A State in society The identity of the Tunisian state in the Constitution.

Sadok BELAID

Looking back at a founding ambiguity

The question of the identity of the State is an old one, which has been asked since the very first days of Tunisian independence. That was the first time that power had been Tunisian – embodied by Tunisians, for Tunisians. Consequently, has only been wrestling with such matters of identity since 1956. To understand the terms in which the question arises today, it is essential to look back at what was decided at the time of independence. We must look back at the key episodes in the conflict over the State's identity to understand how it shapes today's political forces in Tunisia.

In the 1950s, with the advent of independence, two opposing visions emerged: on the one hand, a traditionalist view, more "Zitouna" than Muslim Brotherhood, built and advocated by sheikhs and by professors at Zitouna University, who tried to transplant their vision into the constitution; and, on the other, the vision of those close to Neo-. It was the first time the Tunisian State had been independent, sovereign. It encountered all the difficulties that every religious country in the world faces: the difficulties of religion.

Habib Bourguiba then found an ingenious compromise: he created a misunderstanding of the nature of the Tunisian State and enshrined it in the Constitution of 1959. That misunderstanding left everybody satisfied: some said the State was conservative, while others claimed it was liberal and reformist. The ambiguity ran deep and attracted criticism from some advocates of more radical approaches, but, when the time came, Bourguiba silenced them all, banging his fist on the table and declaring, "this is the way it is going to be".

Upheaval and tensions

Since then, Tunisia has changed. There was the Ben Salah experiment, for instance. The country has changed not only politically, but economically and socially. We have found ourselves confronted with a number of problems, to which we have had to find answers. For some, these answers were inspired by a liberal philosophy; for others, it was quite the opposite. Since the 1970s, the tensions and debates surrounding the definition of the Tunisian State's identity have not abated. The Hédi Nouira period brought change, then the pendulum swung back in the opposite direction.

During the Bahi Ladgham and Hédi Nouira governments, Hédi Nouira, for whom I worked as an adviser for over ten years, asked me to conduct a study on the subject. That was in 1973. The line I took was as follows: from a socio-cultural perspective, we can observe that the language of the Tunisian people is and that their religion is . Putting that in an article of the Constitution simply means that I, as a Tunisian constitution-maker, am observing that the Tunisian people speak Arabic and are, in the vast majority of cases, . Language is not part of the State, therefore. It has a cultural dimension, not a normative one. If it were part of the State, it would be mandatory and French would be forbidden. So the State has been relieved of that burden. There is no prohibition in this provision. People can speak in Arabic or in French; whereas in , everything is Arabized. However, we did not dare go as far as Senegal, which puts French and Swahili on equal footing. In the Tunisian Constitution, the language is not a norm. That idea was deemed to be an intelligent one and, after a debate, was accepted at a meeting.

1 That ambiguity was always in danger of exploding, and brought tensions to the surface. It was the ambiguity in that initial choice that sparked the creation of 's Ennahdha movement, or, as it was then, the Movement of the Islamic Tendency. It was a reaction to that ambiguity, which was then hijacked and exploited by all and sundry. Rached Ghannouchi and Abdelfattah Mourou, whom I knew during the Campus university era, were asking lawyers questions. They were a minority, who were then joined by the people who would go on to become the group's historic leaders, such as Ali Larayedh. The question of State identity was not the only factor explaining the development of the Movement of the Islamic Tendency; the international context also played an important role. Ennahdha emerged outside of the Zitouna movement. Indeed, it was an anti-Zitouna movement, which criticised the Islamic university for its complicity with the regime.

That was what prompted the first clashes on the campus. At the time, I was faculty dean and I saw a small group begin to congregate on the lawn in front of the administration building. There were not many of them at first – no more than twenty people – but then the group grew and there was no longer room for all of them on the grass. It was a dark period... I was there. I was known for being a liberal and a French-speaker. My policy was to keep the peace, to avoid clashes so that everyone could get on with their work. But there came a point when the tensions were running high. That was in the mid-seventies. Confrontations were taking place at the university between "liberal" students and those close to the Movement of the Islamic Tendency. The students were armed. They were slaughtering each other in the university courtyard. Those students are now politicians in positions of power. At the time, the tensions were palpable, but the social and cultural balance of the country as a whole was one of a liberal majority against an Islamist minority. The upheaval triggered by Hédi Nouira spawned violent Islamists. Then came the suffocating silence of the Ben Ali era.

