On this Sunday, Oct. 23, Tunisians will vote for the first time, for real, ever. Ten months after their revolution which sparked the Arab Awakening, les Tunisienes will cast ballots for the Constituent Assembly – the 217 women and men charged with forging a new constitution.
Many will read in this election’s coffee grinds regional implications. How will democracy play out in the post-dictatorship Arab world? What about women and the diaspora? Tunisia could exemplify solutions, or problems, for say elections in Egypt and Palestine: 30 percent of the candidates must be women, and 18 of the assembly seats will be given to the Tunisian diaspora, whose 80 parties in France are running 10,000 candidates. The first vote for the 2011 Tunisian election was cast Oct. 19 in Canberra, Australia.
Electoral dangers abound: old-regime provocations, Islamists in the wings, and the competency of Tunisia’s election managers, the Independent High Authority for the Elections. Famous for its enforced 55-year-old gender parity, will Tunisia elect women to craft their nascent democracy? More than anyone else, sans le Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the women of the region will dissect the results for ramifications.
“The confrontation will be between two camps: the camp of conviction and the camp of money,” said revolutionary icon Abdennaceur Laouini on Al Jazeera, voicing popular sentiment. Reacting to this fear of entrenched money and power, the new Tunisian campaign system is a paragon of campaign finance reform. Each party gets only a handful of three-minute radio and television spots. Candidate lists, the only public campaign material allowed, can only be posted in black grids spaced just larger than a sheet of paper.
All this democracy under a roiling revolution – a chaos where new art scenes flourish next to once-banned religious partisanship. Divergent political viewpoints have risen alongside crime in the country nicknamed “The Green” for it’s luscious, long coast. The tourism-dependent economy hasn’t rebounded from the broadcasts of revolution violence, and widespread workers’ actions have stalled industrial production and government services.
The long-term threats to a democratic Tunisia could be much subtler than the vote, scant tourists, or strikes.
Ignore the headlines, writes Allen Bradley of Tunisia Live, and dig deeper. These will narrowly focus on the percentage of assembly seats won by An-Nahda, the Tunisian Islamist party likened to the Muslim Brotherhood and feared inside and out of Tunisia, whose leader Rachid Ghanouchi stated reassuringly that Tunisia would remain a land of beer and bikinis earlier this year. The real test will be what the new assembly does. What will the Declaration of Transitional Process, the Tunisian Articles of Confederation, look like? Who will they nominate as the Transitional President?
This article originally appeared on the Southwest Initiative for Conflict Studies’ biweekly bulletin.
