Islamists, Secularists and Old Regime Elites in Tunisia: bargained Competition

Abstract

This article analyses the confrontations and compromises for domination of the political arena and its rules that are going on in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution between the Islamists of Ennahda party and the networks of so-called secularists and old regime elites – in particular, Nidaa Tounes.

On the contrary to accounts that claim that the taming of ideological conflicts between religious and secular parties has given birth to a new democratic society, I argue that the new Tunisian order is the result of a particular type of post-authoritarian political culture that I call bargained competition. It consists in Islamists and old regime elites bargaining on their mutual reintegration and their monopolization of the post-revolutionary political scene while fiercely competing over political resources through various (often informal) power-sharing arrangements.

The ousting of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011 raised hopes among Tunisians for better access to politics as well as a more equitable distribution of economic resources, but it also divided them concerning the kind of political order that should be established. On the one hand, revolutionaries from deprived interior regions as well as civil society activists and political parties of the radical Left pushed for a complete overhaul of the political system through a revolutionary constituent assembly and local representative councils involving citizens in a bottom-up process geared towards tackling such issues as health, education, redistribution of resources, abuses by the security forces, corruption and social justice. On the other hand, parties already involved in politics under Ben Ali focused on consolidating their presence on the political scene, maintaining or gaining access to state structures and the informal patronage networks that he had left behind. Maintaining the existing institutional framework and holding elections provided a legitimate avenue for the return to politics of representatives from Ben Ali’s Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD) who had previously been marginalized by his immediate family, in particular relatives of his wife, Leila Trabelsi, and for adherents of former president Habib Bourguiba, who had been overthrown by Ben Ali in 1987.¹ At the same time, liberalization of the political space allowed the reintegration of Ennahda, the long-repressed Islamist opposition party. By jointly steering post-revolutionary priorities towards the re-establishment of centralized state authority and the election of a National Constituent Assembly (Assemblée nationale constituante, ANC) to write a new constitution, processes dominated by political parties, both Islamists and old regime representatives positioned themselves as central actors in the politically relevant elite (PRE), those controlling the resources of power and influence in shaping political orders.² They thus seized Tunisia’s transformation process, quickly marginalizing the young revolutionaries.

This article analyses the competition and compromises since the 2011 revolution between Ennahda and the networks of so-called secularists and old regime elites – in particular, Nidaa Tounes (Call of Tunisia), led by Beji Caid Essebsi – for domination of the political arena and its rules.³ Many accounts claim that the Tunisian ‘transition to democracy’ has been successful due to the taming of ideological conflicts between Islamist and secular parties. Are elite pacts enough to turn post-authoritarian orders into democratic societies? In Tunisia, Islamist and old regime elite interactions have been shaping a political culture that I call ‘bargained competition’. The term refers to a specific type of transformation that differs from the concept of a pacted transition, which has been applied to describe processes of transformation from authoritarian to liberal political orders in many countries of the so-called third or fourth wave of democracy. While the term pacted transition describes a negotiated process between distinct ruling and opposition blocs providing for the liberalization and democratization of the political sphere (e.g. Schmitter, 2010), in Tunisia the almost total absence of Ennahda leaders in the protests of December 2010 and January 2011 and the collaboration of Ben Ali’s own power apparatus in his ousting (Jebnoun, 2014) have blurred the lines between who should be credited for the revolution and who should be held accountable for the dictatorship. This has motivated Islamists and old regime actors to seek a bargain on their mutual reintegration into the political order and thus become the central players on the post-revolutionary political scene.

At the same time, fear of being dominated and repressed by the other side has kept the Islamist and old regime elites in a state of prolonged and intense competition over political resources. The priority that the main political actors have given to normalizing and consolidating their political participation means that their interest in building new institutions has been rather limited. In 2011 as well as in 2014, the main purpose of free elections was to regulate their competition and provide for subsequent power-sharing arrangements. On the one hand, fierce competition was waged over domination of formal and informal institutions and networks inherited from the previous authoritarian regimes, access to the state bureaucracy and control of the judiciary, in addition to obtaining support from foreign actors and business and media networks.⁴ Narratives of Islamist versus secular polarization were used to foment confrontational street protests, and rival alliances formed between parties and civil society activists. On the other hand, informal consensus and non-elected temporary structures – such as the 2011 Higher Commission for the Fulfilment of Revolutionary Goals, Political Reform, and Democratic Transition (Haute instance pour la réalisation des objectifs de la revolution, des réformes politiques et de la transition démocratique, HIROR) and the 2013 national dialogues – allowed for mutual inclusion and provided fora in which to resolve or manage disputes.

To date, this post-authoritarian culture of bargained competition has spared the country a major conflagration. An elite consensus by Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes has shaped the political arena in a relatively nonviolent way and consolidated post-revolutionary power-sharing agreements. Both camps have avoided politically costly and potentially explosive issues, such as structural economic reform and transitional justice, which required addressing if the new political order were to be based on the central grievances of Tunisians but also could have caused the basic consensus in the political arena to collapse. Thus, bargained competition prevented the institutionalization of rules that would have made it possible to process and resolve such conflicts in a transparent way. It has also not led to a broadly inclusive political culture. Rather, the two blocs have increasingly monopolized the political arena, and the revolutionaries’ demands for change and participation have been re-channelled into a reductive form of pluralism that ostensibly pits Islamists against representatives of the old regime.⁵ Since late 2013, both blocs have sought compromises struck for the sake of consensus but against the will of much of their political grassroots. This has not only led to growing internal dissent and volatility within political alliances, but has also worked to alienate Tunisians from the political process as such. More than 70 per cent of Tunisians aged 18 to 30 abstained from voting in the 2014 legislative and presidential elections.⁶

