I was very fortunate to receive a guest post on Tunisia’s 2014 parliamentary and presidential elections from Tom Cui, who knows Tunisia and its politics inside and out.
Map of Tunisia (source: ezilon)
Parliamentary and Presidential elections were held in Tunisia over the past two months, marking the first elections under the new Constitution passed in early 2014. Elections to the Assembly of the Representatives of the People took place on October 26. Elections for the Presidency took place on November 23, with a runoff on December 21.
Seats in the Assembly are allocated on a proportional basis; specifically, Tunisia uses a closed-list, multiple-constituency proportional representation system using highest averages. For electoral purposes, Tunisia’s 24 governorates are divided into 27 regional constituencies, in addition to another 6 for Tunisian expatriates in various countries. The Presidential election is a replicate of the French format; a first round is held with all candidates, and the top two scorers face off in the second. Both the Assembly and the President are elected for five years.
Historical Context
The Republic of Tunisia is a nation of ten million people, spanning no more than a thousand kilometres on either side. Tucked between Algeria and Libya, the nation still has all the features of other North African states: a varied geography from mountains to the Saharan desert and an overwhelmingly Arab Muslim population. And, since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi at the end of 2010, Tunisians have ousted former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, rewrote their constitution and transitioned into democracy.
As far as international elections go, Tunisia’s may be among this year’s most dramatic. The country is hailed as the Arab Spring’s one success story, home to peaceful transition instead of coups and civil war. Without a careful look at Tunisian history, however, a reader may point Tunisia’s success on pure luck, or the natural outcome of an “educated, westernized” people. Such explanations are unhelpful.
Before interpreting Tunisia’s transition and current political landscape, we must expand on two key ideas rarely mentioned in the foreign press:
The Tunisian state’s institutions are distinct from those in other Arab countries. To put it simply, Tunisia does not have a semi-independent military (like in Egypt or maybe Yemen), is not bound up in clear sectarian divides (like in Iraq or Syria), and may have most closely emulated the French bureaucracy out of its former colonies. The old regime in Tunisia was not responsible or representative by most means, but the institutional history has gravitated Tunisian politics toward the role of “The State”.
Tunisia has significant regional divisions, and any conflict or political divides between regions did not pop into being right after the Revolution. They are the results of decades of broken promises by and protests against a centralized state that often tried to suppress dissidents. Nor is there a simple division between North and South, but rather of different sections of society still trying to figure out how politics can resolve their problems.
What follows is a rather lengthy overview of modern Tunisian history that emphasizes the above points. Some key takeaways will be repeated in later sections.
The Bourguiba Years
While Tunisian history go back quite a ways (starting from Arab occupation in the 9th century, or even from the Carthaginian Empire’s beginnings), the history of the Tunisian Republic begins in the middle of the 20th. Tunisia’s independence movement caught steam in the thirties, as a wave of Tunisians born under the French protectorate took to protest and resistance. Under the protectorate, the dynasty which ruled the country as the Bey of Tunis retained a degree of autonomy while privileging French business and investment. By the fifties, however, a coalition of union leaders and socialist leaders forced independence in 1956. The same leftists who were the vanguard of the revolution abolished the monarchy and declared a republic in 1957.
By this time, the Tunisian state had a clear leader: Habib Bourguiba. President for thirty years, he defined the modern Tunisian state and its secular, westernized appearance. That would be, of course, a very sanitized version of history.
One of the first independence leaders to radicalize, his ascension to state leader involved tightening control over his Neo-Destour party, seeking to coopt labour and civic forces and purged fellow leaders who did not adopt his agenda of immediate secularization and westernisation. Fraught with fears of counterrevolution, he declared Tunisia a one-party state (ruled by the now-renamed Socialist Destourian Party [PSD] ) in the sixties and built up a formidable security apparatus.
In terms of policy, Bourguiba was a socialist with dreams of appendaging Arab characteristics to the system. A fierce nationalist, slavish to creating a Tunisian identity, he nevertheless wanted to contort the country’s Muslim and Arab culture into an European look. Among his achievements include rights for women, up to banning the hijab; the creation of a public education and health sector; state provision of contraception; the evacuation of all French occupation in the country; state control of religious authorities; and a campaign to suppress Islamic practice opposed to development.
As far as “Bourguiba moments” go, the most memorable may be when he discouraged fasting during Ramadan by drinking orange juice on public television. His strain of deritualized Islam remains readily seen in the country’s coastal, richer areas.
This history is, again, growing sanitized. Economically, Tunisia lurched into its first crisis. An ill-formed farm collectivization scheme in the late sixties lead to chaos and protests in central Tunisia. With collectivization’s failure (and a successful purge of its proponents) Bourguiba changed course and appointed Hédi Nouira, a market liberal who opened up trade with Europe.
The economy did improve, and this event is indicative; for all of the old regime’s faults, it did produce talent, some of which was noticed by leadership as long as it was aimed to “modernize”. Bourguiba lacked great skill in domestic management, and consequently tasked the job to a growing Ministry. He was much more concerned with social policy, diplomacy and building a cult of personality around the nationalist movement, with him as “Supreme Combattant.”
The second crisis came at the end of the seventies. Up to this point, Bourguiba’s PSD maintained its alliance with Tunisia’s general labour union, the UGTT, founded during the days of the independence movement and continually the country’s strongest civic force. Tensions began to form with further liberalization between the UGTT, the employers’ union and the PSD.
A decisive split led to a general strike in 1978—so called “Black Thursday”—turning to violent suppression in Tunis and imprisonment for organizers. This was followed by an armed insurrection in the mining region of Gafsa, purportedly funded by Libya and Algeria.
Bourguiba, by this time allied to France and the U.S., used the West’s military funding to maintain his authority. It came at a difficult time; as a nationalist first and foremost, Bourguiba steered the country against pan-Arabism and toward an equal partnership with the West. (This is not to say that he was not pro-Palestine or antagonistic to the Arab world, only that he was hard to pinpoint.)
In doing so, he has gone against the grain of Gaddafi’s Libya, but also those in Southern Tunisia who have never surrendered the ideas of Salah Ben Youssef, who professed greater Arab unity against all colonial forces. It also comes on the coattails of the Iranian Revolution, and political Islam did not waste time reaching those alienated under Bourguiba’s state.
