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Runoff presidential election completes Tunisia’s transition to full democracy Runoff presidential election completes Tunisia’s transition to full democracy
(about 11 hours later)
Tunisians voted on Sunday in a presidential runoff election that completes the country’s transition to full democracy nearly four years after an uprising that ousted autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. Tunisians voted on Sunday in a presidential runoff election that completes the country’s transition to full democracy nearly four years after the uprising that ousted the autocratic Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.
With a new progressive constitution and a full parliament elected in October, Tunisia is hailed as an example of democratic change for a region still struggling with the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring revolts. With a new progressive constitution and a full parliament elected in October, Tunisia is being hailed as an example of democratic change for a region still struggling with the aftermath of the 2011 Arab spring revolts. The country avoided the bitter post-revolt divisions troubling Libya and Egypt.
The North African nation avoided the bitter post-revolt divisions troubling Libya and Egypt, but Sunday’s election pits a former Ben Ali official against an incumbent who claims to defend the legacy of the 2011 revolution. Sunday’s election was between a former Ben Ali official, Beji Caid Essebsi, and the incumbent, Moncef Marzouki, who claims to defend the legacy of the 2011 revolution.
Frontrunner Beji Caid Essebsi, a former parliament speaker under Ben Ali, won 39 percent of votes in the first round of voting in November, with current president Moncef Marzouki winning 33 percent. Essebsi, a former parliament speaker under Ben Ali and a close associate of Habib Bourguiba – independent Tunisia’s charismatic first president – won 55.5% of the vote, with Marzouki on 44.5% according to unofficial exit polls late on Sunday night.
Polling opened at 8am local time (0700 GMT) with a heavy security presence, but morning turnout looked thin at stations around the capital. Official preliminary results were not expected until Monday. Essebsi has portrayed himself as Bourguiba’s political heir. It is a formula that has played well in the north of Tunisia, where voters in the first round favoured him over Marzouki.
Overnight one gunman was killed and three arrested after they opened fire on a polling station in the central Kairouan governorate, a defence ministry official said. At the Hay Zayatia primary school in the Jebel Lahmar neighbourhood of Tunis, voter turnout was a respectable 50% by late Sunday afternoon. A trickle of voters walked past the wall where a peeling fresco showed Mickey Mouse brandishing for Minnie a lamp inscribed with the phrase “knowledge is light” (“al-alem an-nour”), while soldiers, including two young women armed with automatic rifles, kept a relaxed guard outside.
Essebsi, 88, dismisses critics who say he would mark a return of the old regime stalwarts. He says he is the technocrat Tunisia needs after three messy years of an Islamist-led coalition government. “In making my choice, I was looking for a statesman who has already some track record in the administration,” said a 30-year-old bank employee who gave her name only as Sawssen. She said that in the first election after the revolution, for a constituent assembly in October 2011, she had opted for the Islamist Ennahda party.
Marzouki, 69, is a former activist who once sought refuge in France during the Ben Ali era. He has painted an Essebsi presidency as a setback for the “Jasmine Revolution” that forced the former leader to flee into exile. Under Ben Ali, she had not dared wear her Islamist headscarf, she said. However, the Islamists had disappointed her and now she had chosen to vote for Essebsi.
“We need a president who looks after the people and is not interested only in power,” said Ibrahim Ktiti, an electrician who voted in the poor Ettadhamen neighbourhood of Tunis. “The old regime won’t make it back. Essebsi never excused himself for all the time he was with Ben Ali.” On top of a hill behind the headquarters of the state television channel, built in the closing years of the Ben Ali regime, Jebel Lahmar retains a friendly village feel.
Yet many Tunisians tie Marzouki’s own presidency to the Islamist party’s government and the mistakes opponents said it made in controlling the influence of hardline Islamists in one of the Arab world’s most secular countries. However, the imam at one of its main mosques, Kamel Zarouk, had, until as late as last year, attracted young men from other neighbourhoods every Friday to his sermons against a “tyrannical” government in Tunis. He is now believed to be in Syria.
“I’m voting for Beji, the others did nothing for us during three years,” said Zohra Zagoumi, a housewife with three unemployed children, voting in the Manouba district of the capital. “We need jobs, security and cheaper cost of living.” The previous, Islamist-led coalition government, of which Marzouki’s small centre-left CPR party was a junior member, is widely blamed for having allegedly turned a blind eye to the activities of extremist groups in 2012 and 2013.
Compromise has been important in Tunisian politics. Essebsi’s Nidaa Tounes party reached a deal with the Islamist Ennahda party to overcome a crisis triggered by the murder of two secular leaders last year. “I voted for stability, for the fight against terrorism,” said Kaouther Shili, in the Mourouj neighbourhood of Tunis. “It would be a problem for me if there was a clampdown on freedom [after the election]. Freedom to speak out, to demonstrate, media freedom were the most important things we got out of the revolution.”
Ennahda stepped down at the start of this year to make way for a technocrat transitional cabinet until elections. But the Islamists remain a powerful force after winning the second largest number of seats in the new parliament. For many voters, an hour-long television interview given by Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi last week, in which he dismissed fears of a return to a one-party dictatorship, was reassuring. “The police state, the single-party state is not about to return. The days of president for life are over,” he said.
