Shady Ghazali Harb, a British-educated surgeon on his first political foray beyond cosmopolitan Cairo, hoped to find support for his effort to build a party and instead he found in Nile Delta, a new crop of emerging from Egyptian’s revolution.

He was one among the young activists who raised their voices in Cairo‘s Tahir Square as part of the uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak and is now attempting to run for Parliament under the banner of his newly founded Free Awareness Party.

Harb only has 50 members and faces competition from dozens of other post-revolutionary political parties among whom the differences are so slight that even the candidates sometimes seem confused.

Egyptians are unsure who to vote for, who is running and what all these groups stand for. The result has been topsy-turvy as Mubarak’s National Democratic Party is no longer on the scene, only a few alternatives have gained official status, and two of them-the Muslim Brotherhood and a moderate Islamist party called al-Wasat-have been around for years.

Egyptian parliamentary elections are scheduled for September despite some activists and officials, including Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, who have called for the vote to be postponed.

DEMOCRACY STRUGGLES IN EGYPTIAN VILLAGES

Report by Sumit