Revolution and Constitution

This ambiguity came to the fore once again after the revolution, when the constitution- making process began. When that work got under way in 2011, we carried out a number of consultations, including my rather feeble effort, which used the 1959 Constitution as its starting point. In particular, I had kept Article 1 unchanged. At that point, only a few of my more courageous colleagues, such as , Fadhel Moussa, and Slim Laghmani, had suggested challenging and amending that article. The Tunisian Constitutional Law Association, presided by Farhat Horchani, played an important role in challenging Article 1. It was the first to suggest replacing it with two articles: one on cultural matters and a second dealing with normative and legal aspects. The combination of those two articles would finally remove any ambiguity, and given the context, the chances of the liberal tendency getting such wording accepted seemed remote. Article 2 was a response to the cleaned-up Article 1. However, this version of the Article, introduced in spring 2013, ran counter to Article 141, which established the points that could not be amended. Article 2 encouraged a liberal reading of Article 1, stressing the fact that it was purely declarative, whereas as Article 141 went further, inviting a reconsideration of the first two Articles as normative provisions. The lawyers immediately spotted this contradiction and proposed that a committee of legal experts be formed to settle the question of which Article should prevail. The opinions were divided. Back then, there was no majority view; whereas today, though the ambiguity remains, most lawyers interpret the Article as a declaration and not a norm. The balance of power has therefore shifted towards the liberals, and I think that as Tunisia develops and continues to cut loose, the ambiguity will disappear of its own accord. Soon, it will be impossible to make a conservative reading of the Article. Today, we find ourselves in a much more favourable situation than just after the revolution.

Tunisia is a civil State…

2 The concept of a "civil State" is a new one, enshrined in the Constitution for the first time. Is this concept not another source of ambiguity? We do not know exactly what it entails, though the wording of the Article may help us to establish a definition. To understand exactly what a civil State means, we need to put it in context, and remember what was going on outside of the Assembly when people first began talking about this notion. At the time, the civil State was presented as the opposite of a military State, a fairly simplistic distinction. Today, we understand the constitutional enshrinement of the civil State to signify that Tunisia is not a religious State. It means that the State is separate from religion. It means Tunisia is a democratic State, a secular State, a non-Islamic, non- religious State. This point has even led us to the idea of civil citizenship. The question of citizenship is linked to Article 1 and its ramifications. It is an extremely important idea which needs to been given a clearly defined place in the Constitution. I had devoted a chapter to it in my draft Constitution but, unfortunately, the final text adopted by the Assembly contains no identifiable chapter or passage on the subject, which is dealt with in the preamble. I find it regrettable that the constitution-makers did not pay more attention to the concept, and I can only assume that this is why Tunisians subsequently behaved in such an uncivil and uncitizenlike manner... because of a gap in the Constitution.

Appointments

From the revolution in 2011 until 2014, Tunisia was torn apart as various political tendencies battled to grab power. All political tendencies behaved appallingly: the Ennahdha movement, Congress for the Republic, Ahmed Nejib Chebbi's Republican Party. All of them fuelled this separation between the identity of the State and its structure. How? All of them sought to appoint allies who would support them, both as senior State officials and at the lower levels of the administration. Such nepotism and co-option sends a terrible message to all citizens.

Appointments in the education sector are a travesty, for instance, and this is a problem that pre-dates the revolution. I was able to observe the problem at close quarters when working on Mohamed Charfi's reform when he was Minister of Education. Even back then, Mohamed Charfi had received numerous death threats, and he had realised that the Ministry of Education had been infiltrated to a huge degree, not only in terms of personnel, but also in its message. Rached Ghannouchi's strategy was to say, "you keep a low profile at first and then, once you are in, you spread the message that you are a Muslim, that people should follow Islam, etc." At that stage, it was a fire under the ashes, but it grew and developed until it became absolute extremism. Mohamed Charfi, who was like a brother to me, realised that this was a national issue of crucial importance, and asked me to reform the university system. That task took me five years. He wanted me to have an official political role to go with my assignment, but I refused. I wanted to remain completely anonymous. Ahmed Mestiri, who was an activist, took that opportunity and got involved in the project but, unfortunately, he was used by Ben Ali and found himself forced to resign.

A matter of vision

Let us begin with the question of identity. Take a very simple example: human identity is something that makes us specific and distinguishes us from other people. I communicate, I have reason, I have my hands... The question arises in exactly the same terms for the State. It's an institution that takes on a mission – the mission of developing society – based on a certain vision and using certain instruments. This is what makes the Tunisian State different from the Russian State, or from any of the Gulf States. It is this vision that determines the identity of the Tunisian State.

