BASKING IN warm autumnal sunshine, its outdoor café tables brimming with customers and the street itself abuzz with the sounds of everyday life – car horns, shop-floor music, friends catching up – the elegant Avenue Bourguiba of Tunisia’s capital city could easily pass for a boulevard on on the other side of the Mediterranean.
It wouldn’t have looked that different a year ago. But watch closely, and see how much has changed. After decades spent reflexively looking over their shoulder to see whether anyone was in earshot before broaching politics, people now want to talk – openly, loudly – of little else.
The window of the Librairie al-Kitab gives pride of place to the memoirs of young revolutionaries and comics that gleefully mock Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s dictator for 23 years – until he succumbed to weeks of popular protests and boarded a one-way flight to Saudi Arabia in January.
The walls of public buildings are plastered not with Ben Ali’s portrait but with posters showing the faces of some of the thousands of candidates who will contest the country’s first free elections this Sunday. They’re nearly all first-time candidates; their electorate is comprised largely of first-time voters.
“I’m 56 years old and I’ve never voted in my life. Neither has my wife or two daughters,” says Kamel Ferchichi as he leaves the mosque on Avenue de la Liberté. “I’d say they voted for me.”
Under the rigged elections of the Ben Ali regime, the outcome was never in doubt. But whereas the political landscape was once impossibly narrow, it’s now dizzyingly wide.
Some 7.3 million potential voters will have the opportunity to choose from more than a hundred party lists, a spectrum that spans communists, liberals, pan-Arabists and Islamists. More than 11,000 candidates will be whittled down to 217 elected members of a constituent assembly, which will appoint a caretaker government and oversee the drafting of a new constitution.
The fraught tension of those wintry days in January – and the menacing silence that hung over much of the city for days after Ben Ali was deposed – seem a distant memory, but Tunis is still a long way from any meaningful sense of normality. In many ways, the city is still in suspense, its future to play for.
Behind stacked coils of barbed wire, four tanks and as many army jeeps remain parked outside the imposing interior ministry, the nerve centre of what was until recently one of the most extensive police states in the Arab world.
It was here that thousands of people gathered to chant in a symbolic show of strength against the regime on January 14th, sealing Ben Ali’s fate and setting off a regional upheaval, the Arab Spring, that has turned global politics on its head.
Not everyone has bought into the elections, however. Apathy is a big concern, particularly in rural areas, with only about half the country’s eligible voters having registered so far.
Some influential voices have even called for a boycott, complaining that little has really changed since January.
On the street, people are worried that something could go wrong, or that violence might ensue.
Kamel Ferchichi says he hasn’t made up his mind on how he will vote, but above all he is looking for a party that’s “clean”, that “won’t steal”. “The election is very important to me, though if I’m honest I’m a little worried that something could go wrong.”
Tensions have risen in the build-up to the election and many shopkeepers plan to close their doors over the weekend in case of trouble. In the past week, violent protests by Salafists were followed by a pro-secularist march attended by 3,000 people.
Those rival demonstrations go to the heart of one of the big questions to be answered next weekend. Will the new regime bring a strengthening of Tunisia’s social liberalism, which includes some of the strongest women’s rights in the region? Or would success for the once-suppressed Islamist party Ennahda – tipped by some to become the biggest political group in the country – mean a gradual rolling back of this relatively secular state?
Mounira Saafi and Manel Dhimi, 20-year-old IT students walking arm in arm along Avenue Bourguiba, are both certain they’ll vote, but their views on Ennahda differ sharply. Saafi, who wears the hijab, will vote for them, but Dhimi is wary.
“I read their literature, and I like them. They’re an Islamic party, and they’re for liberty,” says Saafi. “Yesterday I read what they say on women’s rights. They’re in favour, and I know a lot of women who don’t wear the veil who are supporting them.”
Her friend Dhimi isn’t one of them; she shakes her head as Saafi speaks.
“I’m afraid they’ll cut back on women’s rights. They start from the principle that women should be back in the home.
“I’m still trying to choose a party. But it’s important, because we’re giving someone the power to direct our lives.”
