Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo on Saturday. Its leaders say its chief demand is recognition of its electoral victories.

CAIRO — A week after Egypt’s first competitive presidential election, the announcement of an official winner appears to have become a bargaining chip in a behind-the-scenes negotiation for power between the ruling generals and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Almost everyone here is sure that it has.
“As the beginning of a transition to democracy, it is a disaster,” Omar Ashour, a political scientist at the University of Exeter and the Brookings Doha Center, who is here in Cairo. But, he added, the disaster began the day before the presidential runoff, when the military dissolved the Brotherhood-led Parliament and seized legislative power.
“The generals have their fingers on the reset button if they don’t like the outcome,” Mr. Ashour said. While the Brotherhood may have more legitimacy and the ability to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, “the generals have the guns and tanks and armored vehicles,” he said. “We are playing realpolitik at the moment.”
As Egyptians sorted through conflicting reports on Saturday about when the judicial commission overseeing the vote might finally declare a winner, fragmentary reports of meetings between Brotherhood leaders and the ruling generals have upstaged the faltering health of former President Hosni Mubarak as a staple of debate on television talk shows.
Each side has been fairly open about its bargaining position, and some analysts said that the two were not so far from a reaching a power-sharing accord, as nearly happened a few months ago before talks fell apart in angry disputes over interim control of the transitional government.
“Now each side feels like the other did not live up its end of the agreement,” said Michael Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation in New York. “The problem now is overcoming these accumulated suspicions.”
The members of the commission of judges overseeing the vote — all appointed by Mr. Mubarak — have said they delayed the announcement of the official results to investigate allegations of fraud from both sides. But the delay implicitly threatens the Brotherhood, the 84-year-old Islamist group that is Egypt’s best-organized political force. A public ballot count showed its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, ahead, with 52 percent of the vote. His opponent, Ahmed Shafik, a former air force general and Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, has also declared himself the winner.
The Brotherhood’s leaders say their chief demand is the recognition of their victories in the parliamentary and presidential elections. They pointedly say that they respect a ruling on June 14 by the Supreme Constitutional Court that the military used as a writ to dissolve the Parliament: that political parties were wrongly allowed to run parliamentary candidates competing for the one-third of seats set aside for individuals rather than party lists. But instead of the immediate dissolution of the whole legislature, the Brotherhood proposes new elections for those seats or perhaps accelerated elections for the whole chamber.
The Brotherhood also demands that the military council roll back the provisions of its interim charter stripping the incoming president of almost all of his power and making him largely dependent on the military council. “This would at least solve 75 percent of the problems we find with the decree, which gives the military council a veto over everything,” Khairat el-Shater, the Brotherhood’s chief strategist, told Reuters.
Since seizing power after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, the generals, for their part, have appeared focused on protecting their power, their privilege and perhaps the generally secular character of the state under a new permanent Constitution. “The Constitution is their biggest priority,” Mr. Hanna said. “It gives them a way to protect themselves, a legal shield.”
Under the old military-backed autocracy, top military leaders enjoyed nearly total autonomy and immunity from oversight, and they were allowed to build their own commercial empire far outside the defense industry. And in public statements the generals have repeatedly said they expect to preserve their empire and their autonomy within any new civilian government.
The generals have repeatedly rearranged the transitional timetables to ensure that the Constitution is written while they remain in power, and they have tried to insert specific provisions to protect their power and immunity.
And as recently as a few weeks ago, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the military council, said cryptically that the generals did not intend to leave power until a Constitution was complete, even though the slow-starting constitutional assembly had no chance to finish before the generals pledged transfer of power on June 30. Now that the generals have renewed their hold on power, Mr. Hanna said, his meaning may be clearer.
Until the spring, the two sides seemed to have reached a rough agreement to ease the generals from power. Brotherhood leaders have said consistently that they expected, for at least the near term, only limited public scrutiny of the defense budget, working with the generals to manage defense matters, protecting them from criminal prosecution over events in the past and the continuation of their commercial empire.
The breakup appeared to begin when the Parliament sought to replace the military’s prime minister and the generals refused. Evidently taking a cue from the generals, the bureaucracy — including the election commission — and the state media grew more critical of the Brotherhood as the group grew more assertive.
The Brotherhood broke its promise not to run a presidential candidate, and the judges of the election commission blocked its first choice, Mr. Shater. The Brotherhood sought to dominate a constitutional assembly, and the court struck it down. And the standoff culminated in the parliamentary dissolution and a string of official statements from judges and other officials that appeared to poison the atmosphere against the Brotherhood on the eve of the election.
Now it is unclear if the two sides can return to their earlier accord, in part because neither one trusts the other. But on Saturday afternoon, the election commission announced that it would hold a news conference on Sunday to discuss the election results, leading many here to suspect at least some breakthrough.