One day in 2012 I was invited to speak to the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, and I told them, "I think we have a challenge: are we going to protect what we have, the gains we have made since Bourguiba, or are we going to lose it and squander it?" The State is a model for life, a model for society – one that we have been trying to build since the days of Bourguiba. That model

3 has been imperilled on numerous occasions, coming up against various obscurantist forces that come from elsewhere, from the orient. That was the vision we wanted to protect. The Tunisian State is a vision: a conception of life and society.

Once we have established that, we can see how, with reference to various articles of the Constitution, we can form a general definition. The Tunisian State is independent and sovereign. That in itself represents a revolution in relation to its previous status as a protectorate. It is a State that has chosen a mode of government: it is a republic, not a monarchy. It is also a State in which not everything is normative, where certain aspects remain in the cultural realm, guaranteeing freedom of faith and opinion. Lastly, it is a civil State, which is meant to form a single, integrated human society. Thus, citizenship is at the heart of identity.

Will Tunisia's body politic succeed in redefining that citizenship? There was a great deal of discussion about citizenship in the debates on the drafting of the preamble to the Constitution, but there is no article setting out a precise definition. The State is defined as a civil State in the sense that it is multi-faceted. Also present is an idea that I am very keen on – the idea of participatory democracy, which shows how citizenship can be mobilised and how it can operate. Participatory democracy is addressed not only at national level, but at local level too, with the last chapter on local power and decentralisation stressing its importance. There was a desire to see Tunisian democracy develop from its municipalities and its regions upwards for it to be decentralised and participatory.

This vision promoted by the State builds a human society characterised by a number of bonds that bolster its unity and its momentum. It is about coming together to do something for the common good. One of the characteristics of the Tunisian State, provided the body politic applies it, is that it is a democratic State, and even a participatory democracy. If we bring all these elements together, we get an idea of what the structure and functions of the State should be, and how this overarching structure should overact with society.

Founding a State within society, not above it

The State must be within society, not above it. It is a bottom-up construct that creates a unifying, integrating system. This vision of the State marks a radical departure from the Ottoman Beylik State.

At the university, I often had eccentric ideas about the subjects we should cover in class, and I did a class on the forms of the State in the , in which I developed the idea that until independence, Tunisian society had been built on a divide. Beylik society was built on the Phoenician model, which was similar to the Roman and Byzantine models: you had a family of colonisers – in this case the Ottoman Turks – who settled in Tunisia and established power in their name. Power lay in the hands of foreigners, , who established their authority by force. At the time, the Bey would visit the villages once or twice a year to collect taxes, but did nothing for the schools, nothing for the hospitals, nothing to improve the day-to-day life of the people. All he did was apply pressure to society. In addition, there was a gap between rural and city structures, between the city and the nomadic, Bedouin areas around it. The little villages and backwaters were subject to power, paid their taxes, and asked God to ensure they were not too heavily taxed. In the mountains and the steppes – Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid, Gafsa – there was constant revolution. When the Bey came, the inhabitants would confront him. There were massacres every year, and the boundaries between the Beylik's power and local power shifted regularly. Finally, there was an intermediate fringe between the Ottoman power and the country's inland regions. The Beys used a small bilingual fringe as an intermediary between the foreign Turkish power and the country's inhabitants. That fringe was ! The people of Tunis were the servants of the ruling power and, of course, when that power changed, the fringe changed with it. When colonisation came, these intermediaries had the same

4 role. This is how it has been since the Phoenicians. Tunisian society is based on moving geological layers: it is plate tectonics.

The aim of the new Constitution is to turn that social structure upside down and shake up the social relationships it engenders. That is quite an undertaking. Tunisia is a civil, democratic, republican, and participatory State, and the people of Ben Guerdane and Sidi Bouzid feel a sense of belonging to a certain vision, to the State. Integrating that population is a real challenge for society, and I fear that, alas, the vital ingredients needed to achieve it are not yet in place.

Redefining the State, but with whom?

Recent history, from Ben Ali to today, has weighed Tunisia down. Dictatorial power has bullied, repressed, and exploited. In 2011, a tiny crack appeared, then everything exploded. Unfortunately, there were bad intentions at work. The political parties did not take part in the revolution. They just happened to be there, and they decided that the revolution represented a good opportunity for them. At one point, after Ben Ali's departure, I was even contacted by a group of 16 political parties who asked me to be their leader. I don't like being a leader or a politician. They were full of hot air; it was ridiculous. Those people were interested in party-political manoeuvring. They understood nothing about the revolution or the transformations it entailed. The political class did not live up to the revolutionary spirit.

