Did civil society or parties build Tunisia’s democracy?

The short answer

• Pressure from the streets did not stop. The departure of the dictator did not end the protests. Young people from the interior towns that began the revolt joined trade unionists and students in occupying squares during the Kasbah sit-ins. They stayed until old ruling-party ministers resigned and a constituent assembly was promised. Their pressure prevented the old elite from managing a merely cosmetic change, as happened in several other Arab countries in 2011.
• A union with national reach. The UGTT survived Bourguiba and Ben Ali as the only mass organization not wholly controlled by the regime. It had branches in every governorate and members in every profession. Its leadership had been compromised under Ben Ali, but siding with protesters in January 2011 rebuilt credibility. The union could call strikes and threaten the government, yet it could also negotiate. Those resources made it a natural convener of the National Dialogue.
• An Islamist party that chose compromise. Ennahda’s leaders had experienced twenty years of persecution and knew the party could be crushed again. They accepted the Personal Status Code and dropped demands to cite Islamic law as a source of legislation. In 2014 they handed power to technocrats and accepted electoral defeat. Conviction, internal divisions and fear after Egypt’s example shaped these choices; the settlement depended on them.
• Fear of the Egyptian outcome. Egypt’s army overthrew elected president Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013, and hundreds of his supporters were killed in August. Both Tunisian camps watched. Secular opponents of Ennahda could see that a military solution might destroy democracy, while Ennahda could see what might happen to an Islamist party unwilling to bend.

What it changed

A democratic constitution. The 2014 constitution created a parliamentary system with a directly elected president. It guaranteed civil liberties, equality between women and men and parity in elected assemblies, and promised to favor poorer regions. Free legislative and presidential elections followed late that year. For most of the following decade Freedom House rated Tunisia the only “free” Arab country. The required constitutional court was never created, however, later leaving a president able to interpret the constitution alone.

The old elite returns by election. A new election could return familiar people to power. Nidaa Tounes (“Call of Tunisia”), the secular party founded in 2012 by 85-year-old Béji Caïd Essebsi, a former minister under Bourguiba, won 86 seats in October 2014 to Ennahda’s 69. Essebsi became president in December. Many revolutionaries concluded that political rules had changed while many of the same people remained in charge.

A region that went the other way. Tunisia’s neighbors followed different paths. Egypt returned to military rule in 2013, Libya had fragmented into rival governments and militias by 2014, and Syria descended into civil war. Libya’s collapse brought weapons, training camps and jihadist recruitment to Tunisia’s border. Foreign governments and donors invested heavily in Tunisia as evidence that democracy was possible in the region.

Women’s rights defended from below. Women’s campaigns against the “complementarity” clause and for parity showed them organizing freely on a mass scale for the first time. Women held about a third of the seats in the parliament elected in 2014. Their associations continued to win laws, including a comprehensive law against violence against women in 2017. Rights first granted from above could be defended and extended from below.