Since the 2011 Arab uprisings gave way to the dreadful combination of civil war and terrorism that has spread from Syria to Libya and Yemen, analysts and political actors from both the Arab world and West have felt an acute need for at least one success story in the region. Tunisia has provided such a tale—despite suffering two lethal terror attacks on its soil so far in 2015, the second being the killing of 38 tourists at a seaside resort in Sousse on June 26.
The Tunisian transition away from the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has indeed been successful in many respects. Tunisia managed to enact a new constitution and establish new democratic institutions, with relatively little violence, as a dynamic public sphere emerged. Tunisia is also the first country in the Arab world where an Islamist party, Ennahda, assumed power and then gave it up in response to popular demand. After winning the 2011 elections for a transitional Constituent Assembly, Ennahda acknowledged defeat in the parliamentary contests of October 26, 2014, in which the secular party Nida’ Tunis (NT) got the most votes. The Islamists’ equanimity then allowed for a peaceful transfer of power between outgoing and incoming executives after the presidential race that December.
The narrative of “Tunisian success”—often portraying the country as an “exception” or a “model”—nonetheless invites criticism. [1] All the praise of Tunisia has begun to function, in both Arab and Western discourse, as a damper on legitimate complaints about the course of the post-Ben Ali transition. The encomia are often based on the patronizing assumption that Tunisia’s achievements are “good enough” for an Arab country, or on the Western-centric consideration that it took France and America two centuries to achieve several of the democratic goals that underpinned their respective revolutions.
In the wake of the Sousse attack, many commentators and political actors have expressed understandable concern for the short-term economic consequences—with tourism likely to collapse—and for the consolidation of the country’s democratic gains. But the overall narrative of success has survived. The initial assessments explain the Sousse killings as an attempt by radicals under the banner of the Islamic State, or ISIS, to sabotage a duly elected and secular-minded government. [2] The other ways in which the attack might be understood—as an extreme expression of despair on the part of many Tunisian youth, as evidence of poor police preparation—are mentioned but in muffled tones.
In a declaration mere hours after the killings, President Beji Caïd Essebsi denounced social movements, labor strikes and the grassroots campaign known as winou el petrol, which calls for transparency and accountability in the use of public funds, implying that all these activities have somehow made Tunisian ground fertile for terrorism. Essebsi drew another straight line between freedom of expression and terrorism in his speech on July 4, the day on which he announced his decision to reinstate a state of emergency. The state of emergency law—which dates to 1978, the year when Ben Ali, then the country’s top gendarme, quashed a general strike—gives extraordinary powers to provincial governors, who answer to the Ministry of Interior. The Habib Bourguiba-era statute allows governors to ban strikes and protests, to monitor the press and publishers, and to close down mosques, restaurants and civil associations. Tunisia lived under emergency law from January 2011 to March 2014, which did not prevent the flourishing of the public sphere. But the reenactment of this law in what is supposed to be a post-transition period, and under a government whose dominant party, NT, based its entire election campaign on “national security,” comes across as both an admission of failure and a threat to hard-won civil liberties. Depending on how it is used, the law may even endanger democracy and pluralism in Tunisia.
In other words, while it may be true that ISIS is trying to subvert the Tunisian success story, as liberal commentators say, the obstacles to the Tunisian experiment have much deeper roots than a temporary vulnerability to terrorist outrage. The hurdles are related to the formation of the success narrative itself.
The Double Standard and the Compromise “Mentality”
There is a striking difference in interpretations of the outcomes of the 2011 and 2014 elections in Tunisia. While every single declaration made by Ennahda in 2011 met with skeptical scrutiny, NT appears to enjoy an almost unbelievable level of approval from analysts and officials worldwide. The Islamists’ victory in 2011 triggered a burst of speculation about hidden agendas regarding gender equality and Islamic law, as well as doubts as to party commitment to democratic values. In 2014, either out of genuine sympathy for NT or because of low standards, most analysts turned a blind eye to some rather obviously worrisome features of the secular formation. [3] More than half of the 86 NT deputies who now sit in Parliament held high positions in the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique, or RCD, the ruling party under Ben Ali. The NT, moreover, has privileged relations with big business, the media and the police, as detailed in a report from the watchdog LobbyLeaks. The presidential campaign of Essebsi was marked by an emphatic restoration of the old regime’s aesthetics, with huge portraits of the candidate bringing to mind the cults of personality of Ben Ali and his predecessor Bourguiba. Ben Ali’s son-in-law, Slim Chiboub, staged a provocative return from exile in the United Arab Emirates. Essebsi, himself a former RCD official, made derogatory comments about the martyrs of the revolution and the electorate of the south, whom he dismissed as “terrorists.” The first weeks of the new legislature saw the arrest of blogger-activist Yassine Ayari and others.