The moment when Ghannouchi returned to Tunisia was treason. The Ennahdha movement had said and done nothing for the revolution, but came along and appropriated it for its own ends. The despair of the people, together with Ennahdha's impeccable organisation, then facilitated the party's infiltration efforts. The small fry of the smaller political parties could not hold their own and, little by little, Ennahdha gained ground. The elections turned out to be to their advantage, and there was a constitutional power play in November 2011 when Jebali adopted the provisional constitution. That made the party's stranglehold on the country official. They would give nothing away. Vast quantities of money would be squandered. We conducted a revolution without a figurehead and without a vision.

The Troïka's stranglehold created a backlash, hence the idea of Béji Caid Essebsi. How could this Leviathan be taken on? Unfortunately, they concentrated too much on the party-political aspect, and not enough on policy. Having been ground down by the 2011-2014 period, the political forces contributed little, and the country's traditional political landscape was totally swept away. Nidaa Tounès committed some blunders. Our politicians did not develop a programme. Neither Nidaa Tounès nor Ennahdha had a programme. They produced 350-page manifestos drafted by 250 experts. They were unreadable. It was sad to see for me as a lot of my colleagues were involved in the Nidaa Tounès project. The head of that team of experts could not explain to me the broad outlines of the programme or give me precise answers. Tunisia had to reach its boiling point because we were suffocating at every level: we had no prospects, and our graduates were not finding a way into the job market and were in danger of turning to delinquency.

With no ideas forthcoming, the solution was to preserve the status quo, to do nothing. That is why they produced an Article 1 and an Article 2, and I think it was an excellent idea. Those Articles were meant to be read together, as paragraph 1 and paragraph 2. The advantage of the new Article is that it creates a precondition for all matters relating to Islam. There are also Articles 6 and 49. Regarding Article 49, it should have been stipulated that everything that followed could only be interpreted in the light of Article 49. This Article is a precondition that was meant to be followed by other things, but those things were never added. I find that regrettable. The Troika came along with its Bible, but realised that it could not impose it. It tried to put its men everywhere, to infiltrate the State structures, but that didn't work. I was one of those who argued

5 that the manifestos needed to be restricted to a single page. Not one party did so. I then suggested that a small circle of 30 experts be formed as a Committee of Wise Men, which would operate as a joint platform for reinventing the country's economic and social policy, because there was an urgent need to give Tunisians bread and work, and we needed to know what to do! I had proposed forming a committee during the Constituent Assembly period.

At that time, the provisional regime was an assembly government in which the Congress for the Republic played an important role. The entente between the major political forces could have set a number of initiatives. There was also a plan to establish a technocratic government, involving eminent, first-rate figures. Those were interesting ideas, but now it is back to square one. Ennahdha have gone into hibernation, Nidaa Tounès has contributed nothing, and the other parties have been annihilated. They no longer exist, or barely. It is incredible to see the extent to which the revolution swept away the old political class. We don't hear anything about Maya Jribi anymore, for example. And, when she does speak, it is to propose a common front against terrorism. There's nothing original about that idea. We expected better. We expected more.

Defending the identity of the Tunisian State through the law: the Constitutional Court

Will the interplay between Article 1 and Article 2 influence the rest of the constitution? Each of these articles poses problems. Writing a nice text is not enough. We need to give it meaning. How? First of all, the political forces need to take this opportunity to say, "Look, this is the law". The interpretation work is going to be done by a mechanism that has, fortunately, been created: the Constitutional Court.

One of my colleagues has written that, from time to time, we are surprised when we look at the case law of the courts, and that this constituted one of the obstacles to the proper orientation of the constitutional message. Why? Because at the time of independence, there were spaces to be filled in the courts, as all the judges had left when the colonisers left. So we appointed Zitounians. At the time, Tunis law faculty had perhaps twenty graduates, no more. So the Zitouna generation infiltrated the courts. They are still there today, and even more powerful than before. Unfortunately, it has been succeeded by a new generation that may have been educated in the liberal mould, but whose convictions are rather different! The older judges are therefore from the Zitouna, and the younger ones are, mainly, Zitounian-minded. There are, therefore, major conflicts in the field.

