By MICHAEL SLACKMAN, New York Times
Published: February 28, 2010

CAIRO — Since arriving to a hero’s welcome just days ago, the former chief international nuclear watchdog and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei has taken on the country’s leadership in the way you might expect of a career diplomat: using delicate language and a nonconfrontational approach.

But for all the gentle words, Dr. ElBaradei’s whirlwind interviews made it clear that he had come home to shake up the leadership’s long monopoly on power, even as he continued to dance around the question of whether he would run for president.

His message as he dominated the media landscape was a call for the people of Egypt to press their government for more political freedoms, a provocation in a nation where dissent is hardly tolerated and where a viable political opposition has not been allowed to grow. His point was this: Without amending the Constitution to allow fully free elections, Egypt could not improve any of the deep social and economic problems that had been allowed to fester under the governing party.

“My goal is that there wouldn’t be one savior for Egypt,” Dr. ElBaradei said in a three-hour television interview shortly after he arrived. “My goal is for Egypt to save itself. Help me in order to help you. If you want this country to change, then every one of you must participate to show his desire.”

It is hard to say where Dr. ElBaradei’s head-first plunge into Egyptian politics will lead. He has given voice to the frustration with Egypt’s political, social and economic stagnation in a way that had not been seen since a brief, measured political thaw in 2005. But his early support appears to be primarily among intellectuals and young people, and analysts have questioned whether he will be able to broaden that appeal.

If anything concrete has so far emerged from his challenge, political analysts said, it appears that the governing party may be shaken enough that President Hosni Mubarak will consider running for president again when his term expires in 2011.

There had been widespread speculation that Mr. Mubarak, who is 81 and has governed for nearly 29 years, was grooming his younger son, Gamal, to be the candidate of the governing National Democratic Party. But the thinking now is that the younger Mr. Mubarak’s credentials could not match Dr. ElBaradei’s.

The signs that the elder Mr. Mubarak might be changing his mind: he has visited regions around the country recently and the state-run media have begun referencing his electoral platform.

“ElBaradei constitutes a real challenge,” said Mustapha Kamel El Sayed, a political science professor at American University in Cairo, “not necessarily in terms of his capacity to win an election against the candidate of the National Democratic Party, but in terms of the superiority of his prestige and the respect he has domestically and internationally.”

In 2005, under pressure from Washington, the Egyptian government made some effort to improve political freedoms, and the next year it allow challengers to run against the president in his bid for re-election. Previously the president had run in single candidate “referendums.”

But soon after, the political opening evaporated, and in 2007 the state pushed through amendments to the Constitution that effectively made it harder for independents to run for office.

Dr. ElBaradei has called on the state to change the Constitution again, a pragmatic first step since under existing law he is unlikely to qualify to run — a fact that he has used, subtly, to embarrass the state.

His decision to plunge into politics presents the government with a unique challenge. He is a former insider, a diplomat who once worked for the foreign service and who hails from the cadre of political elite now in charge.

“He is not a radical, and he is not going to change the country’s direction 180 degrees,” said Amr El-Shobaki, a political analyst at The Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “At the same time, he reveals their mismanagement, the absence of democracy, the arbitrariness of the regime.”

Dr. ElBaradei, 67, left his post in December as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Along with the nuclear agency, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. In December, as speculation about Dr. ElBaradei’s possible candidacy surfaced, the state news media began to attack him. But in the past two weeks, they have largely ignored him, even as he has received tremendous attention from independent news organizations.

If there was any indication of how the governing party might challenge Dr. ElBaradei, it was in a front-page opinion piece written by Abdel Moneim Said, chairman of Al Ahram, which publishes the state-owned and widely circulated newspaper of the same name. His article effectively said that while Dr. ElBaradei called for change, his ideas were not new, and that many of his facts about the challenges Egypt faces were wrong.

Few expect that to be where the effort to block Dr. ElBaradei ends.

“The regime that controls this country is very smart and cunning and sly, and he who thinks otherwise is under an illusion and naïve, or it wouldn’t have preserved such a large nation in the refrigerator of stillness and subservience for 30 years,” wrote Magdy el Gallad in the Feb. 23 issue of the independent daily newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. “As such, it knows how to deal with each opponent or competitor or opposition in a special and different way.”

The only remaining question, according to Mr. Gallad: “How then will the ruling regime burn Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei?”