“We want a flawless president. We want him strong, just, respectable, clean, someone who feels for the poor. We basically want a superman,” said Heba el-Sayed, a 42-year old teacher who was asking her colleagues outside a polling station in the popular neighborhood of Sayeda Zeinab who they voted for.

Egyptians have never had the chance to pick a leader. Mubarak, who was often derisively labeled as “pharaoh” by Egyptians, came to power in 1981 after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat at the hands of Islamic militants, mostly because he signed a peace treaty with Israel. He was re-elected multiple time after that, mainly in yes-or-no referendums in which he was the only candidate.

The pent-up anger that exploded against Mubarak’s reign on January 25, 2011 built up over years because of festering corruption, which created a tight ruling clique around his family and cronies. It left a twisted economic development, that soared in terms of economic development indicators, but was unevenly distributed — leaving vast sections of the population — up to 40 percent— hovering near or fallen far below the poverty line.

Denying services and attention to the poor seemed to be a way the Mubarak’s regime kept such classes in constant need of handouts and dependent on a patronage system, which doled out small benefits to those who cooperated and stayed under his control. This left a debilitated public health and education system, where only those who can pay can receive better services.

His authoritarian regime, which has maintained good relations with the world, relied heavily on security agencies whose widespread torture and abuse were the immediate reason behind the uprising.

The 18 days of protests that brought his fall were not limited to the poor or the abused, they brought in a broad spectrum of classes, angered over every aspect of the stagnation and worried that it would only deepen if Mubarak’s son, Gamal, succeeded him as was widely expected.

So in the voting that began Wednesday and continues Thursday, the hundreds of thousands who lined up at the polls had a litany of dreams. Freedom to walk freely with girlfriends or boyfriends without police harassment. Improved sewage systems. Better education.

“I’ve lived under Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak,” Mahmoud Ahmed, a 70-year old businessman, said, listing Egypt’s last three presidents as he waited to vote in the impoverished Cairo district of Basateen.

“What we want to see is someone with the firmness of Nasser, the political skills of Sadat,” he said.

“And nothing at all from Mubarak.”

He said he wants the next president’s priority to hold a “real” trial for Mubarak — reflecting how many Egyptians dismiss the current trial of the ousted leader as a sham.

Mubarak has been on trial for months over charges of corruption and complicity in the killing of nearly 900 protesters during the uprising against him. As the proceedings have dragged, many have grown skeptical that the trial organized under the military rulers would constitute a fair trial. A verdict is expected on June 2 before the name of a president is announced.

For Yasmine Abdel-Rahman, a 22-year veiled student who was voting in the southern industrial district of Helwan, a religious leader can bring justice. She was voting for the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was Mubarak’s most organized opposition and has seized its place as Egypt’s most powerful political movement since his ouster.

“First thing he must do is get back the rights of all the martyrs. Many mothers’ hearts are broken,” she said.

Ali Ragab, a 27-year old who runs a photo shop in a rundown neighborhood of Maadi, agrees. But he thinks only a president that can rival the charisma and populist ideals of Nasser can do the job.

He’s voting for Hamdeen Sabahi, a veteran opposition figure under Mubarak who proclaims Nasser as his role model. Sabahi has recently risen in polls, particularly among the working class and younger generations.

“I want a leader like Nasser, who looks after the poor. I wish those days come back,” said the dreamy-eyed Ragab, born 15 years after Nasser’s death.

“We need a leader that has extraordinary skills, one that has a heart, a big brain, and can play politics. He must be all that,” he said as he helped other voters find their polling station.

Zeinab Nabil, a 28-year old mother, lost two of her triplets because of an unexplainable shortages of incubators in public hospitals. After their premature birth in September 2010, she ran from hospital to hospital for months trying to find incubators and proper care, only to be turned away.

Now she is indebted to the banks for over $8,000 from the salary of her husband, who works in another city. The only good luck she’s had is that her landlord dropped her rent by a third after the revolution because of her economic woes.

“I want the president to spare other people my troubles. I want him to fix the hospitals and provide incubators,” she said. “I want him to be just. I want him to walk among us. I want him to be human.”