This double standard in analysis raises the question of what exactly commentators are talking about when they laud the Tunisian transition. One gets the sense, in reading the coverage, that NT’s triumph put history back on track, as if Ennahda’s tenure and, in fact, all the politics between 2011 and 2014 were some sort of aberration. The rupture of the revolution itself is rendered a parenthetical aside in what is deemed to be Tunisia’s long history of reformism. [4]
Central, indeed, to the narrative of success is the concept of compromise. The Islamists’ decision to step down, the adoption of the 2014 constitution and the ensuing elections are all accounted for in terms of this purportedly unique Tunisian inclination. Interestingly, the Arabic term for “compromise” (hall wasat) is rarely used in the debates. A number of related concepts are front and center: consensus (ijma‘), alliance (tahaluf), cooperation (ta‘awun), union (ittihad), deal (safaqa), pact (ittifaq), contract (‘aqd), negotiation (tafawud), dialogue (hiwar), moderation (i‘tidal), solidarity (tadamun) and forgiveness (tasamuh). These terms are assigned positive or negative valence, depending on who is using them and when, in order to bless agreements that advance a party’s interests and/or the common good or, by contrast, to condemn deals that imperil a party’s interests and/or democratic norms. These rhetorical battles demonstrate the complexity of the debates in Tunisia since 2011, and belie both the deterministic narrative of an arbitration-prone mentality and the Orientalist trope according to which Arab political culture is essentially incompatible with compromise.
Risk Avoidance and Containment
Ever since the return of Ennahda chief Rachid Ghannouchi to Tunisia in January 2011, most of the Islamist party’s decisions seem to have been guided by a strategy of risk avoidance, aimed at making no enemies among either its secularist foes or its sometime salafi supporters. After years of exile and repression, Ennahda sought primarily to become a normal political party acknowledged by others as a needed ally or an acceptable opponent. The party also wanted to build from the ground up at the local level. In the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty, many local leaders opted for an approach of “hedging bets,” consisting of “apparent accommodation combined with stalwart resistance and behind-the-scenes maneuvering.” [5] Ennahda also hedged its bets in the crises it faced after coming to power. Under the government of Hamadi Jebali (December 2011-February 2013), formed by the troika of Ennahda and two secular partners, the Congrès pour le République (CPR) and Ettakatol, the party ventured no firm response to jihadi radicalization of poor urban youth, so as not to alienate salafis. Likewise, it did not push hard on transitional justice, for fear of appearing as éradicateurs to the networks of the former regime. Several Ennahda leaders opposed the initial version of the “law for the protection of revolution,” which would have banned from formal politics all those who had served in RCD governments.
On many issues, Ennahda leaders went against the will of much of the party base. Ghannouchi and his allies on the Shura Council imposed unpopular decisions such as rejecting reference to the shari‘a in the new constitution. The leaders judged this risk lesser than the danger to the party’s survival if it strayed from the path toward acceptability. So far, they have been able to make peace with the base after the fact, thanks to local mediation and the emphasis on the urgency of normalizing the party.
After the 2011 elections, the anti-Islamist forces grudgingly integrated into their worldview the fact that Ennahda was part of the political landscape. Repression à la Ben Ali being unviable, the main objective became containment, which then gave way to counter-hegemony. This latter strategy took shape through a campaign of slander against the Islamists, replete with distortion of their discourse and dissemination of idle rumor. Any ambiguous phrase uttered by an Islamist deputy was seized upon to sow controversy. When Prime Minister Jebali used the word khilafa (caliphate) in a speech, for example, it was immediately interpreted as a slip revealing that Ennahda’s real project was no different than that of ISIS. Media outlets close to former regime circles spread misinformation—Islamists, they alleged, were advocating polygamy, brainwashing toddlers and pushing teenage girls to marry jihadis in Syria. The politics of counter-hegemony also relied upon alliances in the Constituent Assembly and the slow reactivation of former RCD networks. The founding of NT by Essebsi, in June 2012, was a key moment. The military coup in Egypt in July 2013 and the ensuing hounding of the Muslim Brothers allowed NT to capitalize on anti-Islamist fervor and to court regional powers such as the UAE and Algeria.
