Tunisia prepares to vote

[Sheilbh]

'Tunisia elections are a good thing, but we mustn't throw the revolution away'
Tunisians speak of their hopes for the future as the country holds first free elections since overthrow of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

Along the main street of the desolate, rural town where Tunisia's revolution started, people watched from the pavement as a new kind of demonstration filed past.

First came a slow-moving truck carrying a group of 10-year-old boys waving religious banners, shouting: "Allah is great!" Then came a crowd of 100 to 200 people chanting: "Your god has been insulted, come out and defend him!"

Men led the procession – some with long beards, others in jeans and leather jackets. A few metres behind came a dozen veiled women with banners. They were protesting against a screening on Tunisian TV of the award-winning animated film Persepolis, one woman's story of Iran's 1979 revolution. The crowd cried blasphemy, complaining that a sequence in the film showed God as an old, bearded man, where Islam forbids any such depictions.

"They've been protesting every day for five days," said a barrister in legal robes watching from the courthouse steps. "These kind of Islamists are in a minority in Tunisia. But there's a strange atmosphere which could disrupt the election."

Sidi Bouzid, a small, neglected town in Tunisia's deprived interior, is famous as the birthplace of the Arab spring. When Mohamed Bouazizi, a young vegetable seller, set himself alight in protest at the police confiscation of his vegetable cart on 17 December the uprising spread and a month later the ruling despot Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled the country.

A domino effect saw people take to the streets across the Arab region and regimes begin to crumble. Now, nine months after its people's revolution, Tunisia is to hold its first free elections this weekend. It is the first vote of the Arab spring.

But Sidi Bouzid, still crippled by inequality, unemployment and the corruption of the old regime, remains the test of what locals call Tunisia's unfinished revolution. As polling day nears, its mood of nervousness and expectation mirrors the rest of Tunisia. Sidi Bouzid's demonstrations against the Persepolis film reflect a wider movement of conservative Muslim demonstrations across the country over the past week. Last Friday, police fired teargas to disperse hundreds of Islamists, many Salafists, demonstrating in Tunis against the film. The owner of the channel, Nessma TV apologised for showing the film, but crowds nonetheless tried to petrol-bomb and burn his house, forcing his wife and children to flee.

Thousands held a counter-demonstration in Tunis on Sunday in support of the TV station and freedom of speech, arguing that Tunisia was a secular, tolerant and open society.

The moderate Islamist party An-Nahda, which is tipped to top the polls in the elections, condemned the attacks on Nessma TV but said the screening of the film was a provocation. "This has soured the mood, people fear it could destabilise a country about to vote," said one trade unionist.

After more than 50 years as essentially a single-party state, Tunisians must choose between a bewildering array of over 100 new political parties and scores of independent candidates – an alphabet soup of political groupings that has been compared to the shortlived explosion of parties in post-Franco Spain.

The new assembly's specific role will be to draw up a constitution. This will take at least a year, and only after that will parliamentary and presidential elections happen. Tunisia wants to make its transition to democracy one step at a time.

Behind Sidi Bouzid's main boulevard, on the pot-holed, dusty backstreets where many families survive on the equivalent of £80 a month, mules pulled carts and children played barefoot. Families came to their doorsteps as 12 canvassers from An-Nahda went door to door carrying stacks of leaflets and wearing specially printed white jackets bearing the party logo. Local candidates range from an anaesthetist who had been living in Saudi Arabia to a female secondary school teacher of Arabic.

Well-organised, well-resourced and well-staffed, the party, which was outlawed and persecuted under Ben Ali, is predicted to claim an historic victory with a large share of the vote. But a deliberately complex proportional representation system means that regardless of the number of votes, no single party can win a majority of seats or dominate the new assembly.

After 23 years of Ben Ali's despotism, Tunisia fears any one political group overpowering this delicate transitional phase.

"This election is a good thing," said a vegetable seller in his 50s, pushing a sparse cart of produce like the one that sparked the revolution. "But we mustn't throw this revolution away, we have to make sure there is real change in people's lives. Like a lot of people, I'm undecided on who to vote for."

Tunisian voters are sceptical of the myriad political parties and their promises. Many fear politicians' self-interest, corruption or the personality cults that have gripped Tunisia in the past.

Voters want concrete action on unemployment, poverty, inequality and corruption, but the assembly must first hammer out the legal framework of the new state.

One An-Nahda candidate said: "People say to us: 'We want jobs, we want a future, our problems solved.' We're trying to explain that what we're being elected for is to write a constitution. We can't promise them the moon."

Through the dust came a small car with a loud speaker haphazardly tied to the roof, blasting the slogans of the fledgeling Tunisian Workers' party, PTT. A medium-sized party, its leading candidate in Sidi Bouzid, Abdessalem Nciri, is a law professor from Tunis university who came back to his native region to help the revolution.