This article is based on more than 60 in-depth interviews with party activists, unionists, lawyers, state officials, student association activists, intellectuals and revolutionaries conducted after the 2011 revolution and during several rounds of field research in Tunisia as well as Doha, London and Paris between 2004 and 2014. It also draws from the literature on elite bargains in transitions (e.g. Higley & Burton, 1989; Higley & Gunther, 1992; O’Donnell et al., 1986; Przeworski, 1991) and considers the importance of informal governance in times of political uncertainty. Interactions between different forces and their impact on political transformation help in analysing the three phases in the evolution of the dynamic relationship between Tunisia’s Islamist and old regime PRE over the past four years (Bennani-Chraïbi & Fillieule, 2012). The first phase involves how, in the aftermath of the January 2011 revolution and until the elections for the ANC on 23 October 2011, the strategies of both camps were guided by their priority for political reintegration. The second phase witnesses the rise of Islamist–secular polarization involving the governing coalition led by Ennahda and an emergent anti-Islamist counterweight in the form of Nidaa Tounes. The third phase concerns how the consensual appointment of an ostensibly neutral, technocratic cabinet to replace the Islamist-led government in early 2014 prepared the institutionalization of the power bargain struck by the two blocs after the 2014 legislative elections without having to resolve central conflicts or crucial policy issues.

Ennahda and the Old Regime: Negotiating post-revolutionary Reintegration

During the second half of the first decade of the 2000s – that is, the last years of Ben Ali’s rule – few political actors were expecting fundamental change, let alone a revolution, in Tunisia. Within the PRE, RCD members who had been increasingly marginalized by the business and security networks linked to the president’s family were at best hoping that a handover of power to the president’s young son-in-law would mean more state resources for themselves (Hibou, 2006). The loyal opposition had equally been weakened. Some organizations were tolerated, if only to a limited degree, among them the Tunisian General Union (Union génerale tunisienne du travail, UGTT), the centrist Progressive Democratic Party (Parti démocrate progressiste, PDP), led by Nejib Chebbi, and the socialist Democratic Forum for and Liberties (Forum démocratique pour le travail et les libertés, Ettakatol), led by Mustafa Ben Jaafar. So-called secular progressive intellectuals and co-opted middle-class activists were calling for democratization from within while often remaining silent about the violent repression meted out to Islamists and the radical Left.⁷ Other opposition parties – including Ennahda, led by Rached Ghannouchi, the Congress for the Republic (Congrès pour la république, CPR), headed by Moncef Marzouki, and the Worker’s Communist Party (Parti communiste des ouvriers de Tunisie, PCOT), led by Hamma Hammami – were outlawed or repressed, their members often jailed and their leaderships exiled. On 18 October 2005, members of these parties had come together around an opposition platform, the 18 October Collective,⁸ and launched a month-long hunger strike in Tunis to demand respect for human rights and political liberalization. After 2008, it appears that exploratory talks took place on a potential pacted transition between Ennahda (whose political prisoners began to be pardoned in the mid-2000s), the UGTT and Ben Ali’s internal challengers, among them foreign affairs minister Kamel Morjane.⁹ This may have created suspicions among the other opposition parties that a pacted transition was already under way behind the scenes and could explain why, apart from the 18 October group, no structured alliance against the dictatorship emerged.

During the first three months after Ben Ali’s ousting, opposition parties, civil society and revolutionaries were at odds about whether to co-operate with former regime members in a transition government or to continue the revolution. Some centrist parties, including the PDP and Ettakatol, chose to join the first interim government, established in mid-January 2011. Radical leftist parties, including the PCOT, formed the 14 January Front (Front du 14 Janvier), which sought to establish completely new, popular political institutions. Advocating a new order that would meet their demand for socio-economic ‘dignity’ (Marzouki, 2011), the front encouraged inhabitants of the deprived interior regions of the country as well as local UGTT activists, who had started the revolt in December 2010, to continue their protests. Its members, alongside young revolutionaries from the interior and local UGTT branches, constituted most of the participants at the sit-ins known as the Kasbah 1 and 2 protests, which brought down the first two interim governments, dominated by Ben Ali-era ministers, on 27 January and 27 February 2011.

Ennahda, whose exiled leaders and activists quickly returned to the country and whose clandestine domestic cells came into the open after the revolution, chose a two-track strategy that prepared the ground for the bargained competition that would later ensue. While opposing the monopolization of the political scene by former Ben Ali loyalists, it simultaneously entered into negotiations with them. At the same time, in February 2011, Ennahda joined the initiative by the 14 January Front in an attempt to take control of the transition through the National Council for the Protection of the Revolution (Conseil national de protection de la révolution, CNPR), an alliance of 28 associations established on 11 February with the objective of preventing a return to power of the old elites and monitoring the interim government that was supposed to be non-partisan and composed of ‘technocrats’ unaffiliated with the RCD.¹⁰ Interim prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi initially refused to legalize the council, but then proposed merging it with the Political Reform Commission (Commission supérieure de la réforme politique), a body of legal experts appointed soon after the fall of Ben Ali to design the transitional framework, to create a new institution, HIROR. The majority of the 14 January Front refused to accept this compromise, calling it a betrayal of the revolution, but Ennahda, set on winning elections, and the UGTT, whose leader had been close to Ben Ali and was trying to reposition himself on the post-revolutionary scene, broke ranks and agreed to back the new body. Despite maintaining a public position against the political reintegration of members of past regimes, Ennahda also accepted the nomination of Essebsi to head the interim cabinet that took over on 15 March 2011. Essebsi had been minister of interior (1965–69) and of foreign affairs (1981–86) under Bourguiba and president of the National Assembly (1990–91) under Ben Ali. Thus, despite his claims of being ‘independent’, he was clearly a creature of the ancien régimes.