The structuring of political competition around the dialectic between Ennahda’s risk avoidance policy and NT’s politics of containment has hindered the emergence of a space for pluralism, where differences might be confronted rather than sidestepped.
The Invention of Conflict Resolution
The Constituent Assembly was an important exception. It served as a venue for another kind of political transaction—one motivated to establish mechanisms of pluralism rather than solely to maintain stability. The discussions in the Assembly revealed fundamental disagreements about the place of religion in Tunisia, the best type of regime (presidential or parliamentary) for the country, freedom of conscience, gender equality and international law. Given the divergence of views on these matters, the rhetorical strategy of conflict avoidance proved inefficient. Deputies were forced into an exercise of collective—and public—dispute and reasoning. It did not happen easily. There were repeated calls to circumvent the Assembly debates by deferring drafting of the constitution to “competent experts” and to form a “neutral government.” There were also demonstrations and backroom deals intended to derail the deliberations. Nonetheless, after submitting four drafts (in August 2012, December 2012, April 2013 and June 2013), the Assembly finally voted on the new constitution on January 29, 2014.
The delicacy of the equilibrium inside and outside the Assembly, combined with the scope of the ideological disagreements, was such that, in the end, the competitors had no alternative but to reach a compromise through negotiation. Within the troika, Ennahda was the dominant party, but, with only 89 seats, it needed the support of CPR and Ettakatol. Within the Assembly, Ennahda and its two allies had to face the increasingly determined opposition of parties such as the Democratic Bloc and the Democratic Alliance, which had strong ties to the media, secular civil society, organized labor and former regime networks. Importantly, no party or organization had the power to bring people into the streets en masse. The anti-troika forces tried with the demonstrations that began in July 2013 outside the Bardo national museum, but these rallies never reached the relative size or intensity of the Tamarrud campaign that led to the ouster of President Muhammad Mursi in Egypt. With every competitor too weak to impose its will, each always came back to the table, however reluctantly.
A second factor explaining the success of deliberation in the Assembly is the fact that most of the sensitive topics up for discussion had been debated since the early 2000s. In October 2005, the main opponents of the Ben Ali regime—secularists and Islamists—signed a charter in Aix en Provence, in which they agreed upon fundamental principles of a democratic Tunisia. Key provisions of this document were gender equality, freedom of conscience and no mention of shari‘a in a future Tunisian constitution. [6] To the extent that the Assembly discussions were a continuation of previous conversations, rather than a true beginning, the temptation to temporize was weaker: Each side already knew the position of its interlocutor and likewise knew that its own position was already known.
Finally, the July 2013 coup in Egypt had a decisive effect. Mursi’s removal drastically altered both camps’ perceptions of their capacity to establish hegemony in political institutions. It also led to the formation of two ad hoc entities whose function was to search for solutions to the disputes in the Assembly. In the very tense summer of 2013, marked in Tunisia by the assassination of the left-wing politician Mohamed Brahmi and the rise of the terrorist threat, the work of the Assembly seemed to have reached a dead end. As the demonstrations outside the Bardo grew, on August 6 the head of the Assembly, Moustafa Ben Jafaar, unilaterally decided to suspend deliberations until conditions improved. The suspension meant that external players could not blame the Assembly for the lack of progress. Outside the Assembly, a “quartet” consisting of the labor federation, the main employers’ syndicate, the Human Rights League and the Council of the Order of Lawyers met to orchestrate a “national dialogue” about issues of procedure and timing as much as ideology. While the opposition parties—notably NT—demanded the government’s resignation as a precondition of dialogue, the quartet proposed that the government commit to stepping down three weeks after the start of negotiations. Ennahda, however, rejected both options, announcing that it would relinquish power only after the Assembly had completed its work and a compromise candidate for prime minister had been named.
