A year after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian revolution is far from over. As waves of protest and violence give way to a new round of parliamentary elections, its destination is both unclear and far-off. What seemed the cusp of a great change has spawned Islamist advances, military torture, economic dislocation, and successive round-ups of activists. There is a word on the street that the revolution not only failed but produced a terrible inverse of what it promised.

But Egypt has changed. Egypt has found “voice.” A country that spent decades in a political coma has become obsessed with politics. A proliferation of new media outlets now competes with the stale monotony of state propaganda with a confused but earnest argument about what democracy should mean. This revolution is not just on the streets. It is inside people’s heads.

This is not just a story of a revolution but the story of a generation – the youth who brought it to life. Shouting slogans in Tahrir, hunching over the blueish glow of laptops, and arguing online about everything from feminism to presidential candidates, this generation of Egyptian youth has been bound up with protest now commonplace throughout the world.

This is protest of a new kind, inseparable from the quiet, technological re-wiring of society. The Internet has found itself into millions of homes and mobile phones. Computer screens and television have acted as personal periscopes to the world beyond Egypt. This is a generation frustrated with their parents, at their complacency which left them so long resigned to the status quo. They are distrustful of their elders, whom they view as the creatures of a dictatorship. Yet at the same time it is still a generation overwhelmingly trapped in the family home. For a traditional country, where only with marriage do you leave home, and you can only marry when you have money – youth unemployment has trapped, infantilized, and frustrated the young.

This is part of the explanation behind the emotional surge in Tahrir a year ago, where for the first time this generation felt release, importance, and a sense of belonging. However, as Egypt balances between military or Islamist futures, the country’s youth have been slow to mature politically, instead trying again and again to retreat to their ideological womb of Tahrir. Caught up in the beauty and drama of street-protests, the hard tasks of taking part in politics are ignored or viewed as submitting to authority. Many even refused to vote in the recent parliamentary elections overseen by the ruling Egyptian military. Only wanting the purity of protest, power has already slipped through their hands no matter how many rocks are still being thrown.

This is a generation still in its political innocence, on the verge of being defined by its disappointment. Yet regardless of which leadership is eventually formed after the elections - the currents amongst the youth will not settle back into stagnation. They may be far from victory, but it will be impossible to silence young Egypt.
Some people say demographics is destiny, and with over 50% of the population aged under 25, it is right on their side.