None of the 13 candidates running in the first round is likely to win outright. So a run-off will be held between the top two on June 16-17, with the victor announced June 21.

The president’s powers have not yet been defined. The military rulers, the Islamist-dominated parliament and various groups and political parties of liberals and secularists have been locked in a struggle over how to write the constitution that will define the Egypt’s political system, the role of religion and the place of the military in the future.

The explosive mix of high expectations and a power struggle between political factions will set the tone for the next president’s entire term, supposed to be for four years. The stormy transition since Mubarak’s fall has piled on even more demands, with some wanting the ruling generals held accountable for mismanagement and violence during the past 16 months.

And the new president will face the constant threat of protests from a politically charged population.

“There is now an open court in Tahrir. No matter who is elected,” said Hamdi Abdel-Zaher, a 40 year old accountant, referring to Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the anti-Mubarak uprising and months of protests since against the ruling military.

Fares Kamel, a 42-year old trader in a village on the outskirts of Cairo, said despite the destruction of the image of a pharaoh among Egyptians, many still yearn for it, seeing him as a savior.

“They want to be led,” Kamel said. He thinks the president must be “a knight, who has a sword and is not afraid to use it or to die using it. We want someone with dignity, and not a filthy rich man. We don’t want a thief.”

“We want someone that loves this country, and satisfies people’s needs. God be with him.”

The military says that the courts are essential to keeping order in the turbulent aftermath of the 2011 toppling of Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising. Its critics say the tribunals are used to suppress dissent, and human rights groups say they are a violation of international law.

In the latest demonstration, activists, journalists and others gathered at the Journalists Union in Cairo to show support for those detained in a sweeping roundup by the military following a violent protest earlier this month outside the Ministry of Defense in which one soldier was killed. The mass arrest and referral to military prosecution was the largest since Mubarak’s overthrow.

On Saturday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said the detainees were beaten and tortured. “Military officers have no sense of limits on what they can do,” the group said.

An estimated 11,000 civilians have been sent before military tribunals since Mubarak’s fall. The issue has become a major point of conflict between the ruling generals who took over from Mubarak and the youth revolutionary groups who led the uprising against him.

Khaled Ali, 40, a presidential candidate who represents to many the face of the youth movement, said he is joining the 24-hour strike.

Ali is the youngest of 13 candidates making a bid for Egypt’s top job. The race begins May 23-24.

Other well-known protesters were lawmaker Ziad el-Oleimi, one of the leading figures in the 2011 uprising, and Reem Magued, a presenter for a popular private-sector television station.

Nazly Hussein, a member of an activist group called No to Military trials, said an undetermined number of the nearly 300 people still in detention have joined the strike. She said some of them have refused food since Sunday.

“We decided to join them in the strike to let them know they are not alone, and that we will not forget them because of the presidential elections,” she said.

Military authorities have released less than a hundred of those detained, including a handful of journalists and a dozen women pending investigation. They can still face trial on charges including attacking troops and disrupting public order.

Many activists had hoped that Egypt’s newly elected parliament would curtail the use of military trials. However, while legislation passed earlier this month limited the powers of the next president to refer civilians to trial, it allowed the military to refer civilians to trial at its discretion.

She lived in Egypt on and off for more than 40 years, and it was in Egypt that she earned both her cinematic and singing breakthroughs that won her fame across the Middle East. She had at least five lead roles in Egyptian films, and some 300 songs to her name.

Warda Aldjazairia, or the Algerian Rose, was born in France in 1939 to an Algerian father and Lebanese mother. She began singing as a little girl, gaining a following among Arab children in France through her songs broadcast on local radio.

She traveled to Algeria for the first time in 1962 after the country gained independence from it French colonial rulers. She married an Algerian, and quit singing for ten years.

After moving to Cairo, at the time the heart of the Arab cultural and artistic scene, she had her big break in the late 1970s with the hit “My Times Are Sweeter With You.”

She frequently worked with Egypt’s and the broader Arab world’s best-known composers, and eventually married one — Baligh Hamdy. They formed a formidable team, even after their divorce, making some of the most memorable Arab love songs, including “Stay Here, Stay” and “Listen To Me.”

