http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/23/again-tunisia-arab-nations-forward
Ben Ali’s police state took the undemocratic, but well-run, republic created by Tunisia’s founding father, Habib Bourguiba, and worked to pervert it for 23 years. The corruption of his family and his cronies made a mockery of the strong work ethic of ordinary Tunisians. His pervasive, and often cruel and petty, repression, in the words of one of the country’s most famous samizdat writers of the Ben Ali years, Om Zied, “put a policeman in everyone’s head”.
The Tunisian people now seem doubly liberated: from a nasty regime, but also from their own guilt in not confronting it earlier. Many are embracing political activism for the first time in their lives in a manner that makes the apathy often prevalent in established democracies seem shameful.
There is nervousness about the election’s results, of course. It is likely that Al-Nahda, an Islamist movement that leads in the polls, will do well, disturbing the strongly secular tradition of Tunisian politics since 1956. But, significantly, there are signs that Tunisian politics are maturing: today’s al-Nahda seems far from the much more conservative and illiberal Islamist movement of the 1980s, and secular parties are grudgingly recognising that their presence on the political scene is legitimate. Indeed, al-Nahda’s popularity appears to be as much based on the recognition of its leaders’ ordeal – killings, torture and exile – as their religious ideas. In exchange for its political acceptance by secularists, al-Nahda has largely endorsed the relatively liberal social consensus instilled by Bourguiba.
This looks worryingly similar to Western democracy. Disgraceful behaviour.
