The results of Monday’s referendum are in, and the
proposal to give dictatorial powers to Tunisia’s usurper president, Kais Saied,
got a 94.7% ‘yes’ vote.
It’s true that only one-third of those entitled to vote actually did so, and
that most of the opposition parties called for a boycott. But nobody was
prevented from voting: the reason the opposition called on their supporters to
abstain was that they knew how badly they would lose.
How did it come to this? Eleven years ago Tunisia was the birthplace of the
‘Arab Spring’, a wave of mostly non-violent democratic revolutions in the Arab
world. Some were drowned in blood (Bahrain, Egypt), some turned into
long-lasting civil wars (Libya, Syria, Yemen), and some just sputtered out
(Algeria, Morocco). But Tunisia’s revolution survived.
However, it did not thrive. Tunisia has had ten governments in the past eleven
years, all of them crippled by the fact that the biggest party, with more than
a third of the seats in parliament, was an Islamic party called Ennahda
(Renaissance).
The Muslim Brotherhood-linked group was ‘moderate’ as these things go in
Islamic circles, but its leaders had been living in exile until the overthrow
of long-ruling dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. It quickly captured a
third of the vote (mostly older people), and became the indispensable core of
any coalition hoping to gain a parliamentary majority.
Moderate though it was, Ennahda’s Islamic priorities made collaboration with
any of the secular political parties a non-stop tug-of-war, so the coalitions
never survived long and very little got done. The economy floundered, unemployment
soared, and it was not just the Islamic party but democracy in general that got
the blame.
Much the same process happened in Egypt, except a lot faster. The democratic
revolution succeeded, the dictator Hussein Mubarak was overthrown in 2011 – and
the first free election brought an Islamic party to power.
Unfortunately, the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Freedom and Justice
Party’ made cooperation with secular democratic forces impossible, so the army
made an alliance with the secular democrats and overthrew it in 2013. Then it
betrayed the gullible secular democrats too, and General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi
has ruled unchallenged ever since.
In Tunisia in 2022, the budding dictator is a former law professor, Kais Saied.
He was elected president three years ago in a free election, and he ruled until
2021 as a legitimate and law-abiding chief executive. But as popular anger at
the stalemated parliament grew, he spotted an opportunity.
Last July he dismissed the prime minister, suspended parliament, and began
ruling by decree. Two months ago he gave himself the power to fire judges as
will, and promptly sacked 57 of them. And this month he staged the
constitutional referendum that makes all these changes permanent.
The forms and rituals of democracy are observed, but the new reality is an
autocratic ruler who can probably arrange his own re-election indefinitely –
although to ensure no popular resistance he will eventually have to re-create
the old police state as well.
The sad truth is that Kais Saied, a former law professor, has the support of
the great majority of Tunisia’s eleven million people for the moment. A recent
opinion poll found that 81% of Tunisians prefer a strong leader, and 77% don’t
care if that leader is elected or not, so long as the economy creates jobs and
delivers a decent standard of living.
The same poll, conducted by ‘Arab Barometer’, a research network based at
Princeton University, found that similar majorities in favour of strong-man
rule exist in almost all the other Arab countries. In only one Arabic-speaking
country, Morocco, do most people disagree with the statement that a country
needs a leader who can ‘bend the rules’ to get things done.
The Arab world is the least democratic region of the world because Arabs have
come to believe that the economy is weak in a democracy. This is a bizarre
belief, since almost all of the world’s richest countries are democracies, but
it sounds right to Arabs because their democracies don’t work at all well.
The truth is that they don’t work well for ARABS, because Arab democracies are
usually sabotaged and often paralysed by the zero-sum competition between two
rival revolutionary movements, democratic and Islamist. There’s no short-term
solution to that.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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democracy really only just holds in in the Western world as well. The two party state ensures only candidates chosen by the party faithful are nominated. the future does not look bright
By Ian from Other on 30 Jul 2022, 06:26