Though much of this history is undocumented, enough claim that Bourguiba ruled up to this point on a regime of intimidation and torture. His ruthless streak had already resulted in total command of his party, and by the eighties he was willing to confront any resistance with arms. To put it less politely, his grip on reality was losing hold.
As a sign of appeasement, multiparty democracy was announced to be reinstated in 1981. But, since Bourguiba and his state still determined which parties were legal, the newly authorized parties were all socialist in nature (including the Tunisian Communist Party, the liberal Movement of Social Democrats, and the collectivist Party of Popular Unity). Under no chances was the greatest threat to the state approved: the Islamic Tendency Movement, led by a well-travelled professor called Rashid Ghannouchi. What awaited these Islamists was a show trial that locked them away in prison.
The worst was yet to come: Tunisia’s economy remained mostly state-controlled, and by the mid-eighties faced a balance-of-payments and public debt crises. An IMF plan drawn up required an end to subsidies for grain products, which obviously meant more expensive bread. To Tunisians away from the coast or in Tunis’s poorer quarters, this would be fatal.
The result was the “bread riots” of 1984, which involved protest and crackdown in the South, the interior region of Kasserine and Tunis. There was no turning back from this point; the Tunisian state looked like it faced a pincer attack from leftists and Islamist movements. Ghannouchi’s party has now established itself, only for its leaders to be arrested again and sentenced to death or hard labour.
The Tunisian Ministry, having mostly been chosen at Bourguiba’s leisure, turned unstable. Prime Ministers fell as they were blamed for the growing social unrest. One man, however, continued to rise in the ranks; Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, a military man who lead the crackdowns on protests in 1978 and 1984. Bourguiba appointed him as Interior Minister in 1986, then Prime Minister in 1987. The President had now chosen him as his destined successor; Ben Ali, however, moved first.
The Ben Ali years
On November 7, 1987, Ben Ali took the airwaves with an announcement. After summoning doctors who signed a report on Bourguiba’s senility, the Prime Minister has detained the President and assumed executive control. This is the only military coup that Tunisia has seen, though it ranks among the world’s most discreet. Bourguiba lived the rest of his life under house arrest in various places until his death in 2000 (when he was entombed in a very ornate mausoleum he had built in 1963).
Ben Ali started out with a reformer’s look; he promised multiparty democracy and a liberalized politics, and to his credit he never did reinstate single-party rule. Under him, the PSD was transformed into the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD). Officials in the MTI, despised and condemned to death under Bourguiba, were released. That did not mean they were allowed to organize themselves.
Open elections in 1989 showed that Islamists were a considerable force in the South and Tunis, even if Ghannouchi’s now-retitled Ennahda Movement could not officially contest. This was enough of a sign for Ben Ali to escalate a crackdown on all Islamist activity, and they were continuously accused of fostering violence and plotting to subvert the state. The police force was bloated to about 150000 in the early nineties, twice as many police officers per capita as the U.K. Ghannouchi and others were fortunate enough to flee to exile in London.
From thereon, Ben Ali ruled with Bourguiba’s degree of ruthlessness. Both presidents were stridently anti-Islamist, anti-pan-Arabist, anti-Caliphate or anything of the sort. While Ben Ali took care to no longer mention Bourguiba and erase his cult of personality, the idea of a secular Tunisian nationalism remained a powerful tool. Ben Ali also sought to capture civil society, and he did achieve some success by fostering close ties with the UGTT, the employers’ union, as well as other NGOs and organizations.
On one hand, the new Tunisian state began to privatize and entwine itself in free-trade treaties, increasing industrial production and developing services and tourism. The country was an IMF poster-child, not to mention an engine of talent. On the other hand, Ben Ali’s security apparatus cracked down on any dissidents to the regime.
Torture was an obvious fact (examples including electrocution, waterboarding, gang beatings and rape) cast upon not only Islamists but any who protested against Tunisia’s widening income disparity. While the coast, already developed during French colonisation and the Bourguiba years, reaped the rewards, those in the South and Interior remained unemployed or worked in more intensive and dangerous professions.
Relations with the West only improved with time; Tunisia became a close ally of France and the U.S., who approved of its modernized bureaucracy and its hardline attitude towards political Islam. Support only grew after 9/11 and the emergence of Salafism, Al-Qaeda and other jihadist movements. Tunisian expatriates became a common sight in Canada, Western Europe or the Gulf States, either descendants of a new middle class or interior workers driven to build a better life. Compared to Algeria (mired in civil war), or any of the more nebulous Arab dictatorships, Tunisia seemed like a good place to be.
The flip side to this economic liberalization was widespread corruption and nepotism. The RCD, which came to dominate political life, was already the main channel through which educated Tunisians passed through to start business or enter public service. The UGTT and other professional unions became lead by Ben Ali stalwarts, though the situation began to change after the 21st century.
At the top of this network was Ben Ali, elected to multiple presidential terms without competition. Whereas Bourguiba had his rhetoric and vanity projects, Ben Ali’s flaw was corruption. With Leila Trabelsi, his second wife, Ben Ali gifted their relatives and other close contacts with control of privatized state corporations. Civic leaders were rewarded with patronage for their cooperation as the Ben Ali family purportedly divested billions of Euros from the country.
While Tunisia was a nominal democracy with opposition parties, they had power only on paper. Ben Ali never faced any serious opposition to his rule, nor was he stopped when he removed any semblance of term limits in 2002. The UGTT had been pacified, and a major crackdown on Ennahda in the early nineties left political Islam without a clear direction. Independent press was nonexistent, and even religious radio was owned by a Ben Ali family member.
To add insult to injury, Ben Ali allowed for a segment of parliament to be reserved for opposition parties while the RCD claimed every constituency. These were the same leftist parties legalized under Bourguiba, along with some liberal ones, and whose leaders openly praised Ben Ali’s rule for further modernizing the country.
The period of political competition and turmoil during the later Bourguiba years, however, created a generation of “secular opposition” who did not cooperate with Ben Ali’s façade while also keeping distance from Islamists. Examples of these figures include lawyers Mustapha Ben Jaafar and Ahmad Néjib Chebbi, communists and organizers Hamma Hammami and Chokri Belaid, and human rights activist Moncef Marzouki.