After weeks of discussions, and despite several interruptions, the stakeholders finally came close to an agreement in mid-December 2013. They agreed to the appointment of a former minister of industry, Mehdi Jomaa, as leader of a non-partisan, technocratic government whose term would end with the next elections. In September 2013, the Assembly had resumed work, in hopes that the national dialogue would facilitate its internal deliberations. In the meantime, the Commission of Consensus, created within the Assembly in July 2013, had also reconvened. This ad hoc body was tasked with finding common ground on contentious issues before the final product went to a vote. “It is imperative,” Ben Jafaar said at a July press conference, “to find compromise before we start the examination of the project of the constitution article by article, in plenary session.” When the plenary session began, most of the disagreements over such issues as regime type, the content of the preamble and freedom of religion had indeed been resolved.
The constitution finally adopted by 209 deputies was the fruit of almost three years of public reasoning and dispute. The process was loud and messy, but it led to what Richard Bellamy calls a “deep compromise”—one in which all “parties find reasons within their own moral views for conceding something to each other.” [7] The constitution reads as exactly what it is—a juxtaposition of mutual concessions. Much as the charter has been criticized for lack of coherence, it is precisely the absence of perfect consistency that gives it political utility. In the end, the Tunisian constitutional process, for all its drama, succeeded in producing the opposite of the seamless synthesis that so-called neutral experts would have designed, and the opposite of the cheap deal that partisans on both sides wanted to ram down the other side’s throat.
Rotten Compromise
The collective fixation on the constitution and the subsequent elections had a downside, however. It sidelined three subjects—the renewal of the political field, legislative reform and transitional justice—that were just as important to the transition.
More than 100 parties competed in the October 2011 elections. Lack of time, experience and resources, however, prevented most of these parties from building coalitions or drafting platforms with broad appeal, and most were absorbed into the polarization between Islamists and anti-Islamists in 2014. Apart from NT and Ennahda, most political parties in Tunisia are closer to clubs, clans or think tanks. As for the protest movements of 2011, their expressive politics, characterized by spontaneity, the use of art and social media, and a focus on everyday grievances rather than on ideology, was original but rudderless. The Tunisian political sphere is defined by a proliferation of weak, unstable parties, on one hand, and a lively, vigilant citizenry uninterested in party politics, on the other.
With legislative reform sacrificed to the urgency of drafting a constitution, numerous laws in striking contradiction with pluralism remain in force. The 1978 state of emergency law is one salient example. The penal code is unchanged as well. It still includes clauses that criminalize defamation and “forbidden publications.” While the infamous press code is gone, a number of its articles were transferred to the penal code and so continue to set ominous limits upon freedom of speech.
Finally, the contours of transitional justice have been very blurry from the start. The process grinds on, but in the meantime most former RCD officials who would be in the dock have resurfaced in public life. Corinna Mullin and Brahim Rouabah neatly sum up the failure:
Despite some significant steps, transitional justice achievements have thus far been more superficial than substantive. The violence of the former regime took both material and discursive forms. Though the courtroom is far from the ideal venue for redressing discursive legacies, transitional justice is ideally a more holistic process. Juridical forms of redress may form an important part of this process, but equally integral are the redistribution of wealth and power (in the Tunisian context, this is not only a class issue, but also regional as the interior regions, south/southwest and north have been historically marginalized—both materially and in terms of political influence), and the overcoming of deep societal cleavages that resulted from repressive rule. [8]
The pluralism and conflict resolution of the Assembly has yielded to a more stifling style of political transaction, marked by preference falsification and anticipated deals regarding power sharing. Avishai Margalit defines a “rotten compromise” as one that can be considered coerced because one party’s very existence is threatened. [9] He continues that when the compromise endangers the very rules of the game that enabled substantive dialogue in the first place, it is definitely ripe for rapid decay.
The discussions in Tunisia since the summer of 2014, particularly after that October’s parliamentary elections won by NT, represent a shift to a politics of rotten compromise. Even though Ennahda remains the second major party, far ahead of the closest rival with 69 seats in the legislature, the Islamist leadership has since assumed a low profile, to the extent that many wondered if the party would act as NT’s ally. The party leadership refused to declare for any presidential candidate, distancing itself from CPR’s Moncef Marzouki, despite his widespread support among the Nahdawi base. Ennahda declined to oppose the appointment of a NT member as head of the new Parliament, seemingly satisfied with the vice presidency. The Islamists requested seats in the cabinet led by Habib Essid, but were allocated only three posts, a number identical to the right-wing neoliberal party Afaq Tunis, which has only eight seats in Parliament.
