In Tunisia, the New Year begins with a newly-elected President while liberal news organisations around the world hail the country as a survivor of the Arab Spring. As always, however, the picture becomes grainier the closer one looks at it.
It would be folly for Europeans to think that Tunisia has turned the corner or that there is no important role for Europe still to play.
There are, of course, several good reasons for optimism. Last year ended with parliamentary elections followed by a two-round presidential poll, all in line with a new Constitution. Each election saw a smooth handing over of power.
In the parliamentary elections, the governing Islamist party suffered defeat and acknowledged the victory of its secular adversary. It excluded being part of a national coalition government but was open in admitting own faults in the defeat.
The presidential election saw two candidates make it to a run-off: Beji Caid Essebsi, the leader of the major party in the winning parliamentary coalition, and the outgoing President, Moncef Marzouki, himself the leader of leftist secular party but with considerable Islamist support.
The first round ended with a puzzling contestation by Marzouki. Coming in second place, he qualified for the run-off but he still decided to contest the results in certain areas.
Many Tunisians decided this was simply a campaigning tactic, an attempt to delay the second-round vote to have more time to organise a surge.
However, the run-off was held as planned. I was in Tunisia a week before and, in the conversations I participated in, everyone (each a supporter of Essebsi) thought that Essebsi’s first-round lead of six per cent was not a guarantee of his eventual victory.
In the event, Essebsi increased his lead to 12 per cent. The final results gave him 56 per cent to Marzouki’s 44 per cent.
It’s still too early to decide what accounts for the doubling in lead. Marzouki’s post-first-round contestation may have cemented his reputation as a prickly, erratic maverick and alienated some voters. However, he may also have been hurt by the lower turnout of the second round: 60 per cent as against 70 per cent a few weeks earlier.
As the exit polls made the result clear, and Essebsi claimed victory, Marzouki once more showed his contrarian side and said the claims were premature. However, his campaign website was soon congratulating his adversary.
With this round of elections, Tunisia has put down not one but two markers.
First, the country has now not only effected true regime change; it has also seen a handover of power from one democratically-elected government to another.
Second, an Islamist party has transferred power – undermining, at least for Tunisia, the idea that all Islamists, of whatever stripe, favour democracy only until they’ve gained power for themselves (one man, one vote – once).
Tunisia’s stability and democratic transition cannot be taken for granted
My own impressionistic experience suggests that real change has taken place in the country. I happened to be in Tunisia only a few weeks before the beginning of the end of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime. Everywhere you looked, whether in the grand urban avenues or in bookshops, there was room for only one man, the strongman himself.
A week before the second round, however, bookshops paraded the autobiographies or puff portraits of several politicians. There was even a searing collection of cartoons and damning anecdotes about the then President Marzouki’s many gaffes.
Granted, there were no biographies of Islamist politicians (at least none that I noticed). But it could well be that the book-length biography – a political genre borrowed from France – is a form of campaigning more suited to secular politicians than Islamists.
In any case, even if the idea of Tunisia as an area of free political expression needs qualification, there has been an undeniable shift from Ben Ali’s Tunisia, where (despite the country’s international reputation) the curtailment of free speech was one of the harshest in the Arab world.
Given the aftermath of the elections and these political shifts, what reason should there be for caution? Why not just come out and say that Tunisia has indeed turned the corner?
One reason has to do with a closer look at the results.
Sixty per cent is – despite the 10 per cent drop from the first round of presidential voting – a good turnout in comparison with other post-Arab Spring countries, such as Libya and Egypt. However, a breakdown of the demographics shows that over 80 per cent of youth in the 18-25 bracket did not vote.
Such scepticism may have a lot to do with the state of the economy. It is picking up in some key sectors, such as tourism. But its state was in great part responsible for the downfall of the Islamist government.
The idea that the election was a choice for ‘secularism’, as such, is not persuasive: the secular parties that were allied to the Islamists in government (such as Marzouki’s) bore heavy losses in the parliamentary elections, despite their leftist secular credentials.
The vote could be read in a different way: as a vote for managerial experience. It would explain how a young country voted for an 88-year-old president and why the winning coalition’s technocratic connections to the former regime did it little harm. That is also the way the Islamist party, Ennahda, is reading the result: that they paid for their inexperience with being in government.
However, such views of the political coalitions’ strengths and weaknesses will hold only as long as the new government succeeds in turning the economy around. Otherwise, a deeper disenchantment with the system itself, not just one political party, might set in.
Another cause for concern shows that while Essebsi won convincingly on a national basis, the distribution of the vote shows a regional cleavage. Essebsi’s strength lies in the north of the country. Marzouki did better in the south.
Marzouki’s results partly reflect his own southern origins. But they also show that he reaped the benefits of Islamist regional support.
The south is the hardest hit, in terms of economic development. There are areas that depend on exports for the Libyan market. Others are run on the basis of an unholy alliance between Islamists and smuggling networks. The failing states to the south of Tunisia are, of course, part of the wider picture.
Tunisia’s stability and democratic transition, therefore, cannot be taken for granted. Let us not forget that the Tunisian democratic alternative could be a threat to many Arab regimes reluctant to surrender any power to their people.
Europe, on the other hand, has a stake in Tunisia’s success since its example could be critical, once more, to a positive transformation of the southern neighbourhood.
We should weigh Europe’s contribution to Tunisia’s successful transition with the real stakes in mind.
ranierfsadni@europe.com