Many of them were students in the seventies, disenchanted with Bourguiba and Ben Ali. Some looked to liberalism and human rights for the solution, and others to Marxism-Leninism, Baathism and other forbidden pan-Arab thought. Regardless, they were allowed to remain in the country but were frequently detained and tortured when international watchers looked away.
Even if Ben Ali became more accepting of Islam not under state supervision by the new millennium, public expression of the faith was still a subversive act. After 9/11 and the spread of jihadism, Ben Ali had another excuse to rubber-stamp an “anti-terrorism bill” which deprived due process even further.
Far from stopping with terrorists, the regime began persecuting students and activists who learned to spread news of corruption and destitution through the internet. For what it’s worth, jihadism had become a significant factor in the country; as political Islam was suppressed, anger among the Tunisian underclass found violence as a channel.
Thus began the slow fall of Ben Ali’s centralized state. While it tried to cover up terrorist attacks on the southern island of Djerba and in Soliman, a city close to Tunis, the news became known and condemned by all sectors of Tunisian society.
In 2008, with echoes of unrest in 1984, miners relieved from phosphate mines in the southern region of Gafsa rose up to protest unemployment and discrimination. The movement spread across the region and continued for a month, though it received a mixed reaction from opposition figures. Ben Ali’s heavy-handed response—calling in the army to intervene and arrest—changed minds, who now decry state actions.
In a few years’ time, more Tunisians faced the same problem Gafsa’s miners encountered. The financial crisis hit Tunisia as hard as the rest of the world, playing out alongside a rise in world commodity prices. By 2010, GDP per capita was on the decline, worsening an already troubling degree of inequality in the country. Tunisia, with a burgeoning youth population, had no jobs to provide to these newly educated people. At the same time, the UGTT, Islamists and opposition figures were regrouping, as well as other Tunisians who received news of protests in the South.
The rest is history. Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor in the south-central but highly undeveloped region of Sidi Bouzid, set himself aflame after state officials seized his business. News of Bouazizi spread across the youth of Sidi Bouzid, and protests spread. By the end of the year, protests have spread to neighbouring Gafsa, Kasserine and Gabes. As the South rose up, so did the agricultural Northwest and Tunis itself.
The revolution by then captured the passion of youth, as well as the older generation of activists, union leaders, lawyers and professionals. General strikes took place across the country, and Ben Ali’s only response was to shuffle state officials and promise policy changes. By this time, protests were even taking place on the coast and in the Northern port of Bizerte, all with the goal of taking down any traces of the RCD.
On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali ordered new legislative elections and a state of emergency. While police have fought off protesters in Tunis, military generals refused to follow Ben Ali’s instructions and sided in support of revolution. With the intention of protecting himself, Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia the same day. He was lucky to not have been arrested the way others in his family were; he has yet to return.
After the Revolution
This is as good a time as ever to realize Ben Ali’s ouster is not enough. Though the dictators are gone, the state they have built remains; one which is overly centralized, persecutory, dominated by cronyism, unresponsive to concerns outside those of an aged elite, and whose violence has fueled a generation of Islamist radicals. The Revolution’s main phase was not over until the RCD was expelled from the state, and protests continued unabated.
Ben Ali’s last Prime Minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, was number three in the party and a noted economist. Noting the power vacuum, he declared himself as acting president on television. This lasted for about three days before Fouad Mebazaa, Parliamentary speaker and loyal RCD official, was constitutionally invested as acting president.
Ghannouchi was reappointed and formed a “government of national unity,” comprising members of the UGTT and major opposition figures (like Ben Jaafar and Néjib Chebbi). The problem: most of these new ministers refused to serve in the same cabinet with RCD stalwarts. With military support, civil society and protesters now engaged in a general strike that will not stop until a RCD ministry is removed.
The strike continued for a month, despite a government reshuffle by Ghannouchi that replaced most RCD officials. Any plans for a single transition government leading the country to new elections became quite unlikely; protesters demanded Ghannouchi’s resignation, the suspension of parliament and immediate investigation into crimes perpetrated by the Ben Ali state. The West, by this time, must have also grown worried; though not everyone was as bad as French politicians in voicing support for the old regime, America risked losing an ally and Italy did not want Tunisian refugees swarming to its shores.
Finally, on February 17, 2011, Ghannouchi resigned and was replaced by Béji Caid Essebsi, a former old regime official (but we’ll get to more about him later). He composed a government of technocrats, not all of which was friendly to an insider like Essebsi, but which was enough to keep the state functioning until elections to a “Constituent Assembly” tasked with rewriting the national constitution. Delays and errors in voter registration led to a late election date of October 23.
The next eight months were a time for social change. Since the press in Tunisia had an anemic presence, Tunisians plugged into the internet, social networks, and the radio. Bloggers and reporters in the country, already a presence before the Revolution, were now free to spread the news about life throughout the country, as well as engage in debate.
The situation had its absurdities: Ben Ali’s state of emergency was retained throughout, and stayed until after the elections this year. The wave of liberalisation was also met with police brutality, and in parts of the interior continued unabated from Ben Ali’s time.
With the Revolution also came something close to freedom of religion. For the first time in many years, Tunisians can wear the hijab in public or engage in prayer without fear of persecution. Add this to an already latent Islamic radicalism, and religious diversity exploded. The division is as much a regional and class one as it is religious: westernized middle classes, French-speaking and educated, would glimpse in public or hear of poor Tunisians who grew their beards and dressed themselves in robes.
This first wave engaged much debate, and from a year onwards Islamists used their freedom to decry blasphemy or sinfulness. It would be fair to describe it as a battle between Islamists and secular forces in the following way: both sides want freedom of expression for their ideas, but find a decent portion of the other side’s ideas intolerable and necessarily forbidden.
The cultural debate, nonetheless, never last as long as foreigners would think they do. Tunisia’s biggest concerns remain chronic unemployment and unequal development. Citizens of Gabes in the South may be religiously conservative, but they also want a solution to a pollution crisis that stemmed from their petrochemicals sector. The revolution heralded instability and a steep fall in tourism, which made a genuine economic recovery even more unlikely. With time, the discourse transitioned to more substantive issues.
