Tunisia-The Art Of Listening

TUNISIA

The Art of Listening

The Tunisian presidential election is heating up.

That’s important because voters are deciding more than who will lead the Mediterranean country when they go to the polls on Sunday, Al Jazeera wrote.

The future of democracy in the Arab world is also at stake.

“The upcoming presidential election presents a test for the willingness of political actors to once again accept an electoral process that none of them can entirely control or predict,” wrote scholars Max Gallien and Isabelle Werenfels in an op-ed in the Washington Post.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in late 2010 when people took to the streets in protests that eventually ended the corrupt, harsh rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. That freedom movement spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

The Arab Spring failed to live up to many of its promises. Still, democracy took root in Tunisia. In 2014, the country held its first free and fair democratic polls since independence from France in the 1950s, putting President Beji Caid Essebsi into office.

But Essebsi passed away in July, triggering a political reordering.

Essebsi, 92, had already announced that he would not run again in elections previously scheduled for November. But the Tunisian constitution states that voters must elect a new president 90 days after the office becomes vacant so officials moved the vote up to Sept. 15.

Coincidentally, parliamentary elections were already scheduled for October. Suddenly, the presidential elections would precede the parliamentary ones, potentially giving legislative candidates in the president’s party a big leg up on competitors, explained the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Also, in his last days, Essebsi refused to sign a law that would have prohibited controversial but popular presidential candidates from running if they received money from charities, NGOs or foreign organizations.

The measure was clearly meant to ban media magnate Nabil Karoui from running, Reuters reported. Karoui is now sitting in jail on charges of money laundering and tax evasion, but because the law was never enacted, he’s still eligible to run for president.

Twenty-five other candidates are also running, including an Islamist with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood – the now-toppled Islamist group that rose to power in Egypt during the Arab Spring – and openly gay candidates, France 24 reported.

They’re addressing the calls of Tunisians for a better economy, progress against corruption and other improvements, wrote Chatham House, a British think tank.

Those demands aren’t new. But at least now the people in power are listening. Because they have to.