"This revolution is certainly not finished. Daily life has changed in a negative sense, the unemployment rate has gone up since January, even doubled in some places," he said.

Strewn with revolutionary graffiti commemorating the martyrs and warning youths, "Don't Give Up", Sidi Bouzid still has among the highest unemployment in the country. About 45% of graduate women are unemployed.

Far from Tunisia's golden tourist coast, it has yet to celebrate its special status as cradle of the Arab spring because, as one trade unionist said, "much of the misery of daily life hasn't changed since Ben Ali's departure". Even the family of the martyr Bouazizi has moved away. "The symbols of our revolution have been hijacked," said one lawyer.

In the courthouse, the head of the Sidi Bouzid barristers, Jilani Dhai, warned that Ben Ali's unrepentant bureaucrats still dominated officialdom, a dangerously crooked justice system and notoriously brutal police remained in place, torture continued and innocent people were still in prison. He echoed the concerns of a group of Tunis lawyers who announced last week that there was evidence torture in police custody had continued since the revolution. He said corrupt officials, including judges, had actually been promoted since the revolution.

"If anything there has been an increase in corruption, a sense of impunity," he said. "Ben Ali has gone but his system continues. The same people are in place. The beast's head has been cut off, but the beast is still moving. Who has substituted that head? Who is still moving this beast? That is the question."

He and other lawyers were concerned that last week in Sidi Bouzid a group of youths were up in court for insulting police after they complained of heavyhanded police treatment.

"A society which lived under despotism for 23 years can't become a democracy in a day," said Ammar Chebb, Sidi Bouzid's new state prosecutor. "Mentalities have to change. People have to become more democratic in their heads."

At the grandiose local headquarters of Ben Ali's now outlawed RCD party, ransacked and graffitied, two soldiers stood guard behind barbed wire. The offices now house Tunisia's new election authority. "It's highly symbolic being here: it was a place of falsification, we want to make it a place of transparency," said Bouderbala Nciri, a doctor now running the local electoral body.

In the past, Tunisia was renowned for its fixed elections. Of the list of about 7 million potential voters initially provided by the interior ministry after the revolution, 2.5 million were dead, one election official said. "In the old days, only dead people voted in Tunisia."

Sitting in his office, shuffling the dossiers on people who were injured in police brutality during the revolution – lost eyes, teargas wounds, beatings by truncheons – the lawyer Khaled Aouainia sighed: "With these elections, Tunisia is an open-air laboratory for the Arab world. If they don't work and people don't see real change and an end to the system, there will be a new uprising."

Unemployment, one of the reasons for the revolution, hangs heavily over the vote. Behind Ben Ali's public relations spin on Tunisia's economic miracle was a desperate generation of educated and skilled youth who still have no hope of work. Since the revolution, the desperation over jobs remains so acute it has even spilled into bloodshed.

A few hours' drive south of Sidi Bouzid, in the desolate mining heartlands, the town of Metlaoui remains tense after rival clans went to war over a tract suggesting there would be tribal quotas for jobs. Extreme violence this summer saw locals kill each other with hunting rifles, knives, axes or stone opponents to death.

In his living room, Brahim Kalthoum, unemployed and in his 40s, showed mobile-phone footage of his brother, an ambulance driver, lying in a pool of blood with a knife plunged into his eye socket, tens of stab wounds across him and a delighted crowd standing around shouting that his trousers should be pulled down as a final insult. He was murdered in the spate of tit-for-tat killings over tribal job quotas. His family said he had answered a call to attend an injured woman, but it was a trap and the crowd savagely took to him with knives.

"If you ask about the future, I'd say it's black, it's despair," Kalthoum said. "That's what unemployment does. We need our dignity back." He would vote for An-Nahda as he thought they could bring some kind of justice.

A cafe on the other side of town where members of opposing clans were killed was now full of young men, many with scars and wounds from the fighting this summer. "They call this the jobless cafe," sighed Wajih Mnassri, 29, a medicine graduate unemployed for three years and volunteering at a hospital for less than £90 a month.

"I can't even afford cigarettes. I get free tea from the cafe owner. We feel forgotten here, this is about regional inequality. Look around, there's no infrastructure, it's like the 1930s."

He would be voting, optimistic for the country as a whole, though pessimistic for his forgotten town. "We can't have had a revolution for nothing," he said.

And the major parties:

Tunisian elections: the key parties
The first elections since the Arab spring take place on Sunday with a wide range of parties involved


Members of the An-Nahda Islamist movement distribute Tunisian election leaflets in front of the party headquarters in Ariana near Tunis on 19 October. Photograph: Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images

Tunisia goes to the polls on 23 October to choose an assembly that will rewrite the country's constitution. Nearly 11,000 candidates are to contest 218 seats.