As parties were legalized in preparation for elections, the opposition figures from the eighties returned. Back were Ghannouchi, Marzouki and the Ennahda leadership, sharing the spotlight with secular figures. By this time, one would notice that they are all quite old, ranging from the seventies to the late fourties (as is the case for some human rights activists). This is a natural consequence of exile and detainment for twenty years, followed by the one party which absorbed young talent—the RCD—declared as illegal. There are signs of division between the political class and the youth who started the Revolution.
Elections did take place on October, and their results have been covered on this blog already. To summarize, Ennahda used its seven months between legalisation and the election well; it was best suited to reconstruct ties in the South or elsewhere, and build a truly national organization that turned out the vote.
Ennahda alone won 89 seats, or more than two-fifths of the Assembly. Behind them were the Congress for the Republic, led by Moncef Marzouki and composed of various regional activists, running on a platform of human rights, liberalism and a record untainted by regime collaboration. Then there was the Popular Petition, led by expatriate press magnate Hachmi Hamdi, whose lavish welfare guarantees yielded him control of the interior and of his native Sidi Bouzid. Then there is Ben Jaafar’s Forum for Liberties (Ettakatol), Néjib Chebbi’s Progressive Democratic Party, and other non-Islamist parties with variation in participation in Ben Ali’s sham democracy.
Ghannouchi is known to be a moderate in his own party, favouring coalition-building with non-Islamist forces and appearing as compromising as is necessary. With this idea in place, Ennahda formed a coalition government with CPR and Ettakatol in a power-sharing arrangement, known as the “Troika”. CPR’s leader, Moncef Marzouki, was appointed interim president, and Ettakatol’s Ben Jaafar presided over the Assembly. This caused rebuke from supporters of the secular parties, but an Islamist government was formed with Hamadi Jebali, Ghannouchi’s right-hand man, as Prime Minister.
The government was tasked to improve Tunisians’ livelihoods while the Assembly was intended to draft a constitution. On both tasks, it is only fair to say both institutions did poorly. The Assembly was composed of such a heterogeneous group of individuals—not to mention parties united perhaps only by a common occupation in the work opposing Ben Ali’s regime—that consensus was highly unlikely.
Ennahda is a prime example; composed of members of parliament from North and South, some conciliatory and others unmovable in their support for an Islamic legal code (“Sharia”), the party would consider multiple constitutional articles, have their deliberations leaked, face controversy and have to withdraw.
Three ideas that come to mind are the decision to exclude any mention of Sharia in the constitution, a draft article that defined women’s role as “in the family,” and whether to implement a parliamentary or presidential system. More extreme examples are the CPR and Popular Petition, which totally imploded as the Assembly rolled on.
On the government’s performance, the Troika was not remotely close to ensuring sustained, equitable growth. The government itself is not entirely to blame; Tunisia’s internal consumption is already skewed, and demand from Europe that should drive growth vanished with the Eurozone crisis.
What the government faces looks like a repeat of the eighties; the country faces a current account deficit, falling foreign investment, a lacking rebound in tourism and a widening budget deficit (rumoured to be about 8% of GDP). The country looks on track to be as sclerotic as Egypt—and not to mention inflation has never stopped outpacing wages. It could be blamed, however, for a lack of authority; there have not been enough orders from Tunis to resolve what those in the South and the Interior have protested over for decades.
It took late 2012, though, for the stakes to be raised and the political field set up for what we see today. First, it was by this time that Essebsi—the regime stalwart and interim Prime Minister—stepped back into politics, and properly organized his party, Nidaa Tounes or the Call for Tunisia. Second, the recognized jihadist threat that has existed for the past decade had began to act.
There was Ansar al-Charia, a public organization responsible for a media campaign calling for Islamic rule. There were radicalized mosques across the country, left unregulated by the state. Then there were the attacks; on the American embassy in September and against Nidaa Tounes or other regime officials.
The biggest casualty was in February 2013, when Chokri Belaid—a lawyer, fierce secularist and leftist, earlier mentioned—was shot in front of his house. This assassination lead to the greatest anti-government protests since 2011, as the spectre of Islamism threatening national security—a tactic used by the old regime for so many decades—lurched into view. The UGTT, a much more organized force since the Revolution, called for a national general strike as a sign of resistance.
Jebali quickly announced his resignation and proposed another government of technocrats that will ease the transition between new elections, but now he faced a schism within the party over the extent of conceding to regime officials. After some deliberation, Jebali did resign and was instead replaced by Ali Laareydh, another prominent moderate in the party.
The lines were drawn. With economic development, Islam and national identity and national security on the line, Tunisia’s politics coalesced into two sides. On one side was the “Troika,” mostly Ennahda but also what remained of the CPR and Ettakatol. On the other side were the UGTT, the disaffected middle class and suddenly Essebsi, whose record as administrator stood him out among the rest of the accepted political class. With one of their leaders dead, the Tunisian far-left also entered the fray. Their spokesperson, Hamma Hammami, became the most stridently anti-Islamist political figure and captured hearts with it.
A second assassination took place in July 2013, when Mohamed Brahmi—a communist from Sidi Bouzid—was shot in suburban Tunis. Right after, the Tunisian military began a bloody engagement with terrorist camps in the Chaambi Mountains, to the west of Tunisia. This time, the Troika’s opposition was prepared for a sustained campaign.
Those sympathetic to the cause, from youth to old, occupied grounds in front of the Assembly in Bardo and called for the resignation of the Ennahda government. Essebsi also claimed the Constituent Assembly had outlasted its mandate, and therefore had to be abolished. A spade of assemblypeople withdrew their seats to catch the wave. The message: as we are witness to the terrorism that has taken over our country, we no longer have any confidence in the Troika or the Assembly’s incompetence.
Coming at a dark time in Arab Spring nations—a counter-coup in Egypt, civil war in Syria and civil unrest elsewhere—Tunisians feared the democratic transition’s collapse and total chaos. Both sides have turned to accusing the other of conspiracy, violence and creating havoc for political gain. The Islamists were supposedly in cahoots with armed terrorist groups and friendly with them. The opposition was supposedly controlled by RCD operatives readying for a counter-coup.
With so much to lose, the UGTT partnered with the employer’s union, the National Bar Association and the Tunisian Human Rights League to form a quartet of mediators. Representatives from the Troika and its opposition, now structured under a “National Salvation Front,” would engage in dialogue with the goal of agreeing on an interim government and ratification of a constitution.