Both the UGTT and Ennahda faced strong criticism from their revolutionary bases for joining HIROR without consultations. Their participation in the commission was seen as collaborating with the former regime PRE to attempt to close a chapter of the revolution without addressing political and economic freedoms. The repeated enlargement of HIROR through the co-optation of parties and civil society organizations, including the Tunisian Union for Industry, Commerce and Handicrafts (Union tunisienne de l’industrie, du commerce et de l’artisanat, UTICA), the national union of employers associated with Ben Aliera corruption, diluted the influence of local citizen committees and eventually put an end to their supervisory role, paving the way for an agenda that prioritized elections. New protests in May and July 2011 by what remained of independent local councils and civil society activists – dubbed Kasbah 3 by their organizers – pushed for Essebsi’s resignation and were violently repressed. Continuous strikes and sit-ins by local UGTT chapters were condemned by HIROR for ‘blocking the country’s economic and political stabilization’.¹¹

The Islamists’ demands for the exclusion of former RCD members from politics on the one hand, and their willingness to engage in bargaining with them on the other, might appear contradictory. One explanation for their preference for joint management of the transition over the creation of revolutionary institutions can be found in their traumatic experience in the aftermath of the 1989 legislative elections. After supporting Ben Ali’s coup against Bourguiba in 1987, they participated in elections but were targeted for repression after their significant success at the polls running as independent candidates. In 2011 negotiating with the remaining RCD and security sector players instead of striving for all-out power was a way to enter the electoral arena in a non-threatening way. It also aimed at reassuring the urban middle class, which had supported the protests in January, but had been reluctant to overturn the entire system after Ben Ali’s departure (Allal & Geisser, 2012). This confluence of interest between the old and new PRE regarding their mutual reintegration did not, however, resolve their conflicts, but merely served to postpone them. Thus, while these interactions allowed Ennahda to become a leading force within HIROR and Essebsi to build a political platform that would later become Nidaa Tounes, mainly by appointing interim ministers who would join his party, they also institutionalized the rules of their future political competition (Koehler & Warkotsch, 2014).

In 2012 and 2013, the various issues Ennahda and former RCD cadres had dismissed earlier to ensure their control of the post-revolutionary scene re-emerged. In a context where the middle classes were glorifying Bourguiba’s legacy over Ben Ali’s, and Essebsi represented someone who had supposedly opposed Ben Ali’s corrupt entourage and had no personal political ambition, the endorsement of Essebsi as a Destourian technocrat set the stage for the political comeback of old regime members and their networks.¹² Essebsi’s interim government may have agreed to disband the RCD and the secret police, but only second-rank RCD members and businessmen were in fact tried for corruption; the majority of Ben Ali’s close associates were allowed to exit the country. Also, only 23 security officers were tried for crimes against civilians committed between 17 December 2010 and 14 January 2011. Starting in May 2011, all complaints filed for crimes perpetrated before and during the revolution were adjudicated by military tribunals, with most defendants receiving short sentences. Former security officials who had served under Ben Ali were reappointed by Essebsi to the Ministry of Interior; the torture of protesters and human rights activists continued (Amnesty International, 2012). Representatives of the ancien régime and their close allies were also appointed to head such institutions as the commission in charge of ensuring the return of Tunisian assets illegally transferred abroad and the administrative tribunal, which Essebsi later used to reject the political exclusion law discussed in the ANC and in 2014 to reject appeals against the election results made by Marzouki, his competitor in the presidential elections. On the day before the October 2011 ANC elections, the interim government passed a law that forbade prosecutions for torture going back more than 15 years. All this would serve to complicate Ennahda’s attempts to manage security and justice issues once in power.

HIROR, under the influence of Ennahda and the CPR and tasked with preparing the ANC election law, decided to prohibit candidacies in the 2011 elections by former RCD top officials, people who had called for Ben Ali’s re-election before the revolution and members of the interim government.¹³ Yet the government authorized the creation of parties by former RCD ministers, among them Morjane and former RCD executive and Interior Ministry official Mohamed Jegham, and their participation in the 2011 elections. At the same time, HIROR’s legal experts established an unrealistic one-year timeframe for the ANC to draft the constitution. This would later play into the hands of Nidaa Tounes, allowing it to demand that the Islamist-led government resign for not having finished the draft within the allotted time.

As the ANC elections approached in October 2011, the schism between the old regime and the opposition that had framed early post-revolution bargaining processes gradually came to be replaced by an Islamist versus secular divide. This resulted from efforts by the smaller opposition and progressive parties to limit Ennahda’s expanding influence within HIROR, with the former accusing the latter of having a hidden radical agenda (Heurtaux, 2014). In response, Ennahda promised not to govern alone and to build an Islamist–secular coalition to attract the support of voters and foreign actors fearing the potential Islamization of the state. It appears that Ennahda helped the CPR in the elections through informal encouragement of its own followers to cast their vote for the party.¹⁴ After winning a plurality of seats in the ANC balloting, Ennahda first supported Essebsi remaining as prime minister, thinking that he might help secure former RCD resources, but only the CPR and Ettakatol responded positively to its invitation to join the government. While this new Islamist–secular coalition gave Ennahda democratic credentials internationally (Werenfels, 2011), its lack of a joint agenda on how to tackle the country’s challenges and the unequal power distribution within this alliance soon provoked internal dissent and gave the opposition ample opportunity to criticize the government’s inefficiency.

The Troika’s Failure and Islamist–Secular Polarization

Following Ennahda’s victory in the ANC elections, the so-called Troika of Ennahda and its secular coalition partners, CPR and Ettakatol, was initially considered historic, but it soon began to look like a political failure. Assuming leadership of the government after three decades of repression and marginalization, Ennahda proved to be inept. It began to prioritize control over formal state structures as well as the remains of the deep state – the security, judiciary and business networks – over supervising the writing of the constitution, the task for which it had been elected (Bras, 2012). This approach reduced the space for co-operative decision making within the Troika, despite the initial promise of consensual power sharing between Islamist and secular actors. The Troika thus soon became a badly functioning arrangement, incapable of putting forward a common government strategy to address the country’s security, economic and political crises. In particular, the distribution of competencies among prime minister Hamadi Jebali (Ennahda), President Marzouki (CPR) and ANC president Ben Jaafar (Ettakatol) was repeatedly undermined by the intervention of Ennahda’s party leader, Rached Ghannouchi, as well as co-operation between Ennahda and Essebsi, who was preparing the establishment of Nidaa Tounes, particularly on security and foreign policies. Decisions taken in Ennahda’s Shura (consultative) Council were repeatedly imposed on the ANC or on the government without consultation with the CPR and Ettakatol. In one example, in May 2012 prime minister Jebali decided to extradite to Libya Baghdadi Mahmoudi, former prime minister under Muammar Qadhafi, on the demand of Essebsi and without the authorization of President Marzouki. Nominations for governors and heads of national media were also decided by Ennahda without consultation among the Troika, as were negotiations with foreign donors.¹⁵

