Nafeesa Syeed and Salma El Wardany
By Nafeesa Syeed and Salma El Wardany
Like the rest of Egypt, Tahrir Square in Cairo is off-limits nowadays to the protesters who made it famous three years ago. Its Tunisian equivalent is still open for business.
In the run-up to the North African country’s parliamentary election last week, Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis hosted rallies by major parties. Islamists and leftists were among groups sharing the tree- and café-lined boulevard, marking out their own spaces for rival campaign events.
Violent upheaval and even civil war have followed the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria in 2011. Tunisia, where that wave of unrest began, showed that it’s on a different trajectory when Islamists agreed to cede power peacefully after losing the latest vote. The Tunisian exception, analysts say, results from a less meddlesome army, more flexible politicians, and an absence of the external interference that countries deemed more important were subjected to.
Mohamed El Agati, executive director of the Arab Forum for Alternatives research center in Cairo, said he was struck by the contrast during a pre-election visit to Tunisia. “Different political parties, supporters of different groups, were peacefully distributing leaflets and hanging posters in the streets, without anyone stopping them or without clashes erupting,” he said.
Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda, which headed governments after the overthrow of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, conceded defeat in last week’s vote to the secular Nidaa Tounes group, which won 85 of the 217 seats to Ennahda’s 69.
In Egypt, the elected Islamist government was toppled by the army last year after protests against it. Police permission is now required for demonstrations, and several leaders of the 2011 uprising are in jail.
Tunisia’s military stayed aloof from politics after Ben Ali’s fall, according to Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “The Tunisian army has shown it is a professional and apolitical entity,” Khatib said by phone from Tunisia last week.
In Egypt, when Hosni Mubarak was ousted a month after Ben Ali, the military took direct control of the country. It intervened again to topple President Mohamed Mursi last year, and the army chief who led the takeover, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, was elected president in May. “The army was present from the very first moment of the transitional period, and continues to play a major role in politics,” El Agati said.
In Egypt, Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood reneged on a pledge not to seek the presidency, and his government was accused by critics of sidelining non-Islamist views.
Ennahda in Tunisia made concessions over the drafting of a new constitution, and it agreed to step down from government in January this year to make way for a caretaker administration, amid unrest after the assassination of two opposition leaders.
Even in that tense period, when many questioned whether Tunisia would go the way of Egypt, the parties were ultimately willing to work together, said Anthony Dworkin, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London. “The success that they’ve achieved is putting in place a genuinely pluralistic political system,” Dworkin said by phone.
“I think we are on the right track,” said Abdelbasset Ben Hassen, president of the Arab Institute for Human Rights in Tunis. “It’s time for us to build something now, we need a calm situation.” The parties benefited from the existence of well-entrenched civil institutions, including the trade unions that helped to broker coalition talks.
Tunisia, lacking in oil and geopolitical significance to major powers, was also spared the foreign interventions that occurred in countries like Egypt, the traditional leader of the Arab world, or oil-rich Libya. The U.S. and its European allies bombed government forces in Libya, which has slid into chaos since the fall of Moammar Gadhafi. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are among the oil-rich Gulf nations that sent billions of dollars to support their local political allies in Egypt.
Tunisia still faces challenges that could strain its emerging political system, including high unemployment, an insurgency by al-Qaida-linked groups, and pressure for an overhaul of state security and police forces, seen by critics as leftovers from the Ben Ali era.
The government is pursuing a crackdown on extremists, whose appeal is shown by the large numbers of young Tunisians who have gone to fight for Islamic State in Iraq or Syria — more than 3,000, according to a June report by the Soufan Group.
While both Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda have encouraged foreign business, the perception of investors is that the security situation is worsening, said Geoffrey Howard, a North Africa analyst at Control Risks in London.
Economic growth slowed to 2.3 percent in 2013 and is forecast at 2.8 percent this year, compared with an average of 4.4 percent in the pre-revolution decade, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Still, with the main priorities of the democratic transition achieved, the incoming government will have “more capacity and scope to institute new reforms,” Howard said by phone.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Nafeesa Syeed and Salma El Wardany
Like the rest of Egypt, Tahrir Square in Cairo is off-limits nowadays to the protesters who made it famous three years ago. Its Tunisian equivalent is still open for business.