The dialogue began in October and was rocky from the start. The parties met rarely and with great tension, and close to the end of the year it seemed on the verge of collapse. Yet, by January 2014, the parties came to a miraculous compromise, where Mehdi Jomaa, an Ennahda leader, will assume the Prime Ministership over a technocratic cabinet.
Later that month, the Assembly nearly unanimously ratified a proposed constitution, which established a semi-presidential system and has a comprehensive list of rights: to life and dignity, from torture, to free access of information, to work and unionize, to equality between sexes and for children, and so forth. It became one of the world’s most progressive—and with no mention of Sharia.
Since then, the Jomaa government has focused on national security, working in collaboration with the army. The threat of jihadism dominates the news, particularly as the situation deteriorated in Syria (i.e. the ISIS problem). Tunisia is now known for sending the greatest number of fighters to the Islamic State, never mind its internal strife. The economic situation is stable but still on the downside, though Jomaa’s cabinet has and cannot enact major domestic policy.
The state of emergency remains in effect: Tunisia’s police, unreformed since the revolution, has free rein to persecute and arrest in the name of law of order. The old regime’s power players continue to test Ennahda and likewise, seeing which side would blink first. It is under this context that the second Tunisian political campaign since independence took place.
Parliamentary — The Parties
During the Constituent Assembly’s tenure, a variety of state models were debated. Ennahda began with support for a parliamentary system, where the executive is elected by Parliament and will be dismissed if the chamber loses confidence in it. On the other end were calls for “separation of powers,” or a return to Tunisia’s former presidential model. A president would be elected and have a fixed mandate, but there would be a legislative body and an independent judiciary.
In extreme cases, both models would foster authoritarianism. An executive with a parliamentary majority and total control of his caucus possesses control over most administrative responsibilities. A presidential system is prone to the president subverting the Constitution or locked in conflict with it (like the US). The track record, at least, bodes worse for the presidential system, creators of dictatorships in Latin America and South America.
The consensual model mimics the French model, a strange creation encoded in the midst of political crisis and Marshal Charles de Gaulle’s return as national saviour. The Constitution provides many powers to the president: a fixed mandate, control of internal security, foreign affairs and defense, and abilities to declare a state of emergency, appoint the judiciary and dissolve the legislative body.
What it denies is exclusive control over government formation; the President appoints a Prime Minister, who must maintain the confidence of the Assembly of the Representatives of the People. Nothing stops the Assembly from only accepting a Prime Minister from the President’s rival party, and the intention is for “cohabitation” to occur. The Assembly also has the power of impeachment, activated if two-thirds of the chamber agrees the President has violated the Constitution.
The bottom line is that elections to the Assembly have consequences, and the President should achieve some consensus outside of his party in order to form government. But the President remains the country’s supreme political figure, a result Tunisia’s opposition but personalist parties want and Ennahda opposes. The worst case is that the President becomes as dominating as Bourguiba, who can shuffle his cabinet now and then to buy off support in the Assembly: how much different would that be from the seventies?
HARAKAT ENNAHDA (THE RENAISSANCE MOVEMENT) — Whether in or out of power, no party incites as much passion and speculation as Ennahda (excluding the RCD here) Formed as the Islamic Tendency Movement in 1981, the party was the idea of two educated professionals: Rashid Ghannouchi, a philosophy professor, and Abdelfettah Mourou, a lawyer turned religious mystic. Their party was the closest thing Tunisia had to political Islam since the days of Ben Youssef in the fifties, and Ghannouchi held Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as an inspiration.
Subject to intense persecution under the Bourguiba regime, when its leaders were captured and almost condemned to death, its leaders were released by Ben Ali as he seized power. Once candidates associated with Ennahda scored above expectations in 1989 elections, however, Ben Ali lead another crackdown that incapacitated the movement for the next two decades. After the revolution, Ghannouchi and other founding members returned and rebuilt the party’s foundation, shocking some observers with its score in the National Constituent Assembly elections.
Ennahda, at its heart, is a big-tent party—it is devoted to political Islam, but this allows for a wide range of opinions. Unlike other variants of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ennahda has an organizational structure which is “operationally democratic”. Party decisions are made by a Shura Council of 24 members, composed of party elders and even a few young leaders.
More strikingly, the party does not allow itself to be dominated by one personality. It is quite possibly the most “parliamentary” of Tunisia’s parties, with a clear structure from top to local branches, public debate between factions and caucus organization.
Under Ghannouchi’s leadership, the party has tried its hardest to play by the rules of the game. It has a large share of female lawmakers (though near-zero leaders) and promised to work in coalition with secular parties, leading the “Troika” government from 2011 to 2014. It has launched an offensive against jihadist and radical forces, though without much success.
After a troubled administration and protests against its rule, Ennahda made a decisive shift when it compromised with opposition forces in a national dialogue. In a blow to the party’s right, Ennahda has conceded on Sharia law in the Constitution, a full parliamentary system and ceded Ministry control to technocrats representative of the old regime.
For the party’s supporters—scattered throughout the South, near the ancient city of Kairouan, or among the lower classes in Northern cities—Ennahda is a movement that defends their values from decades of oppression. It is hard to overstate how well-established Ennahda is in the South, seeing as most of its leaders are from there, it is in contact with prominent Southern leaders and that central government in Tunis has widely ignored their problems.
For the party’s opponents, including national media and the coastal middle class who benefitted under the old regime, Ennahda is a cultish group with unknown origins and intentions. Since most of its leaders were in exile or tortured, they lack government experience and showed this during the Troika government. Some step further and accuse them of conspiring to assassinate anti-Islamists. Unfortunately for the party, it has had isolated incidents where party members have sieged political enemies (though the number of Ennahda regional offices burnt down during the Troika years is greater).
In terms of actual policy, Ennahda is not too distinct from the Tunisian consensus. It is economically centrist, and its greater objective is to roll back Tunisia’s current form of centralist nationalism for a more Islamic and more diffuse state. In the meantime, the party needs to work out how they can survive in the long-term without abandoning the principles that gather it support among marginalized groups.
A slightly cheesy open-air Ennahda rally
NIDAA TOUNES (CALL FOR TUNISIA) — Formed in 2012 by former Prime Minister Béji Caid Essebsi, Nidaa Tounes has enjoyed an astonishing rise in public visibility. Through a series of strategic maneuvers, the party has become the principal opposition party to Ennahda, defining itself and pulling itself together through their opposition to political Islam.