After the revolution, the idea emerged to create a judge training centre and then a lawyer training centre. I was behind both initiatives. The aim was to ensure that those who would be taking up positions would be trained directly. In reality, it is highly likely to take longer. The Constitutional Court is due to be established soon but, for this to happen, we need to know who is going to form the Court and where they are going to be recruited from. In my text, I proposed that members of the Constitutional Court should be based on appointments by role so as to ensure a mixture of legal practitioners and professors. The aim is to blend experience and knowledge. People who were accustomed to working in the law would be brought into contact with those who had a greater theoretical knowledge of it, so that the liberal mindset would dominate. However, the Constitutional Court project sparked a huge battle in the Assembly. Fadhel Moussa fought like a lion against Habib Kheder and Mustapha Ben Jafaar, but the text is completely abstruse: only those with 15 years' experience can be members of the Court! Imposing such a minimum requirement would completely preclude the kind of renewal expected! It would run the risk of forming a Constitutional Court made up of bailiffs and notaries. Indeed, it is not impossible that we might sink to such a level. In all likelihood, clarifications will be given on what constitutes "experience". There could well be significant tensions once again when it comes to appointing the President of the Court. However, this Court can and must play an essential role in readjusting the Constitution. It will, for instance, be called upon to adjudicate if an issue of religious disparity arises, and we can see that there is a

6 freedom of faith and opinion which must not be touched. There are vacuums that the Court must fill and adjustments it can make. However, it needs to be made up of top-notch individuals.

The debates on the formation of the Constitutional Court bring back bad memories of my involvement in a small committee created when I was dean of the university in 1972-1973 to choose the first judges of the administrative court. There was a vacuum at that time. There were not a lot of lawyers, and not many more government and administration specialists. There were three of us: Moncef Belhaj Amor, the secretary-general of the ministry; Abdesselem Klébi, the then director of ENA; and me. We knew each other well, and one of them had been my teacher in Sadiki. I was put in a difficult position because I wanted to postpone the appointments if the candidates were not good enough; whereas, the others wanted to get their institutions up and running and needed us to appoint the judges quickly, even if that meant training them on the job by sending them to the State Council in or elsewhere. We found a compromise: instead of appointing 10, we appointed five. Consequently, the appointees were low-level bailiffs and notaries! I fear that the candidates for the Constitutional Court might be selected in similar conditions. This is by no means a problem unique to Tunisia. Even in France, the people appointed to the Constitutional Court are not eminent professors; they are politicians. The likes of Chirac, Debré, and Giscard d'Estaing may be former presidents, but what credentials do they have as constitutional experts? In the , the procedure is a little different, but the problem is the same: co-option among academics or senior judges. It is known that the case law of supreme courts is not only legal, but political. The United States Supreme Court was a slave court until 1963. Judges, therefore, have great power. They can use the means at their disposal to plead with, block, or bring down the legislature. The Court has power, and the legislature knows it. But, its members still have to be competent.

In many respects, the Tunisian Constitution offers a wealth of possibilities. The definition of the State as a civil State, in Articles 1 and 2, offers a wealth of possibilities, as do the provisions on equal rights for men and women and those relating to human rights. But, those possibilities remain just that: possibilities. It is up to the Constitutional Court to turn those possibilities into realities, and to strike the necessary balances, as has to be done at present on the antiterrorism law.

Decentralising and developing an economic policy

The implementation of territorial reform poses similar problems. How can we engage with populations that were not part of the State prior to 1956, and who until 1956 were subjected to abductions and pillages by the State? These were the limes – the Roman word for the fringe, the limit. The limes moved: once to Sbeitla, on another occasion to Maktar. The balance of power remained unchanged until colonisation by the French. The South was controlled by military leaders with no civil power, as it was an area of rebellion. The South remains hostile today. It was this hostility that fuelled the events of Sidi Bouzid, Gafsa and Redeyef … Unfortunately, this hostility is not solely geographical, but comprises a very strong political and cultural aspect. Several social divides have jeopardised the country's unity. What happened in 2008 in Gafsa at the Compagnie Générale des Phosphates was an explosion, a split. These social divides jeopardise the res publica that is the State, which is, of course, never public.

