In new Egypt, politics are still local

In Tanta, a city of more than 400,000 in the heart of Egypt's lush Nile Delta, post-revolution politics still largely depends on personal relationships and solving local problems, rather than ideology.

Young revolutionary independents face an uphill battle with little money and organization behind them. Amal Abdoul Yazid, who has run unsuccessfully for parliament five times as an independent, has now joined with the 92-year-old Wafd Party, one of Egypt's longstanding if often co-opted opposition groups.

Yazid, a former district council member, is hitting the streets in and around Tanta to remind potential voters of her campaign.

But like all the others, she'll convince the community she can solve their problems. People are used to decades of rule by the ousted regime's National Democratic Party, and outside of Cairo and Alexandria, the concept of political pluralism is novel. In Tanta, where much of the population farms for a living, they have a diminishing Nile and old, broken agricultural policies with which to contend.

Al Jazeera's Jane Arraf reports from Tanta.