The focus of the party is on Essebsi, who has decades of experience as a minister under Bourguiba and untainted by the drama that has riddled the Assembly and the younger political class; he makes grand speeches, make appearances on national TV and gives interviews to the foreign press.
That is not to say the party has not expanded, but that the focus is necessarily more “top-down” than other established ones. Conflicts exist between regional leaders and Essebsi over “parachuted” candidates, like a controversy over Essebsi picking his son to lead the list in the toss-up Tunis 1 constituency.
The party’s executive council is primarily from the developed coast, uniting former ministers, trade unionists and other leaders from established civil society (contrasted to, say, religious communities or Ennahda’s own networks). Leaders include Taieb Baccouche (secretary-general of the UGTT during the turbulent eighties), Mohamed Ennaceur (minister under Bourguiba’s liberal period), Mohsen Marzouk (international human rights lawyer), and Slim Chaker (economic bureaucrat under Ben Ali).
But—if Nidaa can accuse Ennahda of fostering terror—so can Islamists accuse Nidaa of being a safe house for discredited RCD officials post-revolution. There is some truth to this, moreso in southern Tunisia than anywhere else (and where some have died for their involvement). As far as parliamentary candidates go, however, Nidaa has not made any obvious mistakes.
Their list are lead by bureaucrats or lawyers, human rights activists (one or two defecting from the CPR), and businessmen (like Moncef Sellami, football team owner). Ideologically, these party members are nationalists, with a portion of unionists and a portion of leftists. It remains fair to say that the party has assembled a group of leaders who have done well under the old regime.
As another big tent party united by a cause—or an opposition—Nidaa’s survival is even more surprising. Part of its success must be due to Essebsi realizing this, and making sure that Nidaa leads any secular opposition against Ennahda. This was successful, as Essebsi formed the Union for Tunisia in the wake of Belaid’s assassination in February 2013. It became Nidaa who spoke for the movement, Nidaa who commented on anger against the Troika and Nidaa who approved of a compromise with Ennahda over the transition to a new constitution.
By summer 2014, Nidaa also had enough candidates and connections to make it on its own, spurning the Union altogether. In a way, the party chewed up those on the frontlines against Ben Ali’s regime and used them to its advantage.
Politically, Nidaa is also economically centrist and would like to reform the economy. Their vision of the state is unique—Essebsi spoke gravely about the collapse of national security in the country and the necessity of a strong state to support safety. Nidaa’s state is still the one envisioned by Bourguiba: nationalist, secular and rid of the reactionary parts of Islam. They wear this vision without shame, and has rode on a wave of nostalgia for the old regime.
A CGI Bourguiba head starting off a Nidaa rally
JABHA EL-SHA’ABIYA (POPULAR FRONT) — The Popular Front is not a party as it is a coalition of twelve leftists groups, running on joint regional lists for the elections. Members of these parties were caught in a dilemma; having failed to gain representation running separate lists in 2011, they witnessed the rise and fall of Ennahda and the resurgence of old regime forces, the same who have persecuted them for leftist seditious ideology. The best option was to unite.
The Popular Front’s ideology is not left in the same way that Nidaa or the UGTT is left—its component parties officially subscribe either to Marxist-Leninism or Arab nationalism. Major parties in the Popular Front are the Worker’s Party (led by Hamma Hammami, formerly the Workers’ Communist Party in Tunisia), a Marxist outfit; the Unified Democratic Patriots’ Party, the pan-Arab and anti-Zionist party of the assassinated Chokri Belaid; and the very straightforwardly titled Ba’ath Movement.
Ba’athism, Marxism and other far-left ideologies were viewed with equal suspicion in Bourguiba’s Tunisia, who viewed it as threats to Tunisia’s sovereignty. Under Ben Ali, many of these parties had to go underground, militant as they were. In the latter days of Ben Ali’s regime, they were also hard to categorize among Tunisia’s opposition; they stood out for their support of workers’ strikes in Gafsa’s phosphate mines, isolated from the rest of civil society, and is generally better received in the interior than on the coast.
After the deaths of two leaders (Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi), the Popular Front was thrown into the spotlight as the vanguard of the anti-Islamist movement. It is around this time that the coalition focused their platform on the denunciation of Ennahda, seeing the assassinations as a declaration of war. More critically, party leaders were willing to unite forces with Nidaa Tounes—the old regime!—in negotiations with the Troika, even if their participation was fleeting.
Coming into the election, members of the Popular Front continue to call for immediate action for law and order, suppressing political Islam, and a redistribution of wealth from the coast to the interior. Whereas the alliance takes a distinct position on free trade and collaboration with European institutions, in the media their anti-Islamist policy blends together with Nidaa’s. While Hammami, the coalition’s spokesperson and most prominent media figure, refuse any coalition with Nidaa, he can flip-flop in his opposition to Essebsi’s party. This has led to some tension.
AL MOTTAMAR MIN ‘AJLI AL-JUMHURIYYA (CONGRESS FOR THE REPUBLIC) — A party found by human rights lawyer Moncef Marzouki in 2001, the CPR is a wide coalition of activists from all corners of the country. Based off of its leader’s popularity, the party had a uniform vote distribution across the country and scored 29 seats from 29 constituencies. Its platform is generally leftist, calling for greater rights for all Tunisian citizens and a third-world foreign policy. More interestingly, of all the secular opposition it is the most welcoming to southern Tunisians. This is not due only to Marzouki’s Southern roots, but because his confidants also include prominent Southern figures.
The CPR had collapsed in the polls following 2013, and was not expected to repeat its electoral success. It is worth mentioning as a case study of a Tunisian political self-implosion. It has probably the greatest degree of North-South parity outside of Ennahda, while it is a personalist party held together by Marzouki’s success, similar to Nidaa Tounes. Once Marzouki was elected interim president and left party leadership, the CPR split up over its ideological divisions and lack of a coherent agenda.
After Marzouki’s departure, founding member Abderrayouf Ayadi was appointed secretary-general after delays, only to be stripped of his duties five months later after mocking Bourguiba on television and alienating most of his party. He took five Assembly members with him. Liberal Mohamed Abbou was named to replace him, but he quit as well and took three Assembly members with him after CPR ministers refused to quit after the Belaid assassination. A Marzouki confidant, Imed Daimi, then led the party, and could not stop members moving to Ettakatol, Nidaa Tounes or sitting as independents.