Bourguiba only saw the country's problems in political terms: Youssefism1, Ben Salahism2. He knew nothing about the rest. He was taken for a ride by Ahmed Ben Salah, a mere graduate, because he understood nothing outside of politics. The way he saw it, if economic

1 Salah Ben Youssef, a senior figure in Neo-Destour, opposed in the fight for independence. His supporters clashed with Bourguiba's and were violently repressed. He was assassinated in Frankfurt in 1961. 2 Ahmed Ben Salah was General Secretary of the UGTT and a minister under Bourguiba. In order to "decolonise the national economy", he established a system of cooperatives in 1962 and took on multiple portfolios. In 1970, he fell from favour and was sentenced to 10 years of hard labour.

7 liberalism did not work straight away, it meant it was time to try something else. It wasn't the failure of the cooperativist policy that caused Ben Salah's fall from grace. At the time, I was an administrator in the Ministry of Finance and I saw Ben Salah's power grow. He was Minister of Finance, then Minister for the Plan and Finance, then Minister for the Plan, Finance and Agriculture, then Minister for the Plan, Finance, Agriculture and Education. He had become as powerful as the president. It was that strength that frightened Bourguiba, and it wasn't because he tried something else – a new policy – it was because he was becoming almost as important as he was, and he was a threat. Bourguiba only found a balance again with Hédi Nouira: Ahmed Mestiri would campaign for a more democratic system, whereas Hédi Nouira was the embodiment of the State. For Bourguiba, economic concerns were not relevant. Only politics counted.

However, 2011 showed that looking after politics was not enough. In Tunisia, there were people who were starving, people who did not have work, people who were taking their own lives. And, unfortunately, the model of growth based on exports and tourism had not been enough. Attracting tourists was not sufficient: they had flocked to the coast, but not to inland regions. The problem is that people wanted work, and even back then job creation required an investment of 70 million dinars. It would have been necessary to develop a real economic vision, but neither Ennahdha nor Nidaa was capable of that. Ennahdha was focused solely on ideology and politics, and Nidaa was so busy promoting its own capabilities that it didn't have time for anything else. Their requests for G20 funding concerned two projects: a security project, an area in which the flaws were so great that they led to Bardo and Sousse, and an economic project. So far, the leaders have managed to implement a security programme, but have not been able to reach agreement on an economic programme. We are choking ourselves with our own hands. Instead of building dams, creating economic infrastructure, and costing projects, our leaders are doing nothing.

Redefining the framework for political action

Is the State defined solely by Articles 1 and 2? No, the Constitution is a whole, and it is that whole that defines the State. Tunisia is in favour of participation, decentralisation, and human rights. It is feminist. It is antimilitarist. It is all of those things, but that is not all it is. Just as a good meal requires more than just a piece of meat – you need vegetables, spices, sauces – the Constitution is not sufficient to define the identity of the State. What matters is the environment, what surrounds it, the sociological and political culture in which the constitution will be marinated.

Let us make a brief comparison of what might happen in Tunisia with this Constitution and what is going on elsewhere in the region. In Syria, the Assad family holds power and has always lived with , nepotism, violence, and assassinations. The family is incapable of exploiting all the resources of this extremely rich country with millennia of cultural heritage. We, on the other hand, are lucky enough to have a socio-political climate that is fairly conducive to osmosis between society and State. is a developed country, but it continues to be made up of an aristocratic and religious class on one side, and the people, who remain marginalised, on the other. The Moroccan regime operates by capturing the useful social classes, incorporating them in the State, and forgetting the rest. I'm a professor and am paid 2000 dinars a month; whereas, in Morocco a professor is paid three times as much, with a car, clothes, and honours. Morocco is a society founded on an unjust divide. That is less true of Tunisia. We nearly wasted the chance offered by the revolution. Civil society played an important role in building the Constitution. In the end, the result was not too bad. We could have had an Ennahdha Constitution but, instead, here we are with another face, another leg. Who is going to implement this Constitution? It won't be Si Ben Jafaar, Si Chebbi, Maya Jribi, or Hammami. It will be someone new. We are currently witnessing a redefinition of the framework in which political decision-makers act. Previously, only certain elites and certain privileged areas took part in decision-making. Today, there are many things we need to build. It is not enough to have a good Constitution, a good and hard-won Article 1 and 2. Tunisia will be built over

8 the next 50 years and by future generations. At present, Tunisia is full of potential, but has not yet built the instruments to realise that potential. It does not yet have a political class in waiting. The old political classes have been swept away to such an extent that the country is disgusted with politics and politicians, but no new figures are emerging. The Constitution is capable of many wonderful things, but only if Tunisians have the determination, tenacity, and rigour to gradually put those things in place.

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