Tunisian local elections May 2018: Ehnahda victory; first female Mayor of Tunis

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Thought we should have a little thread for the historic first free elections of post-revolutionary Tunisia. The municipal elections have been put-off endlessly amidst various bits of turmoil and economic malaise; but they are nonetheless an important step (especially in a country that has been historically extremely centralised). A lot of common complaints Tunisians have with their national government is the parties are focused on national issues of identity, while the things that really tick Tunisians