Although it has been pushed out of the US headlines by the New Hampshire primaries, radical Islamist parties just won the lion’s share of the vote in the final round of the Egyptian elections.
I wrote about why this sort of development was a likely and dangerous possibility in several posts going back to the very beginning of the “Arab Spring” (see here and here). If the Islamists consolidate power and make serious progress towards implementing their agenda, Egypt 2011-12 could easily join Russia 1917, Cuba 1959, and Iran 1979 as a classic historic example of a case where a bad regime was overthrown only to be replaced by one that is much worse. Obviously, the future course of events is far from certain. It is not yet clear how much power the Islamist parties will actually get to wield, and the larger of the two may be internally divided about its agenda. But developments to this point have been far from positive.