories among Egyptians right now, is that the SCAF is organising these attacks and this chaos in order to keep power and to maintain the emergency law and military courts. In any case, what happened on Sunday will not diminish the doubts about the real intentions of the military. The fact that it is still totally unclear when the presidential elections are going to be held and the power of the SCAF will be transferred to a civilian doesn’t help either. That is of course also the message my friend sent me.

There remains the question about the situation of the Copts in Egypt. Until last weekend, my friend (whose name I deliberately don’t mention) told me that there are no problems with the Copts. A message I heard many, many times. And although a monk at the abbey of Saint Anthony, the oldest abbey in the world, told me a different story two days ago, everybody must admit that attacks on churches are being carried out by a few persons but condemned by everyone. Including the Muslim Brotherhood. It is true that the Copts do face problems as a minority, but what happened yesterday can’t be reduced to a ‘Coptic problem.’

The conclusion is quite simple. There are only two possibilities: either the situation after the revolution has become more chaotic and has given extremists new opportunities, or someone is deliberately trying to create chaos and frictions between minorities. Either way, the military bares a responsibility. And if the SCAF doesn’t take its responsibility to saveguard the revolution, I predict a new revolution in Egypt in the months to come.

A few nights ago I was sitting on a roof terrace in Zamalek, Cairo, talking to one of the young leaders of the Tahrir Square revolution.

With a beer in our left hand and a water pipe in the right, we talked about the revolution and how the so-called April 6 Movement organised the protests day after day. These young people started their protest movement already in 2008, with a huge strike all over Egypt, on 6 April, the 80th birthday of former leader Hosni Mubarak.

During our discussion he told an even more astonishing story. Along with 59 other young leaders from the April 6 Movement, he was invited some weeks ago to visit Turkey. Not for tourism though. They met with PM Erdogan, with President Gul, with foreign minister Davutoglu and many more.

These very busy top politicians took their time and spoke freely of what their plans were for the future. Their message was that they want to create a new alliance between Turkey, Egypt and Iran. Turkey would invest a lot in Egypt, hoping for friendship and a big new market for its booming economy. What they are planning to do with Iran is less clear. But it is obvious that these three countries are in military and economic terms by far the strongest in the region.

“By the way,” he told me, “You in the West look differently at Iran than we do. For us it is a strong country.”

The fact that Turkish leaders personally told him all makes the story all the stronger.

Of course, it is true that Turkey is becoming a leader in the region. To make it clear Erdogan recently visited Egypt, Libya and Tunisia – the three countries that got rid of their dictators. He made a very strong impression at a meeting of the Arab League when he said it was not an option but an obligation to support the Palestinians in their statehood bid at the UN. He was greeted at the airport by crowds chanting “Welcome, Erdogan, Saladin!”

The alliance could be a very long term plan. Could be. But a few days later Turkish foreign minister Davutoglu said in an interview that he seeks an alliance with Egypt and that within two years Turkey is going to invest not less than €4 billion in the country. Meanwhile, Europe is talking about one million.

In any case, my water pipe friend is not the only one happy with the idea – many Egyptians support it.

Whatever happens with the alliance in future, it is clear that Turkey has turned its head from the West to the east. Angry and humiliated as they are because of the refusal to let them enter the EU (which has a religious dimension), they want to build their own union, based on secular Islamic principles.

Somehow I understand this. It is a lot nicer to be greeted as a hero in the east then as a beggar in the West. That is after all how the EU has treated them. An attitude we might soon regret.