The New York Times reports:
Carried on the shoulders of protesters who claimed him as their own, Egypt’s new prime minister waded into a crowd of tens of thousands in Tahrir Square on Friday, delivering a speech bereft of regal bombast that illustrated the reach of Egypt’s nascent revolution and the breadth of demonstrators’ demands that remain unanswered.
“I am here to draw my legitimacy from you,” Prime Minister Essam Sharaf told the raucous, flag-waving assembly. “You are the ones to whom legitimacy belongs.”
Some protesters dismissed the speech as the savvy move of an ambitious politician in a time fraught with anxiety. Yet it was perhaps the symbolism itself that said the most about Friday’s moment when, just a day after his appointment, an Egyptian leader chose to make his first stop the square that helped topple his predecessor.
After 50 years of dictatorial rule, it would be impossible to find a leader who had not made some accommodations to the dictators. You bent or you died. Only by the new Prime Minister’s actions will we know the extent of his commitment to his words.
(As we may judge Obama’s.)