Tag: elections

By Touraj Eghtesad Almost four years after the Tunisian Revolution, electoral democracy is becoming a reality in this little country where citizens often feel distant from the process of democratic transition. Meanwhile, much of the European media praises the ‘advent of democracy’ in Tunisia, where a democratic tradition has little consistency so far, as if democracy was a ‘thing’ rather than an ongoing process of checks and balances.

After a first set of elections with hundreds of political parties, Ennahdha (conservative) won and led a coalition government (Troika). Many people trusted that an Islamist party could not become corrupt and that Ennahdha would pursue a whole different trajectory than the Ben Ali regime which long oppressed them. Over the past three years, however, many Tunisians were frustrated that the Troika government did little to stop the growth of Islamist terrorist groups and carried out the same economic policies of the Ben Ali era.

The murder of far-left parliamentary Mohammed Brahmi by Salafist extremists in July 2013 brought one million Tunisians onto the streets . The Troika government, under pressure, promised to step down in favour of a technocratic government after a process of ‘National Dialogue’. This culminated in the vote of a new Constitution, praised as the most progressive in the Arab world, in January 2014.

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