A brief history of Tunisia and political Islamism

The debate between Islamism and secularism has been a constant in Tunisia during its contemporary history. The movements for independence from France also had this struggle between the two models. Within the Neo-destour party, the main promoter of independence, the confrontation for leadership took place. The struggle was between Bourguiba who favored the West and its model of social promotion and Salah Ben Youssef who was focused on creating a culture and identity of his own within the framework of Arab-Islamism. Bourguiba had the support of the party and the UGTT trade union (the most important in the country) and Youssef relied on religious institutions such as Zaytûnah and Islamists. Bourguiba's victory, far from signifying the opening of a national reconciliation, caused the near disappearance of the public influence of the Islamists.

Bourguiba and Kennedy

President Bourguiba, on coming to power, initiated major reforms aimed at modernizing the country in the Western way and to this end he controlled religious institutions such as the University of Zaytûnah, the most important center of Islamic learning in the world. He banned Koranic schools, the Islamic veil or polygamy, invited Tunisians not to obey the fast in Ramadan and not to make pilgrimages to Mecca, these last two being part of the 5 pillars of Islam.

The emergence of the opposition to Bourguiba in the early 1960s. Bourguiba, in the context of economic crisis, opted for a way out aligned with socialist measures. The Neo-Destour party in 1964 was renamed the Destourian Socialist Party (PSD) and Ahmed Ben Salah who was Secretary General of the UGTT trade union was in charge of state development policies. Reforms focused on agricultural cooperatives and the industrialization of the country. These measures failed and in 1969 Bourguiba announced that the “socialist experience” was over (Ben Salah was even arrested to calm the protests). This resulted in an authoritarian retreat of the regime. The state openly turned into a one-man dictatorship where the head of state became a life-long dictatorship in 1975.

At this time, when left-wing activism after the Cuban revolution was booming, the confrontation between the PSD and the more left-wing sectors became constant. The conflict with the Islamists took a back seat and the regime's efforts were focused on persecuting the left. During the 1960s and 1970s the Islamists gradually organized themselves into groups, the most important being al-Jama'a al-Islamiya, which would later be absorbed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The founders of al-Jamaa were Rached Ghannouchi, Hmida Ennaifer and Adbdelfattah Mourou. All three have been of great relevance in Tunisian politics as they later founded the Ennahda party.

The initial growth of the Islamist movements and the semi-tolerance of the regime was facilitated because there was a sector within the PSD that was Islamist. The initial repression against the pan-Arabists represented by Ben Youssef had been concluded and the existence of a small group of Islamists within the PSD was of no concern to Bourguiba. At one point even the growth of Islamism in the second half of the 1970s was promoted by the president himself. Interior Minister Ahmed Mestiri said “It did not consist of an alliance but of a tactical choice. He (Bourguiba) sought to control the extreme left through the support of the Islamists.” Even in 1979 a platform linked to the PSD published that the Muslim religion should have a status of primacy in Tunisian society. Later Mestiri himself acknowledged that Bourguiba was wrong and that the Islamist movement represented a greater challenge than the leftist movements.

The replacement of Bourguiba by Ben Ali took place through a soft coup in 1987. Ben Ali's arrival came with promises to open up the political system, he gave freedom of the press and changed the name of the PSD to Democratic Constitutional Rally and even called for supposedly free elections. The fraudulent general elections of 1989 were a trap used by Ben Ali to make the opponents of the regime come out of anonymity and become politically organized. Once the elections were over (where the ACD was the only institutional party) the regime set about imprisoning the Islamist opposition. The promises of openness came to nothing and Tunisia returned to an authoritarian regime more ferocious than that of Bourguiba.

The Ben Ali era was characterized by the constitution of a system that combined autocracy with kleptocracy. Both the Ben Ali family and his wife's family, the Trabelsi, plundered public resources during the two long decades they were in power. The national wealth became in the hands of the political elite.

The Jasmine Revolution put an end to the authoritarian regime of the Ben Ali clan and resulted in a democratic system comparable to European complex democracies. Tunisia was the beginning of the Arab Spring and the only country where the democratic and peaceful revolution triumphed, at least temporarily. Due to the history of repression and political persecution, the Islamist movement was able to become the most cohesive party in the Tunisian democratic political system. The conservative and Islamist but democratic Ennahda party was led by Rachid Ghannouchi. On the other side was Nidaa Tounes, a secular and center-left party with a more unstable base. These two parties became the majority in the Tunisian Parliament and were the supporters of the transition process and the establishment of the parliamentary system.

Rachid Ghannouchi

However, problems stemming from corruption, political inefficiency and unfulfilled promises turned Ennahda into a party that was perceived as the embodiment of the evils of institutional politics. That discontent was picked up by an independent candidate who emerged victorious in the 2019 presidential elections. Kais Saied presented himself as a political outsider who broke the secularism-Islamism axis that came to regenerate politics that had been corrupted by the parties. In 2021 he staged a civilian coup in which he assigned himself special powers to dissolve parliament and persecute his political rivals. Following the populist leader's handbook he confronted the “traditional” political power and especially Ennahda, whose leader has been imprisoned on numerous occasions for political reasons.

In short, political Islam has been an essential actor to understand Tunisia's political history and not only the recent one. Ennahda acted as a key player for the democratic transition of the Ben Ali regime and was the main supporter of the 2014 Constitution. Institutional ineffectiveness, as well as economic difficulties that continued even under the democratic system and the dynamics of the parliamentary system itself led to the fall from grace of the conservative Islamo-democratic movement and with it, of the only democracy in the Arab-Muslim world.