Tunisia’s parliamentary elections in October 2014 were a rare peaceful democratic transition in the Middle East. The following piece from the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson describes how these elections occurred without violence or allegations of fraud from the Islamist Ennahda party, which lost seats to the secular Nidaa Tounes party led by Beji Caid Essebi. The piece is entitled “A Bloodless Transition: Tunisia’s Legislative Elections” and was written by Robert Worth.

            The Tunisian parliamentary election that took place on October 26 has been widely hailed as a rare and heartening success story. It was a moment of bloodless democratic transition in a broader Middle East that appears to be crumbling daily into anarchy, from the lawless militia zone of Libya to the killing grounds of Syria and Iraq. The election went off peacefully, without accusations of fraud, and even the principal losing party—the Tunisian Islamist group known as Ennahda—held a celebration to honor the event as a “victory for all Tunisians.”

            Yet in some ways the electoral story that captured the headlines is less impressive, and perhaps less important, than the popular response to it: a mandate for political compromise, and an array of energized civic groups who seem determined to hold their government accountable in ways that are almost unheard-of in the Arab world. For anyone who has covered flawed elections in Iraq and Lebanon—as I have—it was thrilling to discover iWatch and Muraqiboon, new outfits full of young Tunisians who did (by all accounts) a spectacular job of monitoring the elections and forecasting the results. Another group, Marsad Budget, gathers budget information on all of Tunisia’s government agencies and makes it available online. Their volunteers have attended every session of Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly since the first post-revolutionary elections in 2011, live-tweeting the debates and later posting and collating information about how the country’s money is being spent. A new crop of independent journalists and bloggers, writing in French and Arabic, has published impressive reports (mostly online) on the government’s failures and the challenges it faces in the coming years, from garbage collection to fighting terrorism.

            The election itself seemed straightforward enough, at least from the outside: a big win for the main secularist party, Nidaa Tounes, which took 85 seats in Tunisia’s 217-seat Assembly. Nidaa Tounes capitalized on popular discontent with the Islamists, who were widely blamed for assassinations, strikes, and disarray in the years since the 2011 revolution.

            That result should not have been a surprise; surveys had predicted a victory for Nidaa Tounes. Yet oddly, few in Tunisia seemed to believe them, and one high-ranking member of Nidaa Tounes told me just before the vote that he feared the Islamists would triumph again. Those conflicting expectations hint at the uneasy dance between Tunisia’s two main political factions over the past year, and the determination of many voters to hold both of them in check.

            Traveling around Tunisia during the week before the election, I found it hard to escape the feeling that Ennahda, the Islamist party, was the strong horse. They had sent volunteers knocking on doors in every part of the country, and their frequent political rallies were brilliantly organized and full of wildly enthusiastic crowds. By contrast, Nidaa Tounes’s rallies seemed lackluster, and emanated a lack of discipline and confidence. The party, founded in mid-2012, is a rattle-bag of politicians and businessmen united only in their antipathy for the Islamists. Nidaa Tounes’s rallies had a heavy aroma of nostalgia, and included frequent video clips of Habib Bourguiba, who ruled Tunisia as a (mostly) benevolent autocrat from 1959 until 1987, when Zine El Abidine Ben Ali took over.

            In a sense, Nidaa Tounes is a one-man party: it was founded by Beji Caid Essebsi, an 87-year-old eminence grise who held several top posts under Bourguiba, and presented himself as the man who could restore Tunisia to the harmonious laïcité of the post-independence years. Essebsi is running in the presidential election scheduled for late November, but the lawmakers elected last month all ran under his banner. Even supporters of the party express unease about what would happen if Essebsi were to die or fall ill; there are few obvious heirs to his mantle, and many diverse agendas within the party. And many Tunisians—not just the Islamists—seem anxious about the possibility that members of Ben Ali’s clique could return to power under the Nidaa banner.

            Yet Tunisians handed this party a decisive victory. My sense, based on interviews with dozens of people before and during the election, is that many of the party’s supporters were suspicious of it, but keen to punish the Islamists, or at least to ensure that they are forced to share power. (Scores of parties and coalitions competed in the vote, but Nidaa Tounes was widely seen as the only credible alternative to Ennahda.) Many of these people had voted for Ennahda in the first post-revolutionary election, in 2011, partly because it had no track record and its leaders elicited sympathy with their record of opposition to the Ben Ali regime (many of them spent years in prison). Ennahda’s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, is far more sophisticated than his ideological peers in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and more willing to compromise. But Ennahda’s popularity collapsed in 2013, when jihadists assassinated two prominent leftist politicians and the party seemed unwilling to confront the hardline Salafists at its margins.

            To some extent, the vote ratified the results of a process of political reconciliation instigated jointly by Essebsi and Ghannouchi in late 2013, with a series of “National Dialogue” meetings. Nidaa Tounes may have won the biggest share in the election, but it is not strong enough to govern without partners, and may even end up governing jointly with Ennahda.

            Inevitably, many of the young protesters who helped to kick-start the Tunisian revolution in December 2010 are now disgusted with the country’s politics, and feel that the choice between the Islamists and Essebsi is no choice at all. But the despair is far from universal. And some of the same people who grimace when asked about the vote are also working hard to build Tunisia’s democratic institutions. Among the most impressive, I thought, was a new venture called al Khat (the line, or calligraphy, in Arabic). It has three wings: a website that produces long-form civic journalism, a for-profit media lab, and a training division that teaches investigative journalism and promotes higher standards in the field. These people, working in a small suite of offices for almost no pay, embody the spirit you’d hope to find four years after the start of what was once called the Arab Spring: resignation about the slow pace of political change, but intense dedication to creating new institutions that will—if all goes well—help make those changes sustainable.

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