Despite warnings that they were breaking the law, hundreds of Egyptians – perhaps more than 1,000 – turned up yesterday to greet Mohamed ElBaradei on his arrival at Cairo airport. Reports from al-Masry al-Youm and DPA describe the scenes, while the Egyptian Chronicles blog links to several video clips.

In some ways, his reception echoed the early days of Obama's presidential campaign in the United States: an outsider who attracts enthusiastic grassroots support. Although one bloggertalks of his "star power", he has nothing like Obama's charisma, but he did actually do something to win his Nobel peace prize. He's also a household name in Egypt because of his work for the IAEA, and especially regarding weapons inspections in Iraq.

Whether or not he runs for the presidency next year (and the rules constructed by the Mubarak regime probably mean he can't) is really beside the point. What ElBaradei can do, if he plays it right, is breathe fresh life into Egyptian politics and get people talking about change in new ways.

“We have four messages today,” Nasser Abdel Hamid, an organiser in the campaign for El-Baradei's nomination and member of the Democratic Front Party, told al-Masry al-Youm:

“The first message is for the west to know that there’s a third alternative to the regime and to the Islamists. The second message is for the regime to know that there’s someone that can challenge its quest for succession. The third message is for us, that we can achieve what we want, that we can organise ourselves and do proper political work in Egypt. The final message is for him [ElBaradei]. We assigned him to go through a battle for reform for which we can mobilise thousands of supporters.”

By descending (literally) out of the skies like this, ElBaradei has seriously wrong-footed the regime and its plans for a smooth handover of the presidency to Mubarak's son. The usual tactics for discrediting locally-based opposition candidates are not going to work. Wael Nawara explains:

Not too long ago, Mohamed ElBaradei was considered a source of national pride and supporting evidence to the regime's claims of the important role Egypt, or rather Mubarak, plays in the international political scene. It was a false piece of evidence, of course, because Egypt, under the same regime, had supported another candidate against ElBaradei as head of the international nuclear watchdog. 

Yet, the regime maintained the appearances and began to proudly show support for ElBaradei as he was elected three times to the post. The national media praised his courage when he publicly disputed the US justification for the invasion of Iraq and celebrated his success as a national victory when he became the forth Egyptian to win Nobel Prize. Mubarak himself awarded ElBaradei the highest accolade in Egypt, the Nile Medal.

Yet, as soon as ElBaradei "hinted" in November that he may consider running for president in Egypt's 2011 election, the so-called national media took him on in a vicious defamation campaign. The man who had been a national hero until a few days before suddenly became accused of being a traitor, an ignorant fool, a foreigner and a US stooge. Al-Ahram newspaper described ElBaradei's demands of democratic reforms and fair elections as a "call for a constitutional coup" that would open a door for George W Bush's policy of creative chaos into Egypt.

Far from discrediting ElBaradei, this kind of thing just makes the pro-government media look silly; everyone knows that in the run-up to the Iraq war he was anything but a stooge for the Bush administration.

Continually emphasising his long absence from Egypt may also be a mistake – and one that ElBaradei could turn to his advantage. As an outsider (though still an Egyptian), he is not tainted by domestic politics, and that could prove very attractive to voters who are disillusioned with traditional opposition parties as well as the regime itself.

In the words of a Cairo restaurant owner who had given half his employees a day off to welcome ElBaradei, "'We need to change the whole kitchen, because the same kitchen will produce the same kind of food."

The excitement generated by ElBaradei and Amr Moussa (head of the Arab League who has also been mooted as a candidate) highlights the dearth of locally-based opposition politicians with "presidential" stature – a situation that the Mubarak regime has of course carefully engineered over the years. And so, now that the principle of multi-candidate presidential elections has been conceded, Egyptians have to look elsewhere.

"People start looking at names with a global reputation. So you hear about Amr Moussa, Ahmed Zeweil [an Egyptian-American scientist who is also a Nobel prize winner] and Mohamed ElBaradei," Shafik Gabr, an industrialist and member of the ruling party, said recently in an interview. He continued: "It takes years to create political leadership. It doesn’t happen overnight. You need to get known, you go into institutions, become a member of parliament or the senate, and then you run for president. 

"But because there has been a vacuum, when these names have come out, you hear all this hype. I think it’s healthy. I think it’s a process that Egypt is going to go through."

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 20 February 2010.