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Commentary a New Political Map for Tunisia Paves the Way for Another

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Commentary a New Political Map for Tunisia Paves the Way for Another (Doha Institute) www.dohainstitute.org Commentary A new political map for Tunisia paves the way for another within the coming year Rashid Khashana Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies Commentary Doha, December- 2011 Commentary Series Copyrights reserved for Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies © 2011 Contents A NEW POLITICAL MAP FOR TUNISIA PAVES THE WAY FOR ANOTHER WITHIN THE COMING YEAR .............................. OLD PARTIES IN A PROCESS OF RENEWAL .................................................................................. 1 THE DEVIOUS GUISES OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC RALLY ................................... 2 THE FAILURE OF IDEOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS AND THE RISE OF CENTRIST PARTIES ................ 3 THE NEW POLITICAL MAP IN TERMS OF NUMBERS OF PARLIAMENTARY SEATS PER PARTY ..... 4 Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies A new political map for Tunisia The elections for the Constituent Assembly held in Tunis on October 23, 2011 revealed a political scene that surprised most observers because of the large number of parliamentary seats won by fundamentalist movements, the retreat of left-wing parties, and the return of the remnants of the former ruling party, albeit under new names. The new political map is characterized by its complexity, especially since the electoral law leans toward a system of proportional representation, which means that small parties have managed to win one or two seats. As such, more than 20 political parties have representation in the new Constituent Assembly of the approximately 80 whose electoral lists engaged in the campaign. This complex political map is set to expire, however, at least theoretically, in a period not exceeding one year, as per the terms of a document signed by the parties represented in the Constituent Assembly just weeks before the election. These parties have confirmed that they still intend to adhere to this document and the guidelines it sets. Old parties in a process of renewal The election results erased the majority of political parties that had controlled the opposition share in the parliaments of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime (1987-2011). Ben Ali tended to allocate 20 percent of the seats in Parliament to six parties generally described as “decorative.” These were: the Popular Unity Party (founded in 1981); the Unionist Democratic Union (founded in 1988); the Movement of Social Democrats (founded in 1978); the Social Liberal Party (founded in 1988); the Movement for Renewal (founded in 1993 on the ruins of the Communist Party); and the Green Party for Progress (founded in 2008). The spectrum of genuine opposition during the more than two decades of the Ben Ali regime lay in five political parties, some of which were granted official licenses while others operated illegally. These parties were: the Nahda (or Renaissance) Movement (founded in 1981); the Progressive Democratic Party (founded in 1983); the Democratic Forum for Labor and Liberties (founded in 1994); the Congress for the Republic (founded in 2001); and the Communist Workers’ Party (founded in 1985). It can be said that these parties – which remained obscure in political life during the quarter-century reign of Ben Ali’s Constitutional Democratic Rally (founded in 1988 on the ruins of late former ruler Habib Bourguiba’s party)—are now the ones at the forefront, to varying degrees, of Tunisia’s political scene. It seems that Tunisians have punished those parties that supported Ben Ali, erasing them from the political map. Two notable exceptions were the Renewal Movement, which won five seats(roughly the number it had in previous parliaments)after it formed an alliance with small far-left groups called the Democratic Modernist Pole, and the Movement of Social Democrats, which was the main opposition party in the 1970s and 1980s until it was reined in by the regime. The movement was only able to win two seats in the current Parliament, in spite of its having replaced its previous pro-Ben Ali leadership with a new one. 1 Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies A new political map for Tunisia The devious guises of the Constitutional Democratic Rally From the foregoing we can see that the old political map has not been erased entirely. The top six political parties in the Constituent Assembly existed before, and the former ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally (known by its French-language acronym, RCD), which was banned after the revolution, has returned under new guises. The first of these new aliases is the Popular Petition for Freedom, Justice and Development, which was initially led by journalist Hashemi Hamidi, who was close to Ben Ali, before most of the elected parliamentarians from the party disowned and overthrew him. Analysts have described the emergence of this political force, now the fourth largest party in the Constituent Assembly, as being one of the big surprises of the election. This party’s “independent” electoral lists were no different