Internal dissent in Ennahda also resulted in inconsistent performance by the government. While youth representatives favoured the complete exclusion of former regime members and strongly Islamic-inspired policies, the old Islamist guard was less adamant. In the beginning, Ennahda used a revenge discourse to mobilize its base against the ‘scorn of the secularist elite’, asserting the right of those who had suffered under Ben Ali’s rule to be compensated, thus creating hopes among its followers for a new system of social control and economic redistribution in which they would benefit (Meddeb, 2011). Indeed, the first months of the Troika government witnessed a strong expansion of councillors, ministerial positions and public sector jobs. According to some sources, 87 per cent of the new recruits in the public sector (often without competitive examination) belonged to the Troika parties, 93 per cent of them being Ennahda activists and followers (Weslaty, 2013). Ennahda’s youth wing and the Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution (Ligues de protection de la révolution, LPR), which emerged from among the Committees for the Protection of the Revolution (Comités pour la protection de la revolution), are examples of Ennahda’s constituencies seeking to profit from the party’s political dominance after October 2011 by pushing for the complete exclusion of RCD members, an Islamic-inspired constitution and subsidies they could distribute to their neighbourhoods. They also regularly took to the streets to defend the party against its secular and leftist opponents’ criticism for neglecting economic and security reforms. The result was an escalation of rivalries on the street that often saw violent government repression of leftist protesters and those from the disenfranchised regions. The government also often blocked public investigations into police abuses, such as on the occasion of the demonstrations for the martyrs of the revolution on 9 April 2012 in Tunis and the November 2012 protests in Siliana, where some 220 protesters demanding economic reform were wounded by the police (Human Rights Watch, 2012). When President Marzouki proposed the formation of a cabinet of technocrats to overcome the crisis stemming from police repression, Ennahda’s parliamentary bloc went so far as to threaten a motion of no confidence against him to shoot down the initiative.

Ennahda’s position on the RCD and delays in launching measures to advance transitional justice and fight corruption were major points of contention within the party’s ranks as well as between Ennahda and its coalition partners. Promises of the exclusion of former RCD leaders from the political process had at first contributed to strengthening the Troika, but Ghannouchi’s volte-face on the issue in mid-2013 fuelled criticism from the Islamist, CPR and Ettakatol bases against their leaders. An important segment of the party had been banking on appropriating the networks of business tycoons, the media, the magistrates and the security apparatus that Ben Ali had left behind, ensuring the party’s full reintegration through control not only of the formal but also the informal channels of power. This led at times to bizarre personnel decisions. For example, after asking Habib Essid, minister of interior in the interim government, to resign in 2011 because of his role in Ben Ali’s policies, Ennahda later nominated him as a security affairs counsellor to the Jebali cabinet. In the same vein, it appointed Chedly Ayari, several times minister under Bourguiba and a member of the Senate under Ben Ali, as chief executive officer of the Central Bank and president of the national commission in charge of ensuring the return of Tunisian assets transferred abroad. Those decisions led the CPR and Ettakatol to lose a considerable number of members through resignations from the parties and as deputies in the ANC.¹⁶

The disagreements within Ennahda, among the parties of the Troika and between the coalition partners and their grassroots prepared the ground for the 2013 crises that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Troika government. Although the CPR and Ettakatol had repeatedly demanded a cabinet reshuffle in 2012, it took the 6 February 2013 assassination of Choukri Belaid, a leader of the leftist Popular Front (Front populaire) coalition and early member of the 14 January Front, and the street demonstrations it sparked to push prime minister Jebali to finally offer to form a government of technocrats to solve the crisis. When the central institutions of his own party rejected this move, Jebali resigned, and Ennahda’s Ali Laarayedh, minister of interior, replaced him. Of note, Laarayedh obtained the ANC’s vote of confidence not the least thanks to the support of Al-Moubadara (The Initiative), the Destourian party headed by Morjane, formerly of the RCD. This has been widely interpreted as a sign that Ennahda, parallel to its Troika alliance, was also investing in informal relationships with some of the old elites to stay in power and therefore postponing debate about the latter’s exclusion from the political process.

Such bargains lent Ennahda only temporary dominance, as one of the most important consequences of the Troika’s various difficulties in governing and launching meaningful reform was allowing representatives of the old regime to make comebacks within opposition ranks. In April 2012, Essebsi announced the launch of a new party, Nidaa Tounes. He justified his initiative by citing the need to gather all opposition forces to put an end to the economic and security crises for which he held the Troika responsible. Essebsi later emphasized that the Troika and the ANC had lost their electoral legitimacy by surpassing the one year allotted for drafting the constitution, a limitation that the HIROR experts had pushed for in 2011 under his influence while interim prime minister. He also accused the government of lacking experience, pointing to his own know-how due to long-time civil service.¹⁷ Nidaa Tounes would consequently become the ‘neutral and technocratic’, ‘democratic’ and ‘secular’ alternative to Ennahda. Indeed, the anti-Islamist approach of Nidaa Tounes, accusing Ennahda of being a proxy of the Salafi and Qatari pan-Islamist project, not only attracted former regime figures, but also many self-proclaimed progressive intellectuals and secular democrats, leftists and former UGTT members. To them, Nidaa Tounes was an opportunity to ‘put the revolution back on track and correct the transformation’ in view of ‘Ennahda’s obsession for power’.¹⁸ The party attracted working- and middle-class Tunisians frustrated by the lack of economic progress. It also received funding from the bourgeoisie of Tunis and businesspeople close to the Sahelian milieu – i.e. from Tunisia’s favoured regions, the coastal plains from which Bourguiba and Ben Ali hailed and that strongly rejected sharing the country’s resources with the interior regions.