After decades of despotism and one-party rule, about 110 political parties have sprung up and scores of independents are running. The key parties are:
An-Nahda (Renaissance)

Once outlawed and brutally repressed, with members imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorship of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in the 1990s, the Islamist party is now tipped to take the largest share of the vote in the election. Well-funded, with a large membership and strong grassroots support in the poorest areas, it is the best-organised political force in Tunisia.

Its founder, Rachid Ghannouchi, who was exiled in London for decades, describes the party as moderate, tolerant, pro-democracy and keen to protect Tunisian women's rights in a pluralist society. Pushing liberal and conservative policies, it has been likened to Turkey's Islamist-rooted ruling Justice and Development party (AKP).

Secular critics say the party is an unknown quantity and fear that, once elected, hardliners could seek to enforce a more fundamentalist Islam on Tunisia's secular, civil society. Secular feminists have warned there would be fierce opposition if the party ever sought to roll back women's rights in Tunisia, the most progressive in the Arab world.

The Progressive Democratic party (PDP)

Founded in 1983, the secular centre-right party was part of the legal, but oppressed, opposition during the Ben Ali regime. It is one of four main non-Islamist parties modelled on European social democrats. The party, which is well funded and has the backing of the business community, is competing to take second place in the elections.

Its founder, the well-known lawyer and opposition figure, Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, 67, was banned from running for president in 2009 but could stand in a future presidential election. After the revolution, he was quick to announce he wanted to run to lead the country and has served in Tunisia's post-revolution caretaker governments. Critics say voters are sceptical of the PDP's slick party machine which could be seen as reflecting officialdom.

Ettakatol

The centre-left Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties, known as Ettakatol, is a direct challenger to the PDP and is vying for second-place in the election vote. The social democrat party existed in opposition under Ben Ali, but was oppressed and marginalised.

Its founder, Mustapha Ben Jaafar, 70, a doctor and professor of medicine, was barred from running for president in 2009. He briefly served as health minister in the post-revolution caretaker government formed in January but swiftly stood down in protest that elements of the old regime were still in power.

Congress for the Republic (CPR)

Legalised after the revolution, the CPR is led by Moncef Marzouki, a well-known Tunisian human rights activist and doctor who was pursued under the regime and exiled to Paris. The centrist CPR is one of the main parties running candidates in every district. Marzouki failed in a bid to run for the presidency under the regime, but announced he would like to run for president on his return to Tunisia after the revolution.

Modernist Democratic Pole

Led by Ettajdid, the old Communist party which has reinvented itself as centre-left, the Pole is a coalition of parties and independents running a secular, feminist campaign to counter An-Nahda and Islamism in Tunisia. They believe there is a place for Islam in Tunisia but it belongs in the private sphere and religion must not be mixed with politics. Initially, the coalition had wanted to unite all other major centrist opposition parties against the Islamists but the larger parties preferred to run on their own ticket.

Two parties have been set up by former ministers from the regime and key figures from Ben Ali's now dissolved RCD party.

El Watan, the Nation or Homeland was founded by Mohamed Jegham, one-time interior minister and defence minister alongside Ahmed Friaa, Ben Ali's last interior minister in charge of police and security in the final days of the revolution which the regime violently repressed.

The L'Intiative party was founded by Kamel Morjane, a former defence and foreign minister under Ben Ali.

[Ancient Demon]

So, long story short, Islamists are going to win.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Three way split between the democratc parties? Joy

[HVC]

Everyone forgot about Tunisia. They're not as sexy as rhe other reveling Muslim states.

[Valmy]

So, long story short, Islamists are going to win.

It is a Parliamentary system right?  Them being the largest party doesn't mean anything.

[Sheilbh]

So, long story short, Islamists are going to win.

I imagine that would be the case in most of the Arab world.  In my view it's generally a good thing.

They are only polling at 25% though.

Edit:  Having said that they're predicting over 50% of the vote.  But then the Modernist Democratic Pole have been polling under 5% and they're predicting 20%, so who knows.

It is a Parliamentary system right?  Them being the largest party doesn't mean anything.

The Tunisians are elected a constitutional convention.  There's to be a referendum on how long the constitutional convention should last and then there's Parliamentary and Presidential elections.

I think this is probably more sensible than the Egyptian aproach.

Three way split between the democratc parties? Joy

I've not seen anything to suggest An-Nahda aren't democratic. 

Interestingly one of the splits that's emerging in the free Arab world is that the main rivalry seems to be between the Islamist parties and the left.  I read that many investors in Egypt are actually far more supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood because (like An-Nahda and the AKP for that matter) they're far more pro-free market and economic liberalisation than the Arab left which is pretty old school socialist.