Essebsi appeals to the more secular, liberal sections of Tunisian society, while analysts expect Marzouki to draw on support from more conservative rural areas, and from some members of Ennahda, which did not field a candidate. The Ennahda leadership persuaded its grassroots not to come out openly in support of Marzouki’s attempt to continue as president, thus keeping open the possibility of an entente with Essebsi’s Nidaa Tounes party.
The presidency post holds only limited powers over national defense and foreign policy. The parliament, led by Nidaa Tounes which won the most seats, will be key to selecting a prime minister to lead the government. Ghannouchi has also successfully argued against the party presenting its own candidate for president. He has thus kept open the possibility that the broad coalition government that is expected to be formed, by February, by Essebsi’s Nidaa Tounes party, could include one or two Islamists.
Transport worker Ahmed, 29, declined to give his full name but said he and others who had relatives who were imprisoned before the revolution were worried about the future should Essebsi become president. “A dictatorship never comes all at once – it installs itself step by step,” he said. “Ghannouchi is a supreme politician, but in his stomach he also is afraid of Essebsi .”
Marzouki has warned that if Essebsi became president, there would be a lack of checks and balances, with the same party controlling the presidency, the parliament and the prime minister’s office.
Essebsi’s campaign has countered that such an outcome offers guarantees of stable governance at a time when Libya, across Tunisia’s southern border, drifts towards full civil war.
Marzouki is bidding to stay in the presidential palace at Carthage, on the Mediterranean shore just north of the capital, for five more years. A neurologist by profession, he is also a former dissident and human rights activist. He was harried by the Ben Ali regime, then went into exile in Paris, but returned in December 2010, as the uprising against the regime gathered momentum.
His small centre-left Congress for the Republic (CPR) party was condemned by other Tunisian leftist groups when it went into a coalition government with the Islamists of Ennahda, after the Islamists swept the board in elections to the constituent assembly.
From the outset Marzouki’s presidency faced hostility and satire in the newly free media, much of which has remained in the same hands as before the revolution. His early espousal of the uprising against the Assad regime in Syria, and the suspension of diplomatic relations with Damascus, was criticised by career civil servants at the foreign ministry.
His relatively dark skin-colouring – his family roots lie in the south of the country – was, for some cartoonists, an additional reason for ridicule.
Essebsi showed stamina on the campaign trail and deployed all the discreet charm of the country’s coastal elites in his attempt to convince doubters that the freedoms won in the revolution are safe in his hands.
Opponents claim that his record under Bourguiba and into the early Ben Ali years, especially when he headed the feared interior ministry from 1965 to 1969, would bear little scrutiny. Until the revolution, the interior ministry was also responsible for organising elections that always returned the president, first Bourguiba and then Ben Ali, with official scores indicating almost unanimous support among voters.
But Essebsi has insisted that as president, and as leader of the party that in the legislative elections in October became the largest in parliament, he would not oversee an authoritarian power grab as Marzouki has claimed.
“With laws and the new constitution everything has changed. The new government will no longer be answerable to the president. It will be answerable to a parliament,” he said.
His Nidaa Tounes party controls 86 of the 217 seats in the new parliament, and is expected to announce a broad coalition government by February.
Essebsi has dismissed the word “taghaoul” (power grab) that the Marzouki camp has deployed, evoking the ogre (“ghoul”) of north African Berber and Arab legend. “This word is not appropriate, and people have no reason for anxiety,” he said in a television interview. “We want a break with the past, but we have not broken off with individuals,” he added, referring perhaps to the fact that about half of his new MPs are reported to be former members of Ben Ali’s RCD.
He has offered a lineup of a dozen parties that supported his bid to be president – and will doubtless by expecting to be rewarded when Essebsi’s party forms a coalition government in the new year.
The fact that he is a lawyer, and in the last week of campaigning even referred to himself in one television interview as a rights activist (“huqquqi”), did not impress Marzouki supporters. They chanted at campaign rallies: “We want the doctor, not the dictator!”
InKasserine, one of the provincial towns where the revolution began, local people reported that turnout among the young was especially low, amid disillusionment with national politics. “After four years, young people have little hope and feel the revolution has been stolen from them by the older generation,” said Samir, a 44-year-old trader.
“As for the older people, they’re still living in the shadow of Bourguiba, Ben Ali and the RCD,” he said, referring to Ben Ali’s former ruling party, the now dissolved Constitutional Democratic Rally. “They think things were better before, in terms of the economy and security.”
The networks of personal relations that previously centred on neighbourhood councils controlled by the RCD had come back into play to urge a vote for Essebsi, he said. Sometimes employers handed over lists of employees to be canvassed, and cash payments were also involved in influencing voting choices, he said. “With so many of us here living in poverty, of course money has an influence.”
In the first round of the presidential election in November, turnout was especially low among the young, while in the poorer southern provinces voters overwhelmingly preferred Marzouki. They were outweighed by the more populous north, however.
In the northern town of Testour, unemployed 29-year-old Mahrez Ouslati said he believed he was in a minority in his age group in having voted for Marzouki. “I put it down to manipulation by the media,” he said. “My view is we’ve had the RCD for 60 years, and they haven’t done anything – especially not when it comes to getting more equality between the different regions of the country!”