Reinforcing the anti-Islamist, secular alliance approach, in December 2012 Essebsi announced the establishment of a new coalition: the Union for Tunisia (UFT). This anti-Ennahda front – consisting of Nidaa Tounes and the centre-left coalition Al-Jamhouri (Republican) party, formed by Chebbi’s PDP, the Socialist Party, the leftist Patriotic and Democratic Party (Parti du travail patriotique et démocratique) and al-Massar (Voie démocratique et sociale) – allowed Essebsi to position himself as a central actor despite not being elected. As ANC members from other parties, among them Ettakatol and the CPR, joined Nidaa Tounes, the party gained de facto representation in the ANC without having participated in elections. The UFT provided a forum in which representatives of the former regime normalized their relationships with former leftist and opposition enemies. During the 2014 election campaign, Chebbi would even declare on Tunisian television that although Essebsi ‘had supervised his torture’, he still regarded him with ‘esteem’.¹⁹ The coalition around the charismatic leader was driven more by fear of a common threat than agreement to a common agenda (Van Dyke & McCammon, 2010). Meanwhile, decisions in Nidaa Tounes and the UFT were being taken by a restricted circle around Essebsi, with his son among the most influential figures.

In July 2013, the second assassination of a Popular Front leader, this time Mohamed Brahmi, offered Nidaa Tounes the opportunity to increase pressure on Ennahda to resign. Although the Popular Front had initially refused to join the UFT in January 2013, after Brahmi’s assassination it decided to co-operate with both Nidaa Tounes and the UFT in the framework of the National Salvation Front (NSF), a newly formed alliance that included nearly all the political forces opposed to the Troika. In July 2013, the NSF launched a protest campaign under the slogan ‘Errahil’ (Departure) in front of the ANC in Tunis’ Bardo neighbourhood, demanding the assembly’s dissolution and replacement of the Troika government as well as the removal of Ennahda-appointed governors and public officials. The campaign expanded in August, attracting more than 100,000 demonstrators. This allowed Nidaa Tounes to use public opinion to reverse the balance of power established on the basis of the 2011 elections and to present itself as a corrective force in the transformation, playing Ben Ali’s traditional repertoires of national unity and a particular Tunisian identity (Sadiki, 2002) against what it labelled Ennahda’s ‘foreign ideology’ – that is, its alleged control by Qatar and the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Throughout this period, both Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes used the ideological polarization manifested in street protests and coalitions to sustain their institutional inclusion instead of rationalizing the political arena in a manner that would have featured two clearly competing projects over the political order. They also favoured bilateral negotiations for settling their (above all, electoral) competition and preferred mobilizing their supporters outside the representative institutions over formal decision making. Indeed, even before the summer 2013 Errahil crisis, the rising competition between the Islamist-led government and the Nidaa Tounes-led opposition had resulted in so-called national sessions behind closed doors to negotiate the path towards new elections, thus marginalizing the ANC. After having boycotted a national initiative launched by the UGTT in October 2012 because of Nidaa Tounes’ participation, the CPR and Ennahda, which wanted to be in control of the bargaining, initiated their own dialogues in April 2013. They invited a restricted circle of political actors, among them the Troika parties and Al-Moubadara as well as Nidaa Tounes, which they were finally pushed to acknowledge as a force due to its rising importance in Tunisian society and in the eyes of international actors. Indeed, Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes successfully monopolized the bargaining over the main features of the future political order. They gathered in the presidential palace in Carthage and reached consensus on some issues, such as a semi-parliamentary rather than a presidential system, the sequencing of legislative and presidential elections and the electoral law. They disagreed, however, on the nomination of particular members to an independent election-monitoring committee, the creation of a constitutional court and the dissolution of the LPRs accused of serving as Ennahda’s ‘militias’.

During the Errahil campaign, 60 deputies from parties that had joined the UFT withdrew from the ANC to protest at Ennahda’s refusal to resign. On 6 August 2013, ANC president Ben Jaafar suspended ANC sessions against Ennahda’s will. In September, the UGTT, along with UTICA, the Tunisian League for Human Rights (Ligue tunisienne des droits de l’homme) and the National Bar Association (Ordre national des avocats), formed the so-called Quartet and offered their mediation to bring Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes together in closed national sessions to agree on a road map out of the crisis. Although these talks were formally open to all parties represented in the ANC, the central role that bargaining between Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes assumed ended the Errahil protests de facto as well as the Popular Front’s project of dissolving the ANC and replacing it with a government of ‘national competence’. The bargained character of the Ennahda–Nidaa Tounes competition was further illustrated when Ghannouchi ‘secretly’ met Essebsi in Paris in August 2013, in the presence of Slim Riahi, a young businessman and head of the Free Patriotic Union (Union Patriotique Libre, UPL), a party created in 2011 without a distinct platform or grassroots. Several sources reported that Ghannouchi had offered Essebsi the presidency of a national unity government at the meeting.²⁰

With the objective of stabilization, the international community – that is, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank as well as the United States and Gulf countries – conditioned their financial support to Tunisia on Ennahda’s acceptance of the terms of the national as put forward by the Quartet: re-examining the Troika’s administrative nominations, dissolving the notorious LPR, finalizing the constitution, agreeing on an electoral law, forming a technocratic interim government and an electoral commission as well as holding legislative and presidential elections before the end of 2014. Ennahda further found itself in a situation in which the ousting of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (in July 2013) fuelled violent conflict in Tunisia, with Salafi groups out of control and inhabitants from the interior regions increasingly engaging in clashes with the police. As a consequence, the threat of an uncontrollable escalation deterred Ennahda from mobilizing the streets once more to defend its ‘electoral legitimacy’ (Boubekeur, 2015). In the end, the Islamists acquiesced, finally joining the national sessions and accepting the Quartet conditions in December 2013.

