Ennahda Movement in Power: A Long Path to Democracy

Introduction

The Islamist movement appeared in Tunisia in the 1970s. It was mainly a student movement encouraged by the regime to weaken the left which was then the most popular movement and provided strong opposition to Habib Bourguiba’s (1903–2000) regime. In the wake of the Iranian Revolution, Islamist leaders established the Movement of Islamic Tendency (MIT) inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Movement which in turn was and still is influenced by Wahhabism founded by the Saudi Mohamed Abdel Wahab in the seventeenth century (Ayubi, 1991: pp. 85–89).

The MIT was immediately banned and crushed by Habib Bourguiba, the first president of Tunisia. After 1987 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s coup d’état that deposed Bourguiba, a new law for political parties was promulgated forbidding political parties to refer to Islam. To fulfill this provision, the MIT became, in 1989, the Ennahdha Movement or ‘Harakat Ennahdha’, which means the renaissance movement. The Ennahdha Movement participated in the relatively free 1989 legislative election with candidates labeled as independent and the purple ballot (the color chosen by the Islamists) secured approximately 30 percent of the votes. But Ben Ali’s regime rigged the election and credited the Islamist movement with only 12 percent of the votes. A new wave of repression started, many leaders were arrested and incarcerated without trial and others like the present president of the movement, Rached Ghannouchi, 72, went to exile, first in Algeria and then in the UK.

Since 1989, the Ennahdha Movement has been through the wringer with most of its leaders either in exile, in jail or in hiding. Tens of thousands of Islamists were imprisoned or exiled during this time.

The 2010–2011 Uprising

The Tunisian uprising named in Tunisia Thawrat Al Karama (the Revolution of Dignity) started on December 18, 2010 in Sidi Bouzid (190 miles south of Tunis) a day after 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi (1984–2011) set himself on fire after a row with a policewoman who confiscated his vegetable cart. Bouazizi had been the sole income earner in his extended family of eight. Public outrage quickly grew over the incident, leading to protests which constituted the most dramatic wave of social and political unrest in Tunisia in three decades, resulting in scores of deaths and injuries, most of which were the result of action by police and security forces against demonstrators. Twenty-eight days later, on January 14, 2011, president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted from power. He escaped to Saudi Arabia with his family, bringing an end to his regime that lasted 23 years. The then unique Labor Union—Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT)—was said to be an integral part of the protests but it took by surprise all political parties including the Ennahdha Movement.

On January 30, 2011, Rached Ghannouchi returned after 22 years in exile after the interim government announced that media curbs would be lifted, banned political parties allowed to register, and political prisoners given amnesty. Thousands of people welcomed him at the airport. In his first statement, he said he would not run in the next presidential poll but his party would contest a parliamentary election. Alongside his supporters was a small group of secularists with banners that said: ‘No Islamism, no theocracy, and no Sharia!’ (BBC, 2011).

He added that Ennahda aimed to work with other opposition parties towards a democratic transition: ‘All parties operated against the dictatorship regime and should cooperate to establish a democratic system in Tunisia’ (Ibid.). He rejected comparisons between him and Ayatollah Khomeini who had returned from exile to lead the Islamic Revolution in Iran, but instead compared Ennahda to Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The Conquest of Power

In the wake of the revolution, the party moved quickly to carve out a place in the political scene. It was legalized on March 1, 2011, and soon after its registration, opinion polls showed that the Ennahda Movement ranked first among political parties in Tunisia with 29 percent, followed by the Progressive Democratic Party (centre–right) at 12.3 percent and the Ettajdid Movement (the former Communist party) at 7.1 percent. It was also found that 61.4 percent of Tunisians ignored political parties in the country (ANSAmed, 2011).

At that time, Ennahda’s leaders seemed highly sensitive to the fears among other Tunisians and in the West about Islamist movements.

‘We don’t want a theocracy. We want a democratic state that is characterized by the idea of liberty. The people are to decide themselves how they live…We are not an Islamist party, we are an Islamic party that also gets its bearing by the principles of the Koran’, stated spokesman Samir Dilou. ¹

Turkey was the model regarding the relation of state and religion, the party’s Islamic ideology was compared to Christian democracy in Italy and Germany.

Ahead of the Constituent Assembly elections on October 23, 2011, the party conducted a costly electoral campaign. Although the source of funds of this election is not known, there is speculation that it was possibly sponsored by Arab states of the Gulf, mainly Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Ennahda Movement was providing potential voters, especially from the lower class, with promotional gifts, meals for the end of Ramadan feasts, and sponsoring events like mass weddings.

