The Future of Tunisian Democracy When France’s fledgling democrats convened their legislature under its newly written constitution, in 1791, they soon grew divided over how to proceed. Louis XVI was still on the throne, and a debate began over whether to try to transfer power slowly, through reforms that would leave room for monarchy, or more quickly, through revolution; the schism was reflected in the physical disposition of the chamber where they met, conservatives on the right, radicals on the left. Many democracies since then have similarly divided themselves: it is a post-revolutionary rite of passage. On Wednesday, official results from Tunisia’s first parliamentary elections under its new constitution appeared to confirm that just such a cleavage is emerging. Nidaa Tounes, a new party that unites old-regime partisans and other anti-Islamist politicians, defeated its rival, the Muslim Brotherhood-allied Ennahdha party, taking eighty-five seats to Ennahdha’s sixty-nine in the two-hundred-seventeen-seat legislature. (The remaining seats went to smaller parties, which will likely ally with one side or the other.) Turnout was lower than in 2011, when the country voted on the makeup of the Constituent Assembly charged with drafting its new constitution, but international observers praised the elections as free, fair, and transparent, and the Islamist party duly recognized the victor. (George Packer wrote about the Tunisian election this week.) In 2011, the results favored Ennahdha. Following the overthrow that year of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, who had plundered the Tunisian economy and silenced dissent for more than two decades, the party took thirty-five per cent of the vote—not an overwhelming level of support, but far ahead of its challengers. Ennahdha had played only a marginal role in the uprising that unseated Ben Ali, which saw more than two hundred protesters lose their lives, but it had a long history of being oppressed by the regime. This history helped it to win decisive influence in the Constituent Assembly, which also served as Tunisia’s interim legislature. During Ennahdha’s years in power, the country witnessed the assassinations of two secularist politicians, the exodus of thousands of young men to wage jihad in Syria, and a weakening economy. The government tried to create make-work jobs, but unemployment remained stubbornly high, and inflation rose. An Ennahdha member led the newly formed Ministry of Transitional Justice, but few convictions of regime criminals resulted. Meanwhile, ad-hoc citizen’s brigades, calling themselves Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution—never explicitly avowed by Ennahdha, but widely believed to be at least tacitly encouraged—clashed, sometimes violently, with those that they took to be counterrevolutionary. When a protest movement formed following the second assassination, in July, 2013, a months-long standoff ensued, culminating in the party handing over power to a nonpartisan government. Ennahdha had undone itself; to win election, Nidaa Tounes had only to campaign as its opposite. As Le Figaro noted in October, the former Prime Minister Béji Caïd Essebsi’s rallying cry throughout the campaign was “Not voting for Nidaa is voting for Ennahda.” With the results in favor of Nidaa, the two sides of Tunisia’s political aisle will now settle into their seats: on one side, the Islamists and their self-proclaimed commitment to revolutionary ideals; on the other, the resurgent old guard and its more secular vision for society. In the wake of the elections, foreign media—especially the French—have focussed in particular on the religious schism between the two parties. Martine Gozlan, of the left-leaning Marianne magazine, who was relentlessly critical of Ennahdha during its time in power, waxed jubilant in a column entitled “Tunisia Votes Secular!” “Deserted hotels with jasmine stained by blood, dreams assassinated,” she wrote. The “Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood has paid the price for it. And good riddance!” While other outlets were less hyperbolic, they, too, framed the result as a victory for secularism. The return of members of Ben Ali’s regime has received less attention. Nidaa Tounes’s candidate list contains many former partisans from the regimes of Habib Bourguiba, who was President from 1957 until 1987, and Ben Ali, who succeeded him. Among these partisans is the party’s patrician leader, Essebsi, who is eighty-seven, and who fulfilled key roles under Bourguiba, including interior and defense minister, over the course of three decades. Essebsi has been accused of overseeing the systematic use of torture, though the current statute of limitations for torture-related crimes in Tunisia means that he cannot be prosecuted. Members of Ennahdha tend to view Nidaa’s victory through this prism. Said Ferjani, a spokesperson for the party, told me that although Ennahdha has accepted the results as the will of the people, the vote represents a return of the regime “through the back door.” “Whether the old regime is going to behave according to the new constitution which is in place and according to democratic instincts, it remains to be seen,” he said. The trouble with the division between the two parties is that it is more a product of historical circumstance—the Islamist party’s history of opposition to the regime, Nidaa’s history of collaboration with it—than a reflection of Tunisians’ actual concerns. In a Pew survey released in October, ninety-six per cent of those polled said that “improved economic conditions” were “very important for Tunisia’s future,” the highest score of any of the several options. And while a wide majority believed that Tunisian law should “follow the values and principles of Islam,” less than half considered the participation of religious parties in elections to be important. In Tunisia, like many countries that suffered from the global recession of 2008 and saw high levels of unemployment in its wake, the economy matters most. Every party’s campaign included talk of job creation and encouraging investment, but, if you asked any voter, politician, or political analyst what the real differences between the parties were on economic policy, they would be hard-pressed to cite specifics. Tunisians did not go to the polls to choose higher or lower taxes, stronger or weaker unions, better integration of the informal economy or an elimination of it, though they doubtless care about these things. Instead, they were largely presented with a choice of what they were more afraid of: Nidaa and the spectre of the old regime, or Ennahdha, the party of “extremists,” as one Nidaa leader described it. “You have sort of proxy issues. You have rhetoric which masks other issues. All of the Tunisian parties talked a lot about the economy, without really presenting interesting new ideas in their platforms. The parties don’t represent well-defined socioeconomic classes or interests,” said William Lawrence, a professor who specializes in the Arab Maghreb at George Washington University. This failure to address the fundamental concerns of the electorate is perhaps why almost a million people who voted in 2011 chose not to show up at polling stations this year—a large number in a country with a population of just under eleven million. The decline is unsurprising in light of another figure from the Pew survey: sixty-two per cent of Tunisians said that they would prefer a stable autocracy to an unstable democracy. “The vast majority of Tunisians have no faith in any of the political parties,” Lawrence said. A successful election in an Arabic-speaking country is nothing to take for granted. With Egypt returning to dictatorship and new horrors reported daily in Syria and Iraq, it can seem almost like a miracle. The world wants to believe in Tunisian democracy, but this won’t mean much if Tunisians are losing faith in it themselves.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 06:20:15 +0000
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