Cairo, Egypt - As voters mull over their choices in parliamentary elections that begin Wednesday, candidates have strung banners across Cairo, often striking a theme like that of one hanging in the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood: "If God supports you, then nobody can beat you."
The slogan caught the attention of many people, at least in part because the candidate was not a member of the popular, if outlawed, Muslim Brotherhood. The candidate was Fathi Sorour, the speaker of Parliament and a leader in the governing National Democratic Party of President Hosni Mubarak, in a country where religious political parties are illegal.
The process of electing 444 members of Parliament begins Wednesday with voting in part of the country; other regions will vote next Tuesday and on Dec. 1. There will be runoffs in districts where no candidate receives a majority.
In September the voters gave President Mubarak a fifth six-year term in the nation's first multicandidate election for president.
Although the race for president was widely criticized as a one-sided contest favoring Mr. Mubarak, government officials said that it was intended as a first step toward building a political class in Egypt after decades of political stagnation, and that it had helped generate momentum for the more competitive parliamentary elections.
But the campaign season has demonstrated that for now the status quo prevails: the N.D.P. remains in control, opposition political parties are weak and the most powerful opposition organization in the country remains the Muslim Brotherhood.
Not only have government leaders, like Mr. Sorour, tried to challenge the Brotherhood on its own turf - using the language of religion - but they also have allowed the organization, which remains banned, to take a more public role in promoting the candidates it runs as independents than in the past.
While Mr. Mubarak's party complained about the Brotherhood's use of "Islam is the solution" as its election slogan, many of the governing party's candidates used their own religious references.
Those developments are the most noticeable in a campaign season that has otherwise been low-key, political analysts said.
As in the election for president, the government made some concessions to those pushing for a more democratic system. A court has ruled that civil society groups can act as poll monitors, and the government agreed to use transparent ballot boxes, so that voters and poll watchers will know that the boxes are not stuffed in advance. Four fact-finders from the European Commission will tour polling places.
The government also banned the use of government property, like buildings and buses, to help bring state workers to the polls to vote for the ruling party's candidates. Such violations were widely reported during the balloting for president.
But many critics say the changes are marginal. Ghada Shahbandar, who heads a local election monitoring group, said there had already been signs of what she called irregularities.
She said, for example, that her group had analyzed voter lists and found that on average, 30 percent of the names were duplicates or were improper for other reasons.
Though the group checked a relatively small number sample, she said, the findings held up in several voting districts around Cairo.
"We have witnessed where candidates have offered to pay for votes, where paid thugs have intimidated challengers," she said. "This kind of intimidation, together with the bribery, together with the faulty lists, will not encourage people to participate."
When the parliamentary election season began, it was apparent that the two opposition parties that ran in the race for president - the Tomorrow Party and the Wafd - did not have the momentum they had hoped for. Many of the opposition parties announced an alliance early, hoping that together they could win more seats, but political analysts said the coalition had not proved very effective.
Muhammad Kamal, a leading member of the governing party, acknowledged that there was a greater need to build political parties. "We have a structural problem in Egypt, which is the political parties are still weak," he said.
The National Democratic Party has to face that reality as well. In the last parliamentary election, in 2000, it did not fare well, with many renegade members of its own organization challenging its candidates.
When the election was over, the renegades rejoined the party, allowing it to command an overwhelming majority of 388 seats in Parliament, but the poor showing at the polls was an embarrassment. This year party leaders once again find themselves facing renegades on election day.
If there is one organization that approaches this election with momentum it is the Brotherhood, which hopes to raise its representation in Parliament from 15 members to about 50. The group has been banned since 1954, when a member tried to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the prime minister. But while civil society in Egypt was stifled under an authoritarian political system, the Brotherhood continued to organize and spread.
"Indeed, these elections are different from the previous ones, where there was a large degree of repression, confinement and pursuit, and maybe up to 6,000 of us were imprisoned," said Muhammad Habib, the Brotherhood's deputy leader. "But this doesn't mean they will prevent rigging this time. Rigging can still take place, perhaps not in the same overt way, but in a more subtle fashion."