In the election for the Constituent Assembly, the Ennahda Movement won 89 of the 217 seats with 37 percent of the votes, making it, by far, the largest party in the legislature. Subsequently, it agreed with the two runners-up, the centre–left secular Congress for the Republic (CPR) and Ettakatol, to cooperate in the Assembly and to share the three highest positions in state. Accordingly, Ennahda supported the election of Ettakatol’s secretary-general Mustapha Ben Jaafar (b. 1940) as Speaker of Parliament and of CPR leader Moncef Marzouki (b. 1945) as interim president of the Republic. The latter, in exchange, immediately appointed Ennahda’s Secretary General Hamadi Jebali (b. 1949) as prime minister.

This victory was considered to be a natural outcome as Tunisians see Islam as defining feature of their personal and political identities but it also revealed the deep conservatism of the Tunisian society, despite modernism and secularism imposed by the previous regimes since independence.

The government was given a one-year mandate to enact a new constitution and new electoral laws, after which elections would be held. None of that happened. Instead, the Ennahda discourse changed. On November 13, 2011, the party’s general secretary Hamadi Jebali held a joint rally in Sousse together with a member of the Palestinian Hamas party. In a tone sharply in contrast to official statements of the party, Jebali referred to the occasion as ‘a divine moment in a new state, and in, hopefully, a 6^th caliphate’ and that ‘the liberation of Tunisia will, God willing, brings about the liberation of Jerusalem’ (Benoit-Lavelle, 2011). When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived for a visit to Tunisia in January 2012, people at the airport were heard shouting anti-Jewish slogans including ‘kill the Jews’ (Shirayanagi, 2012). Tunisian Jews said the Ennahda leadership was slow to condemn the shouting (ibid).

Dangerous Links

Although described as socially centrist with strong support for economic liberalism, the party wishes to revise the strong secular, Arab nationalist and socialist principles that dominate among the other parties, and instead allow Islam into public life. Ennhada was soon accused of ‘doublespeak’. It appears soft on television but in the mosques, it is completely different. In reality, Ennahda is fundamentally a conservative Islamist party. Throughout 2012, dozens of Salafist predicators from Egypt and Gulf Arab States were invited in Tunisia and treated as official guests of the government.

Some of Ennahda’s members of Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Committee) called for jihad. Ennahda members argued for ‘imposition of Sharia law’ stating ‘women in Tunisia would be “complementary” to men, not equal to them’, while considering a new constitution (Sullivan, 2013). Both demands were dropped under the pressure of the civil society. The most worrying aspect of Ennahda is its close ties with the Salafist Jihadist group Ansar Al Sharia whose leader, Seïfallah Ben Hassine, alias Abu Iyadh was a close associate of al-Qaeda leader Osama Ben Laden and one of the organizers of the assassination of Commandant Ahmed Shah Massud in Afghanistan on September 9, 2001. The lifting of social controls that followed the revolution has allowed a strong increase in public displays of religiosity. In the period following the revolution there were a series of violent incidents in which Salafist groups disrupted art exhibitions, attacked alcohol sellers, desecrated Sufi shrines, and occupied a university campus in a dispute about whether students could wear the niqab or Islamic veil in class. Despite all these worrying events, Rached Ghannouchi repeated several times that the Salafists were his children and that they reminded him his own youth. The suspicions of secular Tunisians were fanned when a secretly recorded video was made public in the autumn of 2012 that showed Ennahda’s leader Rached Ghannouchi, telling a group of leading Salafists that they needed to adopt a long-term approach ‘as secularists still control the economy, the media and the administration…The army and police are also not guaranteed’ (Amra, 2012).

But since the attack on the US embassy on September 14, 2012, Ennahda was clearly on a dangerous path. The current prime minister, Ali Laarayedh, who replaced Hamadi Jebali after the first serious crisis the ruling power had to face in the aftermath of the killing of Chokri Belaid on February 6, 2013, a prominent leader of the leftist People’s Front, was evasive when asked whether he considered Ansar al-Sharia to be a terrorist group. He said that it was proved that some of its leaders are associated with terrorism. Ennahda was also evasive about the League for the Protection of the Revolution (LPR), a group of young extremists considered as the armed wing of the Islamist movement and involved in numerous acts of violence including the killing of the local representative of the main opposition party Nida Tounès in the southern city of Tataouine in October 2012, Lotfi Naghed, who was beaten to death.

