Frustration and uncertainty persist, but the country is heading the right way
COMPARED with the other upheavals across the Arab world this year, Tunisia’s is still the runaway winner. Since the country’s dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, with his greedy wife, Leila Trabelsi, flew off into a Saudi twilight on January 14th after a nationwide uprising that lasted barely a month, there have been political hiccups, sit-ins, strikes and riots, especially in the fly-blown towns of the interior, and several new governments. But under Beji Caid Sebsi, an avuncular 84-year-old who first served in a cabinet in the 1960s and took over as prime minister on February 27th, Tunisia has calmed down. “People think things are going better than they thought they would the day after the revolution,” says a diplomat.
The postponement until October 23rd of an election to a constituent assembly originally scheduled for July 24th was widely accepted with good grace after the independent electoral commission said it could not prepare properly in time. The country has a clear path ahead. The assembly, once elected, is expected to draw up a constitution within a year, perhaps even sooner, paving the way for a full-blown election. Tunisia is in with a good chance of having a decent democracy and a perky economy by the end of next year.
Its transitional government has a clutch of competent technocrats in key positions, several of whom worked abroad for many years in Western banks but were lured back by the call of patriotism. “Tunisia could be an amazing place,” says Jalloul Ayed, the finance minister, a former Citibank man and composer of classical symphonies. “We have a bright, highly educated population. We’re close to Europe’s markets. We have the right to dream of Tunisia as the Singapore of the Mediterranean. We could achieve it in five to seven years—with a few adjustments.”
The constituent assembly will comprise a range of secular and Islamist parties. More than 90 have registered. In a system of proportional representation in large constituencies, fewer than ten of them will probably get seats. The new constitution is likely to be both presidential and parliamentary, perhaps resembling the model of France, with which Tunisia still has many links. “But we don’t want it to be presidentialist,” says Rafaa Ben Achour, a minister of state and constitutional lawyer, stressing the last syllable.
Virtually every opinion poll puts Nahda, the main Islamist party, in the lead. It wins kudos for its courage and apparent incorruptibility under Mr Ben Ali, who imprisoned many of its leaders (and at one time a good 5,000 of the rank and file), some of them for 20 years. But no poll suggests that Nahda would come close to getting an outright majority. A recent one gave it 14%; its main rival, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), in the secular centre, got 5%. More than two-thirds of Tunisians said they had not made up their minds. Few people, even the Islamists, predict that it will get more than 25%.
The big question is whether Nahda, led by a dignified 70-year-old, Rashid Ghannouchi, who returned this year after more than 20 years in exile, mostly in London, will emerge as the most potent single political force—and whether secular Tunisians, whose various parties together could easily form a majority, would allow it to wield a dominant influence, let alone untrammelled power.
Mr Ghannouchi (no relation of Muhammad Ghannouchi, the short-term prime minister after Mr Ben Ali’s fall) has bent over backwards to present Nahda as moderate and tolerant. His colleagues promise to abide by the rules of democracy, insist on women’s rights, and say they will not impose sharia law, ban alcohol or deter skimpily clad tourists from the West. Like Islamists across the Arab world who have refashioned themselves under new freedoms, Nahda says it looks to Turkey’s mild-mannered ruling Islamists.
But many of the three-quarters or so of Tunisians who do not consider themselves Islamist mistrust Nahda, many of them deeply. Again and again, secular-minded Tunisians accuse it of speaking in different tongues to different people. “They do not understand democracy or freedom,” says Mustapha Mezghani, a businessman who has set up a liberal party. “The least one can say is that they are ambiguous,” says Maya Jribi, the PDP’s co-leader, while deploring Nahda’s tendency, as she puts it, to “use the mosque for sending its political message”.
One movement, calling itself the Modernist Democratic Pole, including the former communist party, Tajdid, is trying to band all secular groups together to ensure that Nahda is kept out of power. Yet most Tunisians also seem aware that excluding Nahda from power could be more destabilising for the country than letting it in, perhaps even as a partner in coalition, at least during a jittery period of transition.
In any event, Tunisia needs a financial helping hand for the next year or so. In late May the G8 group of rich countries promised $20 billion to Tunisia and Egypt in loans and grants over the next three years, of which several billion is to go to Tunisia—the first tranche, according to the finance minister, within a few weeks. It is sorely needed. Economic growth, which was nearly 4% last year, will fall this year to less than 1%. Tourism, which accounted for 7% of GDP, has collapsed. Youth unemployment is around 23%, according to the labour minister. The minimum industrial wage for a 48-hour week is around $50. Of the 700,000 officially reckoned to be jobless in a population of 10.6m, some 170,000 are graduates—the angriest part of a populace enraged by the inequities and corruption that helped spark the revolution against Mr Ben Ali.
The mood in the harsh interior, where the revolution began, is impatient. In Kasserine, a town 300km (180 miles) south-west of Tunis, protesters call for the provincial governor, a military man, to go. Barbed wire surrounds banks and state-owned offices, with armoured cars outside. Civic leaders say that 40% of the townsfolk are unemployed. Last week two prisoners died in the third jail riot since January.
“If there is another social explosion, democracy will be stymied,” says Ms Jribi. Almost everyone in Tunis agrees, often adding that it is also vital that Libya, by far its closest neighbour, also comes right, with Muammar Qaddafi removed. “We consider the Libyan people an extension of the Tunisian people,” says the finance minister. If Libya is set free and Tunisia’s own electoral course goes according to plan, with the angry young men in such towns as Kasserine persuaded to hold their breath, the country could indeed become a beacon for the rest of the Arab world.
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