from hundreds of other such lists lying outside of the frameworks of political parties. Observers were monitoring the political parties that emerged after the revolution to identify the ways in which the supporters of the former ruling party would try to infiltrate the new Constituent Assembly, especially after the nullification of thousands of nominations on the basis of nominees’ roles in the Ben Ali regime, whether in his RCD or in the governments and parliaments he controlled. Former officials in the Ben Ali regime – such as former Foreign Minister Kamal Murjan (founder of the Initiative Party) and former Interior Minister Mohammad Jagham (founder of the Wattan [Homeland] Party) – were prevented from running for office and from leading their parties’ electoral lists in the campaign because of these nullifications. In the end, parties spawned by the Constitutional Democratic Rally – and whose names often included some derivation of the term “constitutional” – did not win more than one or two parliamentary seats, with the exception of the Initiative Party, which took five, drawing with the new incarnation of the Communist Party (Movement for Renewal). The RCD, which had allegedly numbered 2.4 million members on the eve of the revolution, has turned into several small and competing parties, the emergence of which is unlikely to have been centrally planned or organized. It is not known who is now the mastermind of the party, but whoever it is has followed a method of circumventing the legal barriers to entering elections that was previously used by the Nahda Movement in the first elections of 1989, just 15 months after Ben Ali took power – namely, the fielding of candidates on independent electoral lists. Among the hundreds of independent electoral lists, the remnants of the RCD counted on a journalistic figurehead known to be an apologist for the Ben Ali regime to enter the fray under the banner of the “Popular Petition” party without arousing suspicion as to the party’s true allegiance. In contrast to one’s initial impression, confidence in the Popular Petition was not to be taken for granted, for the Independent Higher Election Commission soon discovered that the candidate names on the party’s electoral lists were local-level officials of the RCD. The commission nullified the party’s electoral list before the election, voided others during the vote-counting process, and tried to invalidate 10 other lists after the announcement of the election results, but by then it was too late. On this basis, we find that if we add up the votes received by the RCD under the guise of the Popular Petition, the Initiative Party and others that the former ruling party has won at least 27 seats, making it the second or third largest party in the Constituent Assembly. 2 Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies A new political map for Tunisia As such, the outcome is similar to those of communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe after those countries’ transitions to democracy. The failure of ideological movements and the rise of centrist parties In contrast to the devious return of the former ruling party, a notable feature of the Constituent Assembly elections was the total failure of the ideological oppositional parties. Marxist, Nasserist, Baathist and Maoist parties all failed to win more than one or two seats (with the exception of the Workers’ Communist Party, which won three), despite the fact that successive generations have taken turns in the leadership of these parties during the reigns of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, and have made considerable sacrifices. The centrist parties have come to dominate the new political map under three main formations: the Progressive Democrats, the Democratic Forum Democratic Forum for Labor and Liberties , and the Congress for the Republic. These three parties have in common the fact that all of them sharply opposed the Ben Ali regime – albeit with varying degrees of effectiveness – giving them credibility after the triumph of the revolution. Opinion polls gave the Progressive Democrats a strong lead as compared to the other secular parties, far ahead of the two others. The Nahda Movement considered the Progressive Democrats to be its main competitors, which led the former to limit its negotiations on the formation of the transitional government to the Democratic Fourm for Labor and Liberites and the Congress for the Republic. The Progressive Democratic Party, however, lost much of its electoral base because of the mistakes of its leader –lawyer Ahmed Najib Chebbi, who had participated in the first and second governments formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi after the revolution. The Progressive Democrats’ extensive US-style television campaign advertisements upset many of the party’s supporters, who switched to its two competitors, which according to the opinion polls had been expected to receive a very small share of the votes. In short, the elections for the Constituent Assembly created a new political map that is dominated, in terms of size, by three groups: the five major parties (those controlling 17-91 seats); the four medium-size parties (those with three to five seats); and 10 small parties (those with no more than two seats).
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