The memory of harsh repression in the 1990s and the persecution of Egyptian Islamists since the 2013 coup have only strengthened Ennahda’s preference for risk avoidance. The Islamists fear for survival as a party, but mostly for the safety of each and every party member. As a coerced compromise, the Islamists’ agreement with NT may very well contribute to temporary pacification of the political scene. It is unlikely, however, to usher in pluralist politics. NT’s opening to Ennahda follows the logic of containment that has guided the old regime party since 2012. By coopting Islamist deputies, NT hopes to find conduits to the Nahdawi base and those parts of society where Ennahda holds sway. The NT program is shallow, boiling down to incantations of “modernity,” “the heritage of Bourguiba” and “the prestige of the state,” and the entente with the more deeply rooted Ennahda may help to inject some social content. Though NT is keeping its enemy close, however, its ultimate goal remains the Islamists’ defeat, through absorption or eradication.
The Bardo and Sousse attacks have reinforced the logic of compromise based on risk avoidance and containment. Ennahda representatives, from Ghannouchi on down, have vociferously echoed Essebsi’s calls for national unity and security. Word is circulating of a possible cabinet reshuffle in the fall, with greater inclusion of Ennahda ministers. [10] A fuller Ennahda-NT partnership will only redouble the rottenness of the prevailing compromise, as the Islamists will gain ground in terms of normalization, while losing still more credibility among the party base and the broader public. In the meantime, the two major parties pursue their mutual tendency to strategize on the fly, basing decisions on short-term gauges of balances of power rather than anything like an economic program, a political vision or a commitment to social justice. Ennahda has now postponed its national congress several times, waiting to see what happens, and probably nervous about internal schisms. As for NT, it has contended with several internal struggles, with a major split occurring in March between the constitutive committee of the party and a dissident trend led by the president’s son Hafed Caïd Essebsi. Its main congress has also yet to convene. Amidst these troubles inside both parties and outside, the promise of healthy political competition held out by the Constituent Assembly experiment has yielded to petty, patchwork tactics aimed at achieving a superficial calm.
Indeed, the rotten compromise of the post-transition period carries big risks for both parties, and for the future of democratic politics in Tunisia. The risks emanate from: 1) the disconnect between base and leadership, with the latter isolated; 2) the lack of ideological clarity; and 3) the overemphasis on fictions of the “state” and the “nation” at the expense of social reality. Many rank-and-filers in both NT and Ennahda resent the bargains struck by their leaders. The prospect of Ennahda’s enfoldment into a new syncretic ruling class is very likely to alienate the bases of the two parties even further. How representative will the parties be then? The Ennahda-NT rapprochement also calls into question the authenticity of the disputes between 2011 and 2014 that preoccupied both politicians and voters during the parliamentary campaign. In retrospect, the NT’s anti-Islamist line and Ennahda’s opposition to the old regime come across as posturing rather than conviction. These questions pertain as well to the campaign alliance between the neoliberal NT and the Popular Front, a far left party including many fierce opponents of the old regime. The ideological blurring can only sharpen popular antipathy for party politics and strengthen the belief that the revolution has birthed a mere redistribution of power among the elite. The rationalization of rotten compromises in terms of national unity and state authority downplays the urgency of the social question. Society figures in the rhetoric of NT only as something to be tamed. The recurrent strikes and protests since January 2015, however, show that economic disparities among regions, social grievances, and demands for justice and freedom remain pressing, and that society remains very mobilized.
Use Extreme Caution
Among the consequences of the ISIS attacks in Tunisia is the steady criminalization of dissent in the name of national unity and the war on terror. This process began in the aftermath of the summer 2013 assassination of Mohamed Brahmi. The Interior Ministry outlawed the salafi party, Ansar al-Shari‘a, and ordered the closure of numerous civil society organizations. The NT’s electoral campaign the next fall was based on manipulating public fears. Gigantic billboards in Tunis and other big cities displayed photos of beaten faces and neighborhoods full of trash, with slogans equating the transition period with chaos. Social movements are now regularly disparaged as disloyal and unruly, in another echo of the Ben Ali era.
