Tunisia’s Islamist party, Ennahda, seems to have won a convincing victory in the first elections since the revolution that sparked a wave of uprisings across the Arab world. The Islamists are emerging as by far the largest party with around 40 percent of the vote and will now form a coalition to lead the new constituent assembly. It looks likely to be an extraordinary outcome for a party that was banned, repressed and effectively dismantled under the regime of the deposed president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
Tunisia stands again as a model for the rest of the region: here was a dictator deposed by popular will, not Western military intervention, and here over nine months a transition was carefully followed from dictatorship and revolt to one of the freest elections ever held in the Arab world. Voter turnout was huge; allegations of fraud were few. For its next challenge, Tunisia is about to experience one of the few Islamist-dominated governments in the region.
Ennahda’s win ought not to be a surprise. The party’s own leaders had been privately anticipating a clear victory, although Tunisia’s smaller leftist parties always hoped they could capture some of the support that eventually swung to Ennahda. Politics in the past few months had become unexpectedly polarised: a vocal secularist, and often francophone, minority accused the Islamists of speaking a double language and threatening ‘les acquis’, the gains of the revolution.
But this ignored Ennahda’s credibility as Tunisia’s largest opposition movement. It ran in elections in 1989, during a rare moment of pluralist politics, and emerged as the largest opposition force. Ben Ali responded with repression, jailing thousands of Ennahda members and forcing others into exile, among them its leader Rachid Ghannouchi who spent two decades in London. Voters on Sunday seemed to respond to Ennahda’s record as victims and opponents of dictatorship, as well as to its broad Islamic credentials.
By contrast, the secularist parties and those most critical of Ennahda fared particularly badly, perhaps because they were seen to be reviving the ex-regime’s stale propaganda that spoke of political Islam as a threat. Most striking was the fall of the ambitious Progressive Democratic Party, a centrist party that was legal in the Ben Ali years and that regarded itself as the main challenger to the Islamists.
Ennahda’s win ought not to be a threat to the new Tunisia. Firstly, its victory is the result of a free, democratic election. Secondly, Ennahda stands at the moderate end of the Islamist spectrum. Its leaders speak of Islam as a ‘reference’ and a ‘background plan.’ Ghannouchi, once a secular nationalist, has long argued for the compatibility of Islamism and democracy. The party is socially conservative but has said it will not seek to change the progressive Personal Status Code. It endorses a parliamentary, rather than presidential, system of government to avoid a return to dictatorship.
However, it may yet face internal difficulties. The party’s following is broad and its base is often thought to be more radical than its leadership. These divisions may emerge more clearly in the months and years ahead.
Ennahda says it wants a government of national unity. Even back in 2005 it was one of several opposition parties (among them leftists and communists) to agree a joint platform on issues such as women’s rights and freedom of expression. Now, Ennahda leaders are negotiating a coalition government.
It seems likely they will be joined by at least the next two largest parties: the Congress for the Republic, led by the respected human rights activist Moncef Marzouki, and Ettakatol, or the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties, a leftist social democratic party led by Mustapha Ben Jaafar. Marzouki was one of the first in Tunisia to publicly challenge the repression of the Islamists and although he holds different views to Ennahda, he has been in a working alliance with them in recent months. Ben Jaafar was banned from running in the 2009 presidential elections and when he was appointed health minister after the revolution he resigned within a day, protesting the continued presence of former regime figures in government. That earned him much credibility.
The broader the coalition Ennahda can muster now the more convincing will be the new government and its new constitution. Doubtless Ennahda also wants to share the political burden of the year ahead. A new constitution must be written. More difficult still will be resolving the social and economic crisis that brought Tunisia to revolution. There is mass unemployment, particularly among educated young people, sharp inequality between cities and the countryside, a need for judicial reform, lingering concern about former regime figures and now raised expectations of change. These challenges will not be easily met.
Rory McCarthy is the former Middle East correspondent of the Guardian and is now a postgraduate student in Middle Eastern studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford.
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