Political and Economic Crisis

Since July 25, 1956, Tunisia plunged into a deep political crisis. That day—which is the day of the installation of the Republic (1957)—a second opposition figure, Mohammed Brahmi, was gunned down by two men on a motorcycle—in a killing almost identical to Belaid’s—the country erupted. Thousands took to the streets to protest, and scores of members of the parliament withdrew in protest, forcing its suspension. They were demanding that the government be replaced by independent personalities that would lead the country to new elections. Many of the same complaints heard in Egypt—incompetence, a too-severe brand of Islam, political drift—were fuelling the turmoil. Tunisia is caught in an increasingly violent struggle between two competing views of Islam’s role in government and daily life. The crucial question that it faces is this: Can Islamist regimes thrive in Muslim countries with long traditions of social tolerance and openness? And can they control their more radical and violent supporters?

On August 27, 2013, the government declared Ansar al-Sharia a terrorist organization and started arresting its members. The government said the group, whose name means ‘Partisans of Sharia’, had been involved in the political assassinations and the killings of eight Tunisian soldiers hunting militants in the mountains near the Algerian border four days after Brahmi’s death. Ghannouchi admitted that they have a secret military wing that is involved in smuggling and storing weapons, and training people in their use. Opponents charge that Ennahda’s crackdown on Ansar al-Sharia is too little, too late, and may create more violence.

Both the Islamists and the opposition agree on the need for fresh elections once work on a long-delayed new constitution is completed, which is most like to take place before mid-June. But the opposition does not trust Ennahda to conduct free and fair elections.

The Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) trade union federation along with the business association The Tunisian Union for Industry, Business and Handicrafts (UTICA), the Tunisian League for Human Rights and the Bar Association is mediating between Ennhada and its critics and had prepared a road map for elections in 2014. The quartet has proposed the government step down and let a neutral interim cabinet prepare new elections.

‘We must find a way out of this crisis quickly because the country cannot wait. This could increase our economic difficulties’, stated Hussine Abassi, the UGTT secretary general (Amara & Heneghan, 2013). Indeed, people are disappointed with Ennahda’s management of the country. Critics say although it was only supposed to be a transitional cabinet, the Ennahda-led cabinet behaved as if it were a fully elected government and quickly filled many jobs in the national and local administration with cronies and loyal supporters.

Economic indicators have worsened: unemployment has climbed from 13 percent in 2010 to 17 percent in 2012, the latest figures available from the National Institute of Statistics (NIS). Inflation is at nearly 10 percent and the central bank’s hard currency reserves cover less than three months of imports. Across the country, standards of living are dire, with 2.5 million out of a population of 11 million living below a poverty line of $2 a day, according to NIS. ²

2014, the Crucial Year

Despite this bleak situation, some hope arose at the end of 2013. In mid-December, under the auspices of the quartet, a deal broke between Ennahda and the opposition. They agreed to put in place an independent government of technocrats until new elections in 2014. For the first time, Islamists have agreed, in the face of rising public anger, to step down from power gained at the ballot box. Mehdi Jomma, 51, an engineer who made his career with the French oil group Total, industry minister in the Laarayedh government (March 14, 2013–January 29, 2014), was chosen as prime minister. He had been given the task to constitute a restricted government of 15 ministers and to conduct Tunisia towards the final leg of its long transition.

Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly drafted a new constitution, which was adopted on January 26, 2014. The new constitution can be defined as a concentrated effort for consensus politics. Many commentators have termed it to be one of the most progressive and liberal constitutions in the Arab world. ³

Ennahda ultimately gave up many of its original goals for the constitution. There are no references to an Islamic state or the supremacy of the Sharia Law. But Rached Ghannouchi’s movement succeeded in injecting an Islamic flavor, stating in Article 1 that Islam is the religion of Tunisia and a preamble that recognizes Tunisian’s Arab–Muslim identity. Nevertheless, the country’s more liberal parties secured constitutional guarantees that Tunisia is a civil state based on citizenship, the will of the people and the primacy of law. The constitution enshrines universal freedoms and rights and calls for equality between men and women and parity for women in elected bodies (Article 45). Still, Tunisia’s laws do discriminate against women on issues such as in inheritance and child custody.

The search for consensus led to some contradictions in the text. The constitution guaranteed freedom of conscience, religion and expression but it also said that it is the state’s duty to ‘protect the sacred’, a sentence that reflects Islamists desire to prevent abuse of Islam.

It was partly the crisis in Egypt, including the overthrow in July 2013 of the Islamist government of president Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first popularly elected leader, that prompted Ennahda to make important concessions and seek consensus on the new Tunisian constitution. The birthplace of the Arab Spring is still struggling to defend its nascent democracy against political polarization and mass protests, but there is a strong hope that Tunisia will be the first Arab democratic country which reconciles Islam and modern values.