The compromise on a technocratic government that depoliticized and stabilized the formal exchanges between Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes while they continued to compete for control of the political sphere can be considered an illustration of bargained competition. Above all, it demonstrates that political rivalry was activated when it allowed for institutional integration but was downplayed in the name of consensus when it became a risk to inclusion. While the compromise successfully contributed to easing tensions and allowing the transformation process to proceed, it did not resolve many of the conflicts between Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes. For instance, they agreed on a constitution, which after difficult bargaining was finally ratified in January 2014 despite ambiguities in a number of articles, including those on the role of Islam and the sacred and the balance of power between the president, the prime minister and parliament (Pickard, 2014). Attempts to remove Ennahda members from public administration posts often ended in balancing them with Nidaa Tounes members, rather than replacing them with non-partisan technocrats. For instance, Lotfi Ben Jeddou, minister of interior in the second Ennahda-led government (under Laarayedh), remained minister due to his intimate knowledge of terrorism-related issues but was given as a deputy minister Ridha Sfar, who had worked in the Ministry of Interior under Ben Ali. In the end, the technocratic government was less obviously partisan, in fact reflecting Nidaa Tounes’ dominance. This became clearer during the campaign for the October 2014 elections.

The Limits of Consensus Politics and Bargained Competition

The period from the appointment of the technocratic government in January 2014 to the eve of the October 2014 legislative and presidential elections was of crucial importance for consolidating Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes’ bargained competition. After the legislative elections, in which Nidaa Tounes won 85 seats and Ennahda 69 (i.e. 20 fewer than in 2011), the two parties chose to co-operate, agreeing on Nidaa Tounes assuming the presidency of the parliament (no other parties nominated candidates) and allocating one of the vice presidential posts to Ennahda (the other went to the UPL). Nevertheless, this consensual reintegration based on cohabitation in formal institutions may in the future again be negatively affected by the unresolved conflicts between them as well as within the two parties, as the bargained competition has greatly altered Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes’ internal dynamics and their policy priorities.

Indeed, while after the revolution the Islamists had chosen to use to their advantage the ideological polarization that had primarily been imposed upon them by secular opponents and former regime members, they realized that this had ultimately led to their losing control over the transformation process and that a negotiated approach downplaying ideological issues might serve them better for staying in the game. This transformation of Ennahda from a dominant party, perceived by many as a ‘conqueror’, into a more accommodating force that had ‘learned to lose’,²¹ and which resigned from government in late 2013, also had an important impact on its internal coherence. By the end of 2013, Ennahda’s leadership had accepted forgoing Islam-inspired articles in the constitution, such as reference to shariah as a source of legislation and the complementarity, rather than equality, of women, and abandoned its demand for former regime representatives’ exclusion and judicial prosecution. These actions, along with joining the national sessions, were seen by many among Ennahda’s grassroots as a lack of firmness and coherence.²² Consequently, many members left the party. In November 2013, the members of the party’s regional office in Gafsa collectively resigned, accusing Ennahda leaders of having abandoned the revolution’s goals and having betrayed promises of social justice. The reluctance of the party to mobilize its bases during the summer 2013 crisis to avoid playing into the hands of the Left and Nidaa Tounes’ accusations of support for political violence merely added to their frustration.

In response to their grassroots’ dissatisfaction and to adapt to an increasingly uncertain legislative electoral outcome, Islamist leaders encouraged their grassroots to de-politicize their networks or re-direct their mobilization potential into channels where they would not interfere with the leadership’s political strategies. As a consequence, Ennahda’s youth started to, for example, acquire Qatari funding for civil society initiatives.²³ The crackdown on Salafi associations by the technocratic government in early 2014, the replacement of Salafi imams and Nidaa Tounes’ efforts to revive a folkloric Islam with the help of loyal state imams (whose discourse was unsatisfying to young people wanting Islam to play a role in politics) were beneficial to the return of Ennahda’s networks within the mosques and its outreach to new conservative circles. Simultaneously managing the pursuit of its Islamic project and institutional representation has been at the core of Ennahda’s search for its political identity (Cavatorta & Merone, 2013). During the summer 2013 Bardo protests, Ennahda had opted for a small leadership circle to provide quick decision making in the form of a committee called Group 21 rather than broad consultations within party ranks.²⁴ It thus separated the party leadership’s political work aimed at institutional inclusion from the focus of Ennahda’s base on the Islamic aspects of their project.

Disagreement between Ennahda members choosing to bargain and those preferring to compete had intensified since 2011. To overcome it, in mid-2014 the party’s Shura Council agreed on a five-year strategic plan.²⁵ Among the priorities identified were the consolidation of the party’s institutional position, an increase in its political influence by positioning Ennahda representatives in key posts in regional administrative structures, the media and the banks and countering the perception of potential Islamist dominance by limiting the number of ministerial and public administration positions it would pursue. This pragmatic political turn can also be seen in the kind of candidates Ennahda put forward in the legislative elections. Leaders perceived as uncompromising, like Sadok Chourou and Habib Ellouz, were excluded. While those with advocacy profiles, like lawyers and human rights activists, had been chosen as candidates in the October 2011 ANC elections, in the 2014 competition candidates with technocratic experience and access to media, business and societal interests were put on its lists.²⁶

During the 2014 election campaign, very little remained of Ennahda’s alliance with its Troika partners. In 2011 the revolutionary versus former regime polarization served to mobilize voters, and Ennahda’s coalition with two secular parties helped to placate fears of an ‘Islamist takeover’, but in 2014 it was bargaining with Nidaa Tounes that allowed the Islamists to remain central in PRE circles. In July 2014, Rached Ghannouchi proposed the idea of putting forward one consensual candidate for the presidency, in partnership with other parties prepared to join in. Although such an arrangement was rejected by the parties as ‘undemocratic’, a deal between Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes still seems to have been struck, as Ennahda decided not to field a presidential candidate. Also, even though Ennahda’s base spoke out in favour of Marzouki, Essebsi’s main challenger in the presidential elections, Ennahda itself did not officially endorse Marzouki, maintaining its ‘neutrality’.

