CAIRO: The United States inadvertently helped Egypt’s Islamists make strong electoral gains this month and is now rethinking the wisdom of pressing rapid democratic change in a major Arab country, analysts say.

The Muslim Brotherhood, making the most of the more open atmosphere which Washington has promoted, has already tripled its strength in parliament to 47 of the 444 elected seats, with more than half the seats yet to be decided.

The secular opposition parties which Washington favoured have performed poorly, picking up only a handful of seats — way short of the five per cent threshold they would need if they want to field a candidate in presidential elections.

Although the Brotherhood has no chance of breaking the government’s control over parliament, this outcome has given the Bush administration pause and strengthened the hand of those in Washington who value stability over democracy, the analysts say.

“The Americans have reassessed the situation and come to the conclusion that fast and vigorous democratisation in Egypt is impossible and will work in an undesirable way,” said Mohamed el-Sayed Said, a political analyst at a Cairo think-tank.

The Egyptian vote so far has bolstered the view that free and fair elections could enable Islamist parties hostile to US policies to gain strength in several Middle Eastern countries.

Washington insiders are now advising the US State Department not to abandon existing Arab governments without clear alternatives and instead to work on long-term structural changes and ways to influence Arab public opinion, Said said.

“I think they managed to change the policy when it comes to Egypt,” said Said, deputy director of the government-funded al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

The change in tone is evident in public statements from the White House and US State Department, which have largely fallen silent on Egypt after frequent comments on the presidential elections in September, won by President Hosni Mubarak.

In a rare comment on Monday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack criticised election violence but said he had reason to believe the Egyptian government wanted voting to be peaceful.

Independent monitors say most of the violence has been by ruling party supporters, with the police standing aside.

Josh Stacher, an independent analyst who followed Sunday’s voting in the Nile Delta, said much of the Bush administration’s talk about Middle East democracy was for US home consumption. The US campaign began after early justifications for invading Iraq began to lose credibility.

“The game has not switched that much. The United States now supports a form of authoritarianism less driven by state violence.

As long as the state is not seen as clashing with citizens, they are unwilling to go out on a limb,” he added.

“The reality of the situation suggests the United States is involved in ‘authoritarian adaptation’ — changing the appearance but not the substance,” he said.

The United States supports the Egyptian government’s refusal to recognise the Muslim Brotherhood as a party, although it is clearly the strongest opposition force in the country.

And, like the Egyptian government media, US officials rarely mention the Islamist group by name.—Reuters