In the run-up to the North African country’s parliamentary election last week, Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis hosted rallies by major parties. Islamists and leftists were among groups sharing the tree- and café-lined boulevard, marking out their own spaces for rival campaign events.
Violent upheaval and even civil war have followed the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria in 2011. Tunisia, where that wave of unrest began, showed that it’s on a different trajectory when Islamists agreed to cede power peacefully after losing the latest vote. The Tunisian exception, analysts say, results from a less meddlesome army, more flexible politicians, and an absence of the external interference that countries deemed more important were subjected to.
Mohamed El Agati, executive director of the Arab Forum for Alternatives research center in Cairo, said he was struck by the contrast during a pre-election visit to Tunisia. “Different political parties, supporters of different groups, were peacefully distributing leaflets and hanging posters in the streets, without anyone stopping them or without clashes erupting,” he said.
Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda, which headed governments after the overthrow of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, conceded defeat in last week’s vote to the secular Nidaa Tounes group, which won 85 of the 217 seats to Ennahda’s 69.
In Egypt, the elected Islamist government was toppled by the army last year after protests against it. Police permission is now required for demonstrations, and several leaders of the 2011 uprising are in jail.
Tunisia’s military stayed aloof from politics after Ben Ali’s fall, according to Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “The Tunisian army has shown it is a professional and apolitical entity,” Khatib said by phone from Tunisia last week.
In Egypt, when Hosni Mubarak was ousted a month after Ben Ali, the military took direct control of the country. It intervened again to topple President Mohamed Mursi last year, and the army chief who led the takeover, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, was elected president in May. “The army was present from the very first moment of the transitional period, and continues to play a major role in politics,” El Agati said.
In Egypt, Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood reneged on a pledge not to seek the presidency, and his government was accused by critics of sidelining non-Islamist views.
Ennahda in Tunisia made concessions over the drafting of a new constitution, and it agreed to step down from government in January this year to make way for a caretaker administration, amid unrest after the assassination of two opposition leaders.
Even in that tense period, when many questioned whether Tunisia would go the way of Egypt, the parties were ultimately willing to work together, said Anthony Dworkin, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London. “The success that they’ve achieved is putting in place a genuinely pluralistic political system,” Dworkin said by phone.
“I think we are on the right track,” said Abdelbasset Ben Hassen, president of the Arab Institute for Human Rights in Tunis. “It’s time for us to build something now, we need a calm situation.” The parties benefited from the existence of well-entrenched civil institutions, including the trade unions that helped to broker coalition talks.
Tunisia, lacking in oil and geopolitical significance to major powers, was also spared the foreign interventions that occurred in countries like Egypt, the traditional leader of the Arab world, or oil-rich Libya. The U.S. and its European allies bombed government forces in Libya, which has slid into chaos since the fall of Moammar Gadhafi. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are among the oil-rich Gulf nations that sent billions of dollars to support their local political allies in Egypt.
Tunisia still faces challenges that could strain its emerging political system, including high unemployment, an insurgency by al-Qaida-linked groups, and pressure for an overhaul of state security and police forces, seen by critics as leftovers from the Ben Ali era.
The government is pursuing a crackdown on extremists, whose appeal is shown by the large numbers of young Tunisians who have gone to fight for Islamic State in Iraq or Syria — more than 3,000, according to a June report by the Soufan Group.
While both Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda have encouraged foreign business, the perception of investors is that the security situation is worsening, said Geoffrey Howard, a North Africa analyst at Control Risks in London.
Economic growth slowed to 2.3 percent in 2013 and is forecast at 2.8 percent this year, compared with an average of 4.4 percent in the pre-revolution decade, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Still, with the main priorities of the democratic transition achieved, the incoming government will have “more capacity and scope to institute new reforms,” Howard said by phone.
WP-BLOOMBERG
