Tunisia achieved a smooth political transition in 2019 despite such major challenges as an intractable economic crisis and high rates of unemployment at home and sharp regional polarisation, a new wave of Arab Spring uprisings from Iraq and Lebanon to neighbouring Algeria, and another outbreak of civil warfare in Libya abroad.

But economic straits and regional turmoil did not prevent Tunisians from pressing forward with their fledgling democracy. Legislative and presidential elections were held in September and October, and Kais Saied emerged victorious from the second round of the presidential elections, succeeding late Tunisian president Beji Caid Essebsi. The Islamist Ennahda Party came out ahead in the People’s Assembly elections for Tunisia’s parliament, entitling it to name a prime minister. Habib Jemli was then tasked with forming a new government.

The year opened with Ennahda and its former rival the secularist Nidaa Tounes Party butting heads over major political, social and economic issues. The rivalry had been growing more heated since the collapse of the consensus between the two parties in autumn last year.

Former president Essebsi, the founder of Nidaa Tounes, announced his party’s withdrawal from the consensus he had struck with the Islamist party in 2014 at a time when his party had taken the lead in the presidential and legislative elections. Five years later, however, the party was beset by internal rifts and clashes between its leaders, especially between then prime minister Youssef Chahed and Hafez Caid Essebsi, the president’s son and head of Nidaa Tounes.

The party’s split enabled Ennahda to become the largest parliamentary bloc. By the autumn of 2019, Nidaa Tounes’s popularity had sunk so low that the once majority party barely managed to get three seats in parliament and its presidential candidate, former defence minister Abdelkrim Zbidi, did not come close to clearing the first round of the presidential elections.

After splitting from Nidaa Tounes, Youssef Chahed also stood in the presidential elections at the head of his newly formed Tahya Tounes (Long Live Tunisia) Party. He performed worse than Zbidi, but his party won 14 seats in the new parliament, positioning it for a seat in the coalition government. Chahed is also on good terms with Ennahda, which, as the winner in the parliamentary elections, is entitled to form a government. As it won only 52 out of parliament’s 217 seats, it will have to hammer together a coalition with other parties, however.

The results of the legislative and presidential polls came as a shock to the political establishment that had led Tunisia since the 2011 Revolution. This also applied to Ennahda, whose candidate for president, Abdelfattah Mourou, also fell considerably short of clearing the first round, while the party lost 17 seats in parliament.

The voters turned to new faces instead, above all to Kais Saied, an academic and relative unknown who ran as an independent and won in the second round, and Nabil Karoui, an entrepreneur who ran as the candidate of  the Heart of Tunisia Party, which he founded in June 2019. In the run-up to the elections, analysts foresaw a neck-and-neck race between Ennahda’s Abdelfattah Mourou and the Tahya Tounes candidate Youssef Chahed. Much to everyone’s surprise, Saied and Karoui came in first and second place, respectively, in the first round of the presidential elections held in September. Saied won by a landslide in the runoff in October.

Numerous crucial issues lie ahead for the newly formed parliament in 2020. Some have been bequeathed from the former president, such as the bill on gender equality in inheritance. The economic reform process in Tunisia launched by the Chahed government two years ago will also occasion heated debate. This process has so far been unable to fulfil its promise to significantly reduce unemployment and raise the job-creation rate despite the backing it has received from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

According to Tony Verheijen, World Bank country manager for Tunisia, the Tunisian government has received about $4.6 billion from the bank since 2011. The bank is worried by two problems, however, he said. The first is the Tunisian economy’s lack of integration into the global economy, and the second is the lack of institutional development in the country.

Verheijen believes that over the next two years the critical state of the Tunisian economy will present major challenges for the new government that is due to begin its work in the new year.

Tunisia’s National Institute of Statistics (INS) reported in November that unemployment in the country stands at 15.1 per cent. Over 628,000 of the country’s more than 11 million inhabitants are out of work, with many of these being young people with college degrees. The new government will thus need to make job creation one of its highest priorities if it is to contend with an escalating economic protest movement, especially among young people in the interior of the country who have long complained of being marginalised by the government.

The government will also need to intensify the fight against corruption, since this both inhibits investment and threatens stability. This was among the problems that the World Bank representative had in mind when he warned of the challenges facing the government in the new year.

Despite some fraught moments that caused alarm among some observers this year, Tunisia has managed to stay clear from the brink. Political competition on the whole remained healthy, giving birth to two new parties that have performed remarkably well in elections in Nabil Karoui’s Heart of Tunisia and Youssef Chahed’s Tahya Tounes.

The fact that Ennahda lost a large number of seats in parliament was reassuring to those suspicious of the motives of Tunisia’s largest Islamist party, which will need to engage with at least one other party in order to achieve a parliamentary majority of over 106 seats to pass legislation.

Ennahda has been keen to improve its performance, while trying to learn from the experiences of similar parties elsewhere. It has drawn close to Tahya Tounes, a result of the Ennahda leadership’s courting of Chahed last year, which was one of the factors that triggered Essebsi’s break with the consensus with Ennahda.

But the most important reason why Tunisia has averted any backsliding in its democratic transformation has been the Tunisian people’s determination to compel the country’s political elites to behave responsibly for the sake of the greater welfare, to keep polarisation in check, and to uphold the country’s political institutions. These have bolstered this inclination by guaranteeing a fair political playing field governed by the rule of law.

Such factors have facilitated the smooth democratic rotation of power, even under the state of emergency following the death of Essebsi some weeks before the presidential elections. Tunisia’s political parties, government and civil society organisations, labour unions and other institutions showed the degree of responsibility and flexibility necessary to make it possible for the country’s Independent Higher Authority for Elections to reschedule the elections smoothly.

As a result, no problems arose that might have called the authority’s integrity into question or jeopardised the country’s stability.

If Tunisians used democratic mechanisms to punish establishment politicians and parties they felt had been remiss in their duties or had failed to fulfil their promises in 2019, they still faced the perhaps greater challenge of fighting corruption in government.

Tunisia ranked 73 in the Corruption Perceptions Index that the international NGO Transparency International published in 2018. The country will need to work much harder on this challenge during the next two years in order to overcome entrenched problems that hamper the economy. It will need to calm public opinion, which sees corruption as one of the main sources of the country’s economic woes.

The government will also need to follow through on its economic reform programme in order to stimulate economic growth. The World Bank and IMF hope to see the growth rate in Tunisia climb above three per cent in the coming year, but this will require a cooperative and flexible spirit among the political parties and a concerted effort among relevant government agencies.

Although the previous government had initially been upbeat on the prospects for stimulating growth, Tunisian Central Bank, IMF and World Bank figures put a damper on such optimism. The figures showed a large government deficit, a negative balance of trade, and a shrinkage in agricultural production, the largest economic sector in Tunisia. Meanwhile, tourism hinges on perceptions of the political and security situation.

The challenges ahead are formidable. But there is good reason to believe that the Tunisian people can surmount them, just as they have surmounted the many challenges to the country’s democratic transition. Hope is to be drawn from their determination to exercise their political and civil rights in accordance with democratic mechanisms, as well as from the general spirit of responsibility and commitment to the democratic rules and spirit shown by the country’s political elites.

In short, political life in Tunisia continues to mature. However, in the light of the economic crisis in the country, the Tunisia people will need support to help them to realise their aspirations for development.

 

*A version of this article appears in print in the  26 December, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.