The 2014 election campaign also revealed the challenges stemming from Nidaa Tounes’ heterogeneous nature. On the one hand, the composition of the catch-all party was an asset in its representatives’ comeback on the political scene and the party’s victory in legislative elections. The support of the middle and upper-middle classes – that is, inhabitants of the coastal regions, businessmen, secular leftists, civil servants and unionists – who had experienced upward social mobility under Bourguiba and Ben Ali and considered Ennahda’s project anti-democratic, helped the party to impose itself as the country’s main political force. To overcome stigmatization as a gathering of pillars of the old regime aimed at the restoration of authoritarian rule, its leaders began publicly reinterpreting their roles in the 2011 revolution. On television, in the press and during popular meetings, they explained that they had chosen to avoid bloodshed as a sign of support for popular demands and that the protesters at the time were actually mainly members of the RCD with social and economic rather than political demands. Essebsi even asserted that Tunisia’s real martyrs were Belaid, Brahmi and Bourguiba and that talk of the rest, alluding to the martyrs of the 2011 revolution, was mere blathering.²⁷ As nearly 2 million Tunisians (out of a population of some 10 million) formerly belonged to the RCD (and had often felt forced to enrol), such reinterpretations did not shock the majority of Tunisians.

On the other hand, the cohabitation of leftists, like Nidaa Tounes secretary-general Taieb Baccouche, and old regime figures, like former RCD secretary-general Mohammed Ghariani, proved to be complicated and did not allow for shared vision, for example, in regard to the reform of state institutions. Also, the dominance of Essebsi and his close circle reflected the lack of pluralism in Nidaa Tounes’ leadership. Internal consultation beyond this circle has been non-existent (Wolf, 2014). In fact, the reluctance of Essebsi to let any other Nidaa Tounes figure appear in public during the election campaign or to participate in the bargaining with Ennahda prompted some prominent members, who happened to have had leading roles in the RCD, among them Ghariani, to quit the party.

Essebsi had paved the way for the reintegration of Destourian and RCD networks into PRE politics with policies forgoing transitional justice that he initially introduced when he headed the interim government established on 27 February 2011. His party has since been able to use these networks to garner positive media coverage and mobilize large segments of society. At the same time, the end of Ben Ali’s monopoly over rent redistribution and the reintegration of ‘economic networks of privilege’ (Heydemann, 2004) have favoured the multiplication of RCD-like parties that collaborate but also compete with each other. Riahi’s UPL is one example. Having obtained 17 seats in the 2014 elections, the UPL has become the third largest political force in the country, by tapping into Nidaa Tounes’ constituency. Some Nidaa Tounes branches in Tunis’ popular neighbourhoods even withdrew from the party to join the UPL, which presented itself as a ‘young people, non-ideological party’ (i.e. above the Islamist–secular divide) with the sole objective of bringing wealth to Tunisia. Still, Riahi supported Essebsi’s presidential candidacy in exchange for the opportunity to join the Nidaa Tounes-led parliamentary coalition.

Nidaa Tounes’ alliances, born in times of crisis, have proved to be fragile (Maravall, 2010). Those that it had built before and during the 2013 Bardo protests with the Popular Front and the leftist and centrist parties of the NSF were not converted into electoral alliances. The PDP had already left the UFT in December 2013; those parties that remained in the UFT were marginalized when Nidaa Tounes decided in June 2014 that it would not endorse mixed lists and only present its own party members as candidates, thus violating the UFT agreement. The remaining members of the UFT were not left with many options: quit or accept Nidaa Tounes’ offer to be on its list and thus renounce their own party.

The 2014 elections thus seem to have temporarily settled the issue of Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes’ competitive reintegration with the latter’s dominance of parliament. This will allow Ennahda to become an ‘anti-incumbent opposition’ (Albrecht, 2010) able to oppose specific government policies without, however, opposing Nidaa Tounes’ hegemonic position. As of November 2014, Essebsi had been widely expected to win the presidential elections,²⁸ and because in post-authoritarian contexts people tend to reject governance based on strong ideologies (Xiao, 2003), Nidaa Tounes’ hegemonic pluralism held the possibility of being successful as long as fear of the cost of open political conflict restrained Ennahda.

Conclusion

The interactions between Ennahda and old regime forces, reincarnated primarily in Nidaa Tounes, have been influenced by their polarization as well as continuous bargaining over the terms of their competition, which extended over three phases of the transformation period and in the end ensured the two groups a central role in politics as well as the normalization of their participation. This included the post-revolutionary reintegration of both forces during Essebi’s interim government with Ennahda’s participation in HIROR; the Islamist-led Troika government with the Nidaa Tounes-led alliance monopolizing opposition politics and the escalation of street protests by both forces; and the neutralization of the conflict through informal bargaining leading to Ennahda’s resignation, consensus on a technocratic government and alternation of power through elections.

This cohabitation, however, has not led to a transitional elite pact in favour of structural reform as many observers had thought might happen (Stepan, 2012). A consolidation of the specific mode of governance, which this contribution has described as bargained competition, will depend on the two parties’ ability to effectively address problems that have been avoided to date. Some of the transitional institutional bargains struck bear the potential for renewed conflict, such as the reform of the security forces, the law on political exclusion and the establishment of the Dignity and Truth Commission, whose task will be to unveil political crimes committed under the former regime (and the reshuffling of which Nidaa Tounes has already announced). More important, local demands have not been addressed. While slogans like ‘La Desstra wala Khwandjia’ (neither Destourians nor Islamists) were first limited to the Left, which had hoped to constitute a third voice, the marginalization of regional demands have led to the rejection of both Islamist and secular actors in Tunisia’s deprived areas. Slogans such as the ‘Revolution is not over’ and demands for alternative local representation have emerged. If civil society continues to be ineffectually integrated into the political arrangements (Dakhli, 2013), there can be no guarantee that the demands for stronger economic and political participation will remain confined to peaceful channels.