But there are odd alliances going on all around.  In Egypt the MB and the Salafists are really going for one another, while the SCAF seem to be using the MB.  The alliance between the MB and some liberals, on the other hand, has broken down.  In this case An-Nahda and the Congress for the Republic are in an unofficial alliance, I believe, with the Tunisian Worker's Communist Party as they're all 'revolutionary' parties. 

[Sheilbh]

So the election happened.  I read a lot of stories about this, my highlight was one by a Lebanese journo moaning at how dull Tunisian politics was.  I think that's probably a compliment.

And An-Nahda won by the looks of it:

Tunisia elections: An-Nahda party on course to win

Moderate Islamist party An-Nahda tipped for victory in Tunisia's first free elections nine months after people's revolution

Tunisia's voters go to the polls. Source: guardian.co.uk Link to this video

The moderate Islamist party An-Nahda is tipped for a historic victory in Tunisia's first free elections, the first vote of the Arab spring.

Nine months after a people's revolution ousted the dictator Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali and sparked the Arab spring, Tunisians turned out in record numbers to vote for a caretaker assembly that has to rewrite the country's constitution and govern until parliamentary elections in a year's time.

An-Nahda, which was banned for 10 years and brutally repressed under Ben Ali, with activists exiled, tortured and imprisoned,said it had taken the biggest share of the vote based on early predictions before the official results expected .

The party campaigned on a moderate, pro-democracy stance that sought to allay secularist fears by vowing to respect Tunisia's strong secular tradition and the most advanced women's rights in the Arab world.

The party compares itself to Turkey's Islamist-rooted ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) – liberal and socially conservative.

Said Ferjani, from An-Nahda's political bureau, said: "We have to be careful about figures until the official results, but there's a consensus that we're around the 40% mark. It's something that we were expecting.

"We already have our ideas about the government. We are not dogmatic; we are highly pragmatic. It will be a broad national unity government. The new reality is that we have to do what we do for the Tunisian people – we go beyond old lines of argument or disagreement."

The 217-seat assembly has a specific role: to rewrite the constitution and set the date for parliamentary elections in a year's time. It will also form a caretaker government. Aproportional representation system meant regardless of the number of votes, no one party could take anan overall majority. An-Nahda is expected to form an alliance with the centrist secularist Ettakatol party, which is forecast to win 15-20% of the vote.

The party's leader, Dr Mustapha Ben Jafaar, was banned from running for president under the old regime. He could now become interim president with an Islamist prime minister and key ministers.

The centre-left Congress for the Republic Party, led by human rights campaigner Moncef Marzouki, also did well. The centrist PDP, once the major opposition, suffered by association with the old system and performed poorly.

Kais Nigrou, of the the Modernist Democratic Pole, a coalition of the centre-left which ran a secular, feminist campaign to counter An-Nahda, said: "We accept the democratic result and we'll be in opposition.

"The diversity and openness of civil secular society in Tunisia is strong and isn't going to change. We don't see a threat from Islamists. If 40% voted for Islamists, 60% of society did not."

An An-Nahda win would be the first Islamist election success in the Arab world since Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian vote. Islamists won a 1991 election in Algeria, Tunisia's neighbour, but the army annulled the result, provoking years of conflict.

[KRonn]

Any idea or thoughtful guess on what this election means going forward?

[Jacob]

Sounds like they have a pretty good attitude for making parliamentary democracy work.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Any idea or thoughtful guess on what this election means going forward?

I suspect An-Nahda will form a government and, with the other parties' input, write a constitution.

[Josquius]

Thats the trouble with democracy in crazily religious, super conservative countries. They always vote for the right wing bible/qaran nuts.
The 'moderate' is encouraging, perhaps they'll be like the Turkish ruling party, but still I worry.

[Valmy]

The 217-seat assembly has a specific role: to rewrite the constitution and set the date for parliamentary elections in a year's time. It will also form a caretaker government. Aproportional representation system meant regardless of the number of votes, no one party could take anan overall majority. An-Nahda is expected to form an alliance with the centrist secularist Ettakatol party, which is forecast to win 15-20% of the vote.

So I take it An-Nahda could not get a majority so needs Ettakatol?  Good the system works.

[Syt]

Tunisians turned out in record numbers

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/tunisia/8845108/Tunisia-election-turnout-more-than-90-per-cent.html

ISIE electoral commission secretary-general Boubaker Bethabet said more than 90 per cent of some 4.1 million citizens who registered ahead of the poll had cast their votes on Sunday - at least half of all eligible voters.

No figures were available for the other 3.1 million voters who did not register but also had the right to vote.

[Valmy]

So out of 7.2 million potential voters, 4.1 millions registered and 3.7 million voted.

So about 51% of potential voters.

[Maximus]

Doesn't say that the 3.1 million didn't vote. Only that figures were unavailable.