If Egypt goes forward to democracy

As Egypt will find out,  Democracy has its risks and the outcome may surprise them, but perhaps they can take a page from what happened When Russia and Eastern Europe toppled their Communist rulers or Turkey evolved from Kemalism to a more open democracy and avoid some of the pitfalls.  Those emerging from Communist dictatorships mistook democracy as economic and political anarchy. The old guard scrambled to keep economic power and privilege by taking advantage of the plums of enterprise firesales and the oligarks  and  the habit of corruption of the past carried on into the new order.  It has taken a decade to get over  the cowboy capitalism and political corruption that followed.  Turkey could be a template of how democracy could function in a Muslim country. While Islamist governments have been elected and is less  secular than Attaturk would have wished, the country still marches on toward a more Western style democracy.

The most important  factor that will determine whether Egypt truly becomes democratic in the western liberal sense is how those winning power treat he losers in any political struggle or campaign for office in the future. .  If the winners  fall back to a habit of treating the losers  like disloyal citizens and do not protect the rights of  the dissenters, a dictatorship of the majority could be just as oppressive as the dictatorship of the military or a head of the country. This means that minority rights, free press, the right to assemble peacefully and to express dissenting views must be protected with vigor or else the type of democracy  Egypt and Tunisia practice could become  as corrupt and burdensome as the prior regime.