Tunisia shows that in a process of transformation, the repertoires of polarization and consensus can have various functions and consequences. For example, ideological polarization can help political forces position themselves as alternatives to elements of the former regime without challenging them substantively while at the same time allowing bargaining with them. Bargaining between new and old elites in Tunisia has mainly taken place outside formal, elected institutions, thus damaging the renewal of political culture in terms of transparency, political participation and pluralism. Indeed, informal compromises, volatile alliances and technocratic legitimacy have helped to consolidate post-revolutionary institutions by depoliticizing transitional social conflicts and preventing overly obvious formal rule breaking.²⁹ If, however, post-electoral pluralism remains limited and the decision-making process remains dominated by hegemonic parties, new forces might emerge to address social cleavages. Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes’ bargained competition has certainly brought an end to the former authoritarian order based on single-party hegemony, but it has retained a system of dominance and blocked access to politics for many actors outside PRE circles rather than institutionalizing transparency and effective oversight of the country’s institutions. It remains unclear how far the political positions represented in Tunisia’s parliament can be translated into a fruitful competition over policy priorities and approaches rather than mere bargaining for offices and spoils under the cover of consensus.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs [grant number VN 02-381.47-TP-P-03/12], [grant number VN 02-381.47-TP-P-03/14], [grant number VN02-381.47-TP-P-15/15]; Robert Bosch Stiftung [grant number 11.5.2070.0195.0].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Interviews with former RCD ministers and diplomats, Tunis, February 2011.

2. On the PRE, see Muriel Asseburg & Heiko Wimmen (2016).

3. The term secular refers to the political narrative that Tunisian post-colonial regimes used to legitimize their authoritarianism vis-à-vis the alleged threat of Islamism. It does not, however, mean that these forces avoided using Islam as a political resource. In contrast, ‘secularist’ refers to Tunisian leftist parties that officially demand that religion remain in the personal realm. For historical background on the secular versus Islamist categorization, see Zeghal (2013).

4. Helmke and Levitsky (2006: 5) define informal politics as ‘socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated, and enforced outside officially sanctioned channels’.

5. Restraining political competition is rooted in the ‘for or against Ben Ali’ choice that has shaped the political culture of Tunisia for the last decades.

6. The figure is from the independent elections commission, Instance supérieure indépendante pour les élections, http://www.isie.tn/statistiques (accessed 9 December 2014).

7. See Manifeste des démocrates progressistes tunisiens (2001), http://audace.free.fr/n73.htm#manifeste (accessed 12 July 2015).

8. Chebbi and independent human rights activists were also involved in the group (Haugbølle & Cavatorta, 2011: 326).

9. Interviews with Tunisian Islamists, unionists and foreign affairs officials in Tunisia, London and Paris, February 2009, and Tunis, February 2011.

10. The CNPR also oversaw the local Committees for the Protection of the Revolution (Comités pour la protection de la révolution). The committees had been spontaneously organized in the aftermath of the revolution to resist attacks by mobs loyal to the RCD and the secret police and then transformed into local representative structures assuming the role of municipalities (Houki, 2011). Originally close to the Left and the UGTT, many of these committees were soon taken over by Ennahda sympathizers, giving the Islamists leverage vis-à-vis the interim government, as it appeared to be the sole political force able to control and calm street protests, which it did through the councils.

11. .Interviews with local UGTT activists, Tunis, December 2011.

12. The Neo Destour (New Constitutional) Party (later the Socialist Destourian Party) was co-founded by Bourgiba and led by him for more than five decades, until his ousting in 1987.

13. Journal Officiel de la République Tunisienne, no. 33, 10 May 2011, p. 624.

14. This was confirmed by Sonia Toumi, an Ennahda member of the ANC, on the television show ‘Tounesna lyoum’, 12 June 2014.

15. Interview with CPR activists, Tunis, April 2013.

16. The Marsad project provides a chart on ANC members exiting and entering parties after October 2011. It shows that only Ennahda did not suffer from massive defections. See al-Bawsala, ‘Mercato des partis politiques de l’Assemblée nationale constituante’, http://majles.marsad.tn/fr/mercato (accessed 9 December 2014).

17. Interviews with Nidaa Tounes councillors and members, Tunis, April 2013.

18. Interviews with professors of La Manouba University and young Nidaa Tounes activists, Tunis, November 2013 and May 2014.

19. He did so on the El Wataniya 1 show ‘Choran Ala Al Houdhour’, 11 November 2014.

20. B. Lakani, ‘Tunis: Slim Rihahi révèle le deal entre BCE et Ghannouchi’, L’économiste maghrébin, 22 September 2014, http://www.leconomistemaghrebin.com/2014/09/22/tunisie-riahi-deal-bce-ghannouchi (accessed 9 January 2015).

21. In post-authoritarian systems, dominant parties usually adapt ‘in order to survive, to remain competitive or to ultimately re-gain power’ (Wong & Friedman, 2008) p. 5.

22. Interviews with Ennahda student activists and Salafi followers, Tunis, April 2013 and May 2014.

23. Interviews with Tunisian civil society activists, Doha, November 2014.

24. Interview with Tunisian activists, Tunis, May 2014 and Dahmani (2013).

25. Interview with Tunisian activists, Tunis, May 2014.

26. Hamza Marzouk, ‘Ennahdha – Législatives: dix anciens ministres et neuf hommes d’affaires têtes de liste’, L’économiste maghrebin, 25 August 2014, http://www.leconomistemaghrebin.com/2014/08/25/ennahdha-legislatives-anciens-ministres-hommes-affaires-tete-listes (accessed 8 December 2014).

27. ‘Essebsi: La Tunisie a donné 5 martyrs ... tous les restes du blabla’, TunisMAG, 19 December 2014, http://www.tunismag.com/essebsi-tunisie-donne-5-martyrs-les-restes-du-blabla (accessed 19 December 2014).

28. This article was finalized between the first and second rounds of the 2014 presidential elections.

29. Technocratic governance can be considered an informal but legitimate way to suspend official rules of democratic representation. See Helmke and Levitsky (2006).