All of these steps were taken before the March 18, 2015 attacks that killed 24 people in the Bardo museum. Since then, social movements have been subject to tight surveillance and repression. Police attacked journalists who covered the winou el petrol demonstrations in June. Human rights organizations have documented more than 30 such assaults on reporters since January.
Now, in the wake of the brutal murders in Sousse, not only has the state reenacted the emergency law, but it has taken a number of other measures that engender concern for civil liberties. A scheme is afoot to build a wall on the Tunisian-Libyan border. [11] More than 80 salafi-oriented mosques have been shuttered, with no concomitant effort to reach out to pragmatic salafi preachers. Predictable as these decisions may be, given the public mood, they recall the criminalization of Islamism in the 1990s and hint that the emergency law itself is the biggest danger to democracy. As Amna Guellali, head of the Tunisian chapter of Human Rights Watch, explained to Le Monde, “Between 2011 and 2014 the state of emergency law was enacted somewhat loosely. But it will be different this time. First, there is an aggravation of the terrorist threat, especially in cities. Second, public opinion pushes for a tightening of security.” [12] The Bardo and Sousse attacks have indeed deepened the ambient fatigue with political and economic instability. It is unclear, however, whether this malaise will translate into mass acquiescence in a return to authoritarianism. Some old-guard intellectuals, notorious backers of the former regime’s policies, have hastened to call for a reassertion of state authority and to castigate the supposed leniency of the troika government toward salafis. But many activists, journalists and bloggers have warned with equal alacrity of the fragility of the liberties so recently attained and so dearly bought. Society, in other words, is highly conflicted. These divisions, however, are concealed by what seems to be the authorized political discourse summoning Tunisians to be united and disciplined.
The narrative of Tunisian success based on compromise should thus be employed with extreme caution. Despite great achievements since 2011, the country is very far from having robust political pluralism or finding political channels for social grievances.
The approach of Western countries to the Arab world often fluctuates between indifference and indiscriminate applause. Since the fall of 2014, a deluge of congratulations from Western commentators and officials has washed over Tunisia. But because a number of honors, such as the International Crisis Group’s award to Essebsi and Ghannouchi as “pioneers in peacebuilding,” have gone to politicians, rather than to the Tunisian people, the plaudits seem inscribed in the global attempt at legitimizing the counter-revolution throughout the Arab world. A corollary of this trend is the deprecation of the democratic experiment of 2011-2014. In the meantime, hunger strikes multiply, parliamentarians want to criminalize “denigration” of policemen and gendarmes, the state intimidates dissenters such as Yassine Ayari and the mainstream media returns to the Ben Ali era, flattering the government and silencing its critics.
Endnotes
[1] Nadia Marzouki and Hamza Meddeb, “Tunisia: Democratic Miracle or Mirage?” Jadaliyya, June 11, 2015.
[2] See, for example, Alice Su, “‘Look What Freedom Has Brought Us: Terrorism on the Beach,’” The Atlantic, June 29, 2015.
[3] There were a few salutary exceptions, such as Monica Marks, “The Tunisian Election Result Isn’t Simply a Victory for Secularism Over Islamism,” Guardian, October 29, 2014; Vance Serchuk, “Give Tunisian Democracy the US Support It Needs and Deserves,” Washington Post, January 2, 2015; and Steven Cook, “Beji Caïd Essebsi and Tunisia’s Identity Politics,” From the Potomac to the Euphrates, May 20, 2015.
[4] Béatrice Hibou, “Le réformisme: Grand récit politique de la Tunisie contemporaine,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 56/4bis (2009).
[5] Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 72.
[6] For details of this debate, see Nadia Marzouki, “Dancing by the Cliff: Constitution Writing in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia, 2011-2014,” in Aslı Bali and Hanna Lerner, eds., Constitution Writing and Religious Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
[7] Richard Bellamy, “Democracy, Compromise and the Representation Paradox: Coalition Government and Political Integrity,” Government and Opposition 47/3 (2012), p. 447.
[8] Corinna Mullin and Brahim Rouabah, “Requiem for Tunisia’s Revolution?” Jadaliyya, December 22, 2014.
[9] Avishai Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
[10] Soufiane Ben Farhat, “Tunisie: Nouveau gouvernement Nida-Ennahdha en vue: Le scénario de la rentrée?” AllAfrica.com, July 6, 2015.
[11] Le Monde, July 8, 2015.
[12] Le Monde, July 4, 2015.
