Even with the winner a foregone conclusion, the unprecedented multi-candidate presidential elections in Egypt started today.

The official campaign period for Egypt’s landmark presidential election opened Wednesday. Ten men, including sitting President Hosni Mubarak, are vying for the presidency in the country’s first multi-candidate election.

The three leading contenders for the presidency all scheduled rallies for Wednesday to launch their election campaigns. Incumbent President Hosni Mubarak decided not to wait for the rally and took out a full-page ad in Egypt’s largest newspaper, the government-run Al-Ahram. A private television station bought space on another page, trumpeting its exclusive coverage of the president’s bid for re-election.

This is the first time in his 24 years in office that Mr. Mubarak has faced an electoral opponent. So the idea of competitive political campaigning is new here.

Mubarak will win handily, no doubt, for many reasons.

First of all, the elections are not completely transparent. While the polling stations themselves are overseen by judges, the counting process is done behind closed doors. We actually witnessed a judicial protest a couple of months ago, with hundreds of judges demanding that they be given oversight of the entire procedure. Without this kind of oversight, fraud is easy to commit by the government.

Mubarak will not have to cheat, however, because with so little time to build up a strong campaign, his opponents will have nowhere near the necessary notoriety to pose a real challenge this season. While the Interior Ministry mandated that all candidates do given equal coverage, election ads taken out cannot be negative of other candidates. That means no anti-Mubarak ads.

Also, remember Mubarak’s famous move back in the spring. Political apathy pervades in Egypt, so hardly anyone registered to vote. It wasn’t until the registration process ended that Mubarak declared that there would be multi-party elections. Now, of course, more people are interested, but they have no way of participating even if they wanted to.

This all sounds very depressing, of course. Mubarak will win, Ayman Nour will hopefully gain some prestige, and Islamic parties will always be a fear in the back of our minds. Any real change that happens may not even come until legislative elections — which I’m now looking forward to with great interest.

But despite the fact that we know who will win, the very fact that multiple candidates are allowed to run has put Mubarak in the once unthinkable position of running campaign ads and appealing to the people by promising more economic reforms and an end to the emergency laws. After a quarter of a century, it’s maddening to think such a spectacle could occur in just a few months. And most importantly, it has opened up a broad conversation in Egyptian civil society.

The conversation is no longer about the Zionist monster next door or American imperalism. Pan-Arabism is dead. Finally, after decades of myth, the politics are shifting to local problems. In conjunction with a lot of things I’ve read over the past few months, Mona Eltahawy details this phenomenon precisely and beautifully.

My summer vacations in Cairo usually have been mock exercises in public diplomacy, with yours truly playing a reluctant Karen Hughes. I am not a Republican or even a U.S. citizen, but I’d find myself dodging conspiracy theories or lending a sympathetic ear to a cousin who proudly remembers memorizing the names of every U.S. state but who hates America so much now that she never wants to see those states herself.

But not this summer.

There were no arguments over the United States, Israel, Palestine, Iraq or any of the other “hot spots” that used to dominate every meal and spill over into tea, coffee and dessert. This time, all conversations were about a small but active opposition movement in Egypt that since December has focused on ending the dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak.

I have never heard so many relatives and friends take such an interest in Egyptian politics or — more important — feel that they had a stake in them. This opposition movement holds almost weekly demonstrations. It draws Egyptians from across the political spectrum: leftists, liberals and Islamists. And, more worrisome for Mubarak, it has solid roots in the country’s middle class: Journalists, lawyers, judges and university professors have all thrown their hats in.

It is brimming with Egyptian youths who have known no leader other than Mubarak but are all too familiar with the legacy of his 24-year dictatorship: corruption, unemployment and fear. There isn’t much that Egyptians can do about corruption and unemployment; those who turn out for the demonstrations are fearless. Several times during my visit I heard “we have broken the barrier of fear” — the sweetest words of my trip. The demonstrators risk beatings, arrest and intimidation of their families.

Those are sweet words to my ears, too. Over in Lebanon, Tony notes a similar disengagement from such things, like Hezbollah’s crusade against Israel. While we all know who will win next month, the most important thing is that the discussion has started and is spreading like wildfire. This change has thrusted an energetic jolt through civil society.

In 2003, Fareed Zakaria argued in his book The Future of Freedom that a liberal democratic Egypt, as the center of the Middle Eastern world, would propel the rest of the entire region into reform. He argued that the United States should be at the forefront of pressuring Mubarak to open up the political system and be lenient on liberal ideas, and this is exactly what the U.S. is now doing. And to great reward.

As freedom slowly comes to the country, Egyptians are beginning to realize that it is coming in large part due to U.S. pressure on the regime. Supporting democratic values and taking action that helps people achieve those goals is reshaping opinion toward America in the Middle East. At the same time, because politics are going local again, criticism is now being directed toward the regime, which is certainly the cause of more of Egypt’s problems than any international conspiracy.