Late Egyptian singer and composer Mohammed Abdel-Wahab said Warda had “a broad voice with special abilities that other singers lack.”

“I feel safe when she sings my tunes,” he said.

Warda sang in all Arab dialects, and although better known for her love songs, she also sang nationalistic songs for Algeria and the larger Arab world.

She was first introduced to a wider audience in Egypt when she took part in a pan-Arab song in 1960 called “The Greater Nation” written under Egypt’s charismatic president, Gamal Abdel-Nasser. In the song, she sang the part about Algeria, earning her the moniker Aldjazairia, or The Algerian.

Warda had a liver transplant ten years ago, which forced her to give up performing for a number of years.

Her son told an Arab newspaper Sunday that his mother was planning to film a new song in Algeria soon.

Her last album was released in 2011, titled: “The Years I lost.”

Still, mothers and grandmothers traditionally teach young girls belly dancing at home, particularly by watching old black-and-white movies that made earlier generations of belly dancers household names in Egypt.

Early Thursday, Egyptian vice police raided an apartment in central Cairo where the station’s owner, Baligh Hamdy, had been running the operations and recording most of the videos, the security official said. Police confiscated tapes and video equipment and arrested Hamdy.

The official said Hamdy would record the videos and send them over the Internet to his partners in Bahrain and Jordan, who would in turn broadcast them on the station’s satellite TV, making it accessible in Egypt and elsewhere.

The raid was prompted by complaints from viewers, the official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.

Besides the belly dancing, the station also carries advertisements for sexual enhancement products and matchmaking messages.

Hamdy is accused of airing ads that offend public decency, the official said.

While Egypt has grown increasingly conservative over the years, many rights groups fear an Islamist political class growing in influence may push for more censorship and use laws that vaguely define offending public decency to clamp down on the arts and freedom of expression.

It may also be meant to calm worries that the military will not go back on its pledges to hand over power to a winner who may well be the first president with a civilian background in the country’s history.

His address comes a week before more than 50 million Egyptian voters are to choose the country’s first president since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising in February 2011.

Tantawi said the armed forces, police and judiciary will ensure fair and free elections, according to comments carried by the state media. “We hope the elections yield whoever is good for great Egypt. We want a great leader for a great nation.”

This is the country’s first real competitive presidential race, with 13 candidates vying for the country’s top job.

For the first time, Islamist candidates are making a bid for the presidency. They are facing stiff competition from Mubarak-era officials, including his former foreign minister and his last prime minister, who like the ousted president is a former air force pilot.

It is unlikely that a winner will be determined in the first round of voting, and a runoff between two top candidates is expected on June 16-17. A president is expected to be declared by June 21. The military has promised to transfer power by the end of June.

State TV’s website quoted Tantawi as saying Egypt will present a “model to the world of elections that reflect the will of the people.” Tantawi was speaking after attending a military training exercise.

Mubarak’s regime practiced widespread election rigging. Egypt’s first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections that were spread out over three months starting in November witnessed some reports of violations but are generally thought to be the cleanest vote in decades.

Still, the stakes are arguably greater for the presidential vote, and many of the leaders of the uprising and several political forces, including the Islamists, fear the military council will try to steer the vote in favor of a candidate who will preserve their far-reaching economic and political interests built up over the past six decades. The military has been the source of all Egypt’s leaders since the 1952 military coup.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most influential political Islamic group which won close to half the seats in parliament, meanwhile warned Tuesday of “reinventing the old regime” and urged voters not to support Mubarak-era candidates.

“The believer doesn’t get bitten twice by the same snake,” the group said in a statement. “The nation has tasted agonies at the hands of the corrupt old regime.”

“Stability and renaissance won’t come from the hands of people linked to the former corrupt regime, therefore the nation ought to stand firm in the face of any attempts to reinvent this regime,” the group said.

The turbulent post-Mubarak transition has been marred by frequent violence, deteriorating economic indicators, and a rise in crime. This has prompted many Egyptians to look for a candidate who has the support or the blessing of the military— which is still seen by many as the last remaining strong national institution.

The performance of the Islamists in the parliamentary elections and their strong organization has also stirred fear among many Egyptians they would monopolize power in the country if they succeed in their bid for president.