Bardo Attack Threatens Tunisia's Moderate Coalitions

The attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis on March 18 could have implications on Tunisia’s fragile democracy, according to David Ottaway in the latest edition of the Wilson Center Middle East Program’s Viewpoints series. Tunisia is widely seen as the most successful democratic transition since the Arab Spring, but cooperation between Islamist and secular politicians is shaky at best. The following is an excerpt of Ottaway’s piece.

The attack by Islamic extremists on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis that killed 20 foreign tourists and 3 Tunisians is tragic in more ways than the horrendous act itself. The chief political victim may well be the moderate, secular-Islamist center that has been holding the country together and made possible its successful transition to democracy so far.

The collapse of this moderate center would also call into question the soundness of the basic Western assumption that democracy is the best antidote to rising Islamic extremism in the Arab world.

Tunisia is the one and only country so far to emerge from the Arab Spring far more democratic than ever before in its history. But it is also the Arab country that has sent the largest number of jihadis to fight for ISIS and other similar groups in Syria and Iraq. The government calculates 3,000 Tunisians have gone and that it has prevented another 9,000 from leaving.

If there is any evidence that democracy serves to reduce Islamic extremism, it is hard to find so far in the Tunisian example. If anything, the opposite appears to be true: democracy has given space and voice not only to secular and Islamic democrats but to anti-democrats of both persuasions as well. The result has been a polarization of Tunisian society that has turned a growing number of both secularists and Islamists into uncompromising militants of opposing faiths.

Tunisia rightfully lays claim to having given birth not only to the Arab Spring but to the only successful transition to democracy. The string of uprisings against authoritarian Arab rulers began with the self-immolation of a distraught fruit and vegetable street vendor in the backwater town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010. This touched off nationwide protests that in less than a month led to the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled for his life to Saudi Arabia after 24 years in power.

Democracy suddenly flourished and produced a successful, if sometimes rocky, transition to the freest and fairest elections of representative bodies since the country’s independence from French colonial rule in 1956. A bewildering array of new parties competed for the 217 seats in the National Assembly elected in October 2011, but it was the Islamic party, Ennahda, that came in first winning 89 of the total.

Absent from this burgeoning new democratic order right from the beginning were hardline fundamentalist Salafis who resorted almost immediately to tactics of intimidation to close down bars serving alcohol and Western-influenced art shows while demanding women to ware veils. In April 2011, seven months before the first elections, the most militant of them launched Ansar al-Sharia, which dedicated to the use of political terrorism such as the failed attack on the parliament building and successful one on the Bardo Museum.

Meanwhile, Ennhada was discovering the costs of democracy to its own standing. In order to govern, it had to accept entering a coalition with two militantly secular parties, forcing it to make numerous concessions in the writing of a new constitution. It gave up on its hope for creating an Islamic state and agreed to drop any mention of shari’a, Islamic law, as a fundamental constitutional principle.

Its political moderation and pragmatism did not stop there. When public sentiment turned against Ennahda in 2013, its highly pragmatic leader, Rached Ghannouchi, convinced his party to give up power and even approve a law allowing its hardline secularist enemies from the Ben Ali era to return to politics. To assuage secularists’ fears, Ennahda also renounced running for the presidential election in late 2014 that was won by the 88-year-old Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi, who had served in various past governments and stands as a personification of the return of politicians from the old order.

In the 2014 parliamentary elections, Essebsi ‘s party—Nidaa Tounes—won 37 percent of the popular vote, the exact same percentage that Ennahda had won in the 2011 National Constituent Assembly election, although Nidaa Tounes ended up with three fewer seats (86 seats). Nidaa Tounes campaigned on a vehemently anti-Islamic platform aimed at rallying Tunisia’s secularists to roundly defeat Ennahda. Still, the moderate Islamic party managed to garner almost 28 percent of the vote and 69 seats.

The reaction of Nidaa Tounes to having only a plurality of votes stands in sharp contrast to that of Ennahda facing the same dilemma in 2011.

Ennahda had quickly decided to look for secular partners to form an Islamic-secular coalition, the “troika” as it was called, in the name of national unity and stability. The three parties divvied up the top positions. While the prime minister was from Ennhada, the country’s president and assembly speaker were leaders of the two secular parties in the troika.

By contrast, Essebsi and his Nidaa Tounes made no attempt whatsoever to share power with Ennhada. On the contrary, they sought to shut the Islamists out of any leadership role in the latest government. The new prime minister, Habib Essid, is technically an independent but was Essebsi’s interior minister when he was prime minister of the transitional government in 2011. Essid was also a high-ranking security official under the ousted President Ben Ali. The speaker of the new parliament, Mohamed Ennaceur, is a Nidaa Tounes vice president.

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