By the Assembly’s end, the CPR had 12 of its 29 elected members.
AL ITTIHAAD AL-WATANI AL-HOUR (FREE PATRIOTIC UNION) — The “UPL” is the brainchild of Slim Riahi, a Tunisian businessman who made a fortune dealing with Libyan oil (more on him later). Having tried to lead his party to victory upon return in 2011 and failed, Riahi waited a few more years to prepare a better campaign. He has bought Club Africain—one of Tunisia’s most popular football teams—and fused his party with other small liberal outfits in a search for staffers.
Riahi is called the Berlusconi of Tunisia for good reason (except he is not remotely as successful). His campaign simply involves pouring much of his own money into publicity; up to 5 million dinars (about 2 million Euros) was spent plastering his name across the country or in media. He has sucked up as much media time as he can imagine doing philanthropic acts, like paying for protesters’ medical bills. The UPL has also been noted for donating food to Tunisians, for whatever reasons one can imagine.
The ISIE can enforce campaign regulations this time, and Riahi’s massive 2011 publicity campaign would now be considered illegal. He seems to have played by the rules, focusing on canvassing on the ground in Tunis and environs. There are a few public rallies, but nothing as lavish as Essebsi’s.
What are the party’s policies? None of it is quite clear, absent a need for cleaner and more representative government. It pays lip service to the big issues, promising to eradicate terrorism and create exactly 422000 jobs. It does not appear to support welfare policies as lavish as another populist party who scored big in the 2011 election. The party also seems to prefer Nidaa over Ennahda, as made evident by Riahi’s statements throughout this campaign.
AFEK TOUNES (TUNISIAN ASPIRATION) — Afek is a conspicuously young party with a market liberal platform. Its leader, Yassine Brahim, works in finance and is 48 years old, making him one of the youngest party leaders. While it is distinct from Nidaa, the party has drifted closer to it over time; indeed, Afek’s leaders represent a display of young talent facilitated by the old regime’s liberalization. Their biggest catch has to be getting Hafedh Zouari, head of the Zouari industrial conglomerate, to lead one of their lists.
Some of its policies are rather specific: there are calls for increasing sports investment, higher education vouchers and a two-tiered public health care system. It remains frustratingly vague on the political Islam issue, but its cooperation with Nidaa and on-the-record opposition to the Troika says more than anything. The party markets itself to a coastal, white-collar base, and supporters may see more dynamism in Afek compared to other parties.
When the party was founded, there were accusations that its members had ties to the RCD, made by lawyers up to President Marzouki. These rumours no longer hold much sway, and Brahim is a popular media figure. The party seems to have a better grasp of social media advertising than most and even made a viral music video.
AL-JOUMHOURI (REPUBLICAN PARTY) — Joumhouri’s roots began in the Ben Ali era as the Progress Democratic Party (PDP), a socially liberal party led by Ahmed Néjib Chebbi. Having started out in politics as a skeptic of Bourguiba, Chebbi may have softened his views but retained harsh criticism of the old regime. Of the parties opposing Ben Ali but still not outlawed, the PDP was the most radical.
The PDP only gained about 4% of the vote in 2011’s election, and garnered 16 seats due to the highest averages electoral system. Though it was well funded and advertised substantially, it did not score substantially outside of the North and metro Tunis. Following the results, the PDP became the largest secular opposition to Ennahda; it tasked itself with the role of leading a united opposition to the Troika.
Al Joumhouri began as a merger between the PDP, Afek Tounes and other centrist figures. A wing of the PDP, led by eight assemblypeople not tied to Chebbi, already split in dissent. Unfortunately for the new party, the merger took place in April 2012, the same time that Essebsi first revealed his vision for Nidaa Tounes. What Chebbi admitted as his greatest strategic error was signing up with Nidaa Tounes to form the Union for Tunisia, an electoral alliance lead by Nidaa instead.
With Nidaa and Essebsi dominating the airwaves, Joumhouri began to fracture; Afek left the party in 2013 to pursue its own list. Nidaa and the Popular Front worked to keep up the opposition to the Troika, and Joumhouri’s idea of a national dialogue mediated by the UGTT did take place, but only after the party had left the spotlight. Nidaa and Ennahda then compromised, a decision Joumhouri protested as non-consensual. The party did vote for the new Constitution, but later left the Union for Tunisia as Nidaa clearly outgrew the vehicle.
A party of the middle class who wanted to stay above the Nidaa-Ennahda duel, Joumhouri has collapsed in the polls to about the CPR’s level. One could say the party wanted to pursue a third way to a new Tunisia, one that does not pay lip service to Islamists or the old regime, and perhaps relied instead on international assistance and civil society. It is their tragedy that they did not see how restless people were at political impasse, the little patience they devoted to the project and how hard Islamist-versus-nationalist rhetoric spurned by the old regime is to go away.
OTHERS — Minor parties at the time of the election include:
Ettakatol, the “Democratic Forum for Liberties” founded by Mustapha Ben Jaafar, legal opposition figure under Ben Ali. Particularly strong in metro Tunis in 2011, the party committed electoral suicide by cooperating with Ennahda for three turbulent years. The party has splintered and is destined for 2-3% of the vote.
The Union for Tunisia, or the remnants of it. After Nidaa and Joumhouri pulled out, its only major member is the Social and Democratic Path, an alliance centred around the Ettajid Movement, the reformed edition of the Tunisian Communist Party. Totally eclipsed by Nidaa.
The Current of Love, formerly the Popular Petition. A party glued together by press magnate Hechmi Hamdi, claiming voters across the nation and dominating in Sidi Bouzid. Hamdi’s wild welfare state plans never came through, and 19 of its 26 Assemblypeople left for other parties.
The National Initiative (Al Moubadara) of Kamel Morjane, foreign minister under Ben Ali. Explicitly carrying the RCD’s banner, the party is made up of former regime officials. Scored well in 2011 lacking other channels for nostalgia, but now is eclipsed by Nidaa.
People’s Movement, a Nasserist party started by assassinated politician Mohamed Brahmi. Before Brahmi left to join the Popular Front, he claimed the party had been infiltrated by Islamists.
