What’s his secret? Many people admire the 74-year-old’s dignified bearing and his smoky baritone, but that’s only part of the explanation. What his supporters love most is his long and vocal history of anti-Israel diatribes. Speaking with NEWSWEEK at his Arab League office looking out on Tahrir Square, he made no secret of his anger against Israel. “The peace process has become a dirty word, because we discovered it was just [an Israeli] trick to continue talking and make the cameras flash … but there’s no substance. We shall not engage in such a thing anymore. Never.”…

Even so, Moussa rules out the idea of abolishing the treaty. “I will tell you two things: No. 1, that the treaty, we’re not going to abrogate it. And No. 2 … We want to rebuild the country, and rebuilding the country by necessity [means] not to follow an adventurous policy.”…

Nevertheless, Moussa leads the field in name recognition, and he’s courting the Islamist vote. He might actually win. After the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, more than one former communist apparatchik repackaged himself as a reformer and won office democratically. Steven Fish, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies post-revolution societies, thinks Moussa could do the same. Washington might find the former foreign minister more palatable than some of his America-bashing rivals, says Lynch: “The West can live with him, I’d guess.”