Did civil society or parties build Tunisia’s democracy?

The short answer

• Pressure from the streets did not stop. Unlike many revolutions, Tunisia’s did not end when the dictator left. The Kasbah sit-ins were led by young people from the same interior towns that had begun the revolt, and with trade unionists and students they kept occupying squares until the old ruling party’s ministers resigned and a constituent assembly was promised. Continued mobilisation prevented the old elite from managing a cosmetic change, which is what happened in several other Arab countries in 2011.
• A union with national reach. The UGTT had survived Bourguiba and Ben Ali as the only mass organisation not wholly controlled by the regime, with branches in every governorate and members in every profession. Its leadership, compromised under Ben Ali, had rebuilt its credibility by siding with the protesters in January 2011. It therefore had the legitimacy and the organisation to call strikes, threaten the government and sit at the negotiating table, which made it the natural convener of the National Dialogue.
• An Islamist party that chose compromise. Ennahda had been persecuted for twenty years and knew that it could be crushed again. Its leaders accepted the Personal Status Code, dropped demands to cite Islamic law as a source of legislation, and in 2014 handed power to technocrats and accepted electoral defeat. Their choices were shaped by conviction, by divisions inside the party and by fear of Egypt’s example, but without them no compromise would have been possible.
• Fear of the Egyptian outcome. Egypt’s collapse taught both Tunisian camps what confrontation would cost: the army’s overthrow of the elected president Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013, followed by the killing of hundreds of his supporters in August, was watched closely in Tunis. Secular opponents of Ennahda saw how a military solution could destroy democracy, and Ennahda saw what could happen to an Islamist party that refused to bend. A neighbour’s disaster can be a powerful teacher.

What it changed

A democratic constitution. The 2014 constitution created a parliamentary system with a directly elected president, guaranteed civil liberties, equality between women and men and parity in elected assemblies, and promised to favour the poorer regions. Free legislative and presidential elections in late 2014 made Tunisia the only Arab country rated “free” by Freedom House for most of the following decade. Its chief weakness was that the constitutional court it required was never created, which later allowed a president to interpret the constitution alone.

The old elite returns by election. The first parliamentary election under the new constitution returned figures of the old regime to power. Nidaa Tounes (“Call of Tunisia”), a secular party founded in 2012 by the 85-year-old Béji Caïd Essebsi, a minister under Bourguiba, won the election of October 2014 with 86 seats against Ennahda’s 69, and Essebsi became president in December. Many revolutionaries saw this as proof that the revolution had changed the rules of politics while leaving many of the same people in charge.

A region that went the other way. Tunisia’s success was surrounded by failure: Egypt returned to military rule in 2013, Libya fragmented into rival governments and militias by 2014, and Syria descended into civil war. The collapse of Libya in particular brought weapons, training camps and jihadist recruitment to Tunisia’s border, while foreign governments and donors invested heavily in Tunisia as proof that democracy was possible in the region.

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