Party of the Tunisian People’s Voice, a front cobbled by TV network owner and Ben Ali associate Larbi Nasra for his political career (more on him later).
Movement of Social Democrats, legalised as a liberal alternative during the Bourguiba years and played along as loyal opposition during the Ben Ali years.
Various splinters of the PDP, the CPR and of the Popular Petition (ex-PDP Democratic Alliance, ex-CPR Democratic Current, quasi-Islamist Wafa movement, regionalist Al Amen). There are also region-specific lists, which will be explored in the results.
Parliamentary — Results and Analysis
As earlier mentioned, Tunisia’s elections follow a proportional representation system with regional constituencies. Three especially populous governorates—Tunis, Nabeul and Sfax—are split into halves for demographic coherence and possibly a smaller range of constituency sizes. As it is, constituency sizes range from electing only one candidate (the expatriate constituency of Germany) to ten (coastal Sousse and Ben Arous, which covers Tunis’s southern suburbs).
In the interests of parity, Tunisian parties by law have to have an equal number of men and women women across their electoral lists. This does not change the reality that there are very few female politicians or businesswomen, and party leadership is predominantly male. Ennahda has a fair distribution of women near the top of their lists to fend off accusations, and Nidaa did similarly. It still remains that Nidaa only had one female list leader, who replaced Essebsi’s son in Tunis after a party revolt. This election produced a chamber that is 31% female, a rate higher than many Western democracies.
Tunisia also uses a largest remainder system for apportionment (or the Hare method). The idea is to create a quota for seats in a constituency, a fraction of all votes cast. Parties’ votes, then, are converted into units of quotas. Parties first receive a number of seats equal to the highest whole number lower than their quota units, then any seats left over are given to parties with the highest remainder of quota units (Wikipedia has a good example).
There are two quirks of this system relevant for these elections. First, largest remainder suffers from the Alabama Paradox: if parties receive the same percentage of the vote across constituencies, but with some larger ones, the large parties can crowd out seats from small parties if the seat increase is not great enough. Second, the system allows tiny parties to still gain a seat if there are only one or two major parties. This is not the case with other PR systems.
As an illustration, refer to this article that computes the 2011 election results and find that Ennahda would have achieved a supermajority under other popular PR systems. In that same election, it also turned out that parties who had more uniform distribution of votes (like the CPR) did much better than ones with skewed voter bases.
How is it relevant in 2014? Though the political debate has been dominated by Ennahda and Nidaa, there is a wide range of people who despise Islamist incompetence and fear the old regime. They can either abstain or head to one of dozens of parties with regional influence. The result is a fractured parliament and a group of kingmaker parties with many more seats than their vote counts suggest. But the results first:
RESULTS: PERCENTAGE/SEAT COUNT (RELATIVE TO DISSOLUTION OF ANC)
Nidaa Tounes 37.56% winning 86 seats (+82)
Ennahda 27.79% winning 69 seats (-16)
Free Patriotic Union 4.13% winning 16 seats (+14)
Popular Front 3.64% winning 15 seats (+9)
Afek Tounes 3.02% winning 8 seats (+4)
CPR 2.14% winning 4 seats (-8)
Democratic Current 1.93% winning 3 seats (0)
People’s Movement 1.34% winning 3 seats (+1)
National Destourian Initiative 1.32% winning 3 seats (0)
Current of Love 1.20% winning 2 seats (-5)
Al Joumhouri 1.47% winning 1 seat (-6)
Democratic Alliance 1.27% winning 1 seat (-9)
Union for Tunisia 0.82% winning 0 seats (-11)
Ettakatol 0.72% winning 0 seats (-12)
Wafa Movement 0.7% winning 0 seats (-7)
Party of the Tunisian People’s Voice 0.23% winning 0 seats (-6)
Others/Independents winning 6 seats (-30)
Total votes cast: 3579257 (Turnout 68.4%)
Source: ISIE
As the polls predicted, Nidaa triumphed over Ennahda and held a hefty lead in seats. It was not as much of a massacre for Ennahda as the polls suggested—but only slightly, as they performed about 4-6% better than surveyed before polls were forbidden after the summer. With a massive number of undecided voters and selection bias toward the coast, the polls were not very indicative anyways; the actual results show a much wider field outside of Nidaa and Ennahda, with around 35% of voters choosing different parties.
Nonetheless, there is no credible third party yet in Tunisia politics so long as national security and Islamism are the biggest issues. The smaller parties are either regional or are empty hulls of a political class elected in 2011 and swept out in 2014. The biggest loser, far more than Ennahda, is the secular opposition; absent the far-left, they were used by Nidaa and replaced. The final blow was when Essebsi announced on October 20 his view on tactical voting: any vote wasted on non-Nidaa parties is a vote for Ennahda.
The CPR, Ettakatol, PDP and the Union for Tunisia parties had 70 seats between them in 2011. They now have nine.
ISIE, Tunisia’s independent elections agency (whose separation from the Interior Ministry, still full of Ben Ali’s influence, was an early issue), provides legislative results for each constituency. Looking at them gives some ideas about Tunisian political demography.
Ennahda’s defeat, if expected, is still a hard pill to swallow. It may even be so for its opponents, who expected more of a fight. Their vote spread in this election shows a more natural result: their dominance in the South, bases in Tunis and Sfax and middling results elsewhere. The Sfax region, to the middle-right, is right outside of the Sahel and into the desert; Sfax itself is Tunisia’s third-largest city, with a strong industrial base. Similar climate holds for Kairouan governorate to Sfax’s north, whose capital is home to the Kairouan Mosque and has some variation in religious devotion. Tunis I, the western constituency of Tunis governorate, covers most of the old town and the industrial slums to its West and South; Ennahda has done well here since the eighties.
Though much talk is spilt about Ennahda’s dominance in the South, it looked quite less than dominant this election. The party has an iron grip on Gabes and Medenine by the coast, from where most of its leadership was raised and identify. It dominates in Tataouine, the vast expanse of desert also home to Tunisia’s Berber population; it explains trends that, in Bourguiba’s homogeneously Arab Tunisia, Berbers don’t totally exist.
Things change in the other two traditionally Southern governorates. In Kebili, Ennahda received only about 40% of the vote; Nidaa did not sop up the rest, either. At 16% each were CPR’s list (due to Ma