The Tunisian transition: a winding road to democracy

ABSTRACT

Tunisia is the country where the anti-authoritarian uprisings known as the ‘Arab Spring’ started in 2010 and the only country in the region with an ongoing democratic transition process. The current paper will develop the historical pathway of the Tunisian transition from the overthrow of the former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to the latest political developments after the elections in 2018 and 2019. The analysis emphasises factors that could be hampering the consolidation of the Tunisian transitional process, such as the priority of the institutional agenda vs the social one, the parliamentary fragmentation, the consociationalism, and the blockage of the transitional justice process.

KEYWORDS:

• Tunisia
• democracy
• transition
• civil society
• political parties

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Alejandro Cabeza and Carmen Zarco for their research assistance, and to Antonio Alfonso for his help with the data. We are grateful to Irene Fernandez-Molina and Francesco Cavatorta for their helpful suggestions. We acknowledge The Journal of North African Studies anonymous reviewers to help us with their comments to greatly improve the quality of the paper. Finally, the financial support from the research project ‘Crisis and regimen change processes in the north of Africa. Implications for Spain’ (CSO2017-84949-C3-3-P), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI), and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Among these measures, the liberation of Ennahda political prisoners after taking the presidency, including party leader Rachid Ghannouchi.

2 Messaud Romdhani is the president of the Forum Tunisien des Droits Economiques et Sociaux (FTDES).

3 Tunisia from 2006 to 2010 was on ‘the Internet enemy list’ by Reporters Without Borders (2006–10)

4 Ramy Shgayer is a political activist who actively participated in the revolution riots.

5 See Leaders (2011).

6 Décret-loi n° 2011–6 du 18 février 2011, portant création de l'instance supérieure pour la réalisation des objectifs de la révolution, de la réforme politique et de la transition démocratique.

7 The Hare quota is a largest remainder system, based on the application of the pure electoral quota. The number of votes/number of seats to elect is known for its tendency to represent a larger number of minority parties, especially in cases in which there is no electoral threshold.

8 Further details on BBC News (2013).

9 Loi organique 2013–53 du 24 décembre 2013, relative à l’instauration de la justice transitionnelle et à son organization.

10 All volatility calculations by the authors following the Pedersen (1979, 1983) calculation method: $\mathrm{VT}={\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}{\sum }_{i=1}^n|\mathrm{\Delta }{P}_i|}$.

11 See https://www.facebook.com/Manich-Msaleh-مانيش-مسامح-257087941429281/.

12 Zied Krichen is editor-in-chief of the journal Al Magheb.

13 An example of this is the case of Ridha Yahyaoui, who was on a public hiring list, and the day after he was excluded, his protest action ended in electrocution and death.

14 The unemployment rate was over 15% and over 30% among university graduates; inflation grew 7.4 percentage points, as well as there being an alarming depreciation of the Tunisian dinar (IMF 2018; Expansión 2018).

15 Larbi Chouikha is a member of the press institute at Manouba University, a member of an independent institution for the reform of information and communication, and a member of the ISIE Conseil for the 2011 elections.

16 Mokhtar Hammami was director of the national agency to support the decentralisation process (Instance de prospective et d'accompagnement du processus de décentralisation).

17 Fadoua El Ouni is a junior elections specialist at I Watch.

18 The inter-block parliamentary volatility 2014–2019 (Islamist vs secularist) was 3.87%, much lower than the general parliamentary volatility 2014–2019, which reached 69.6%. Calculations by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is part of the results of the research project ‘Crisis and regimen change processes in the north of Africa. Implications for Spain’ (CSO2017-84949-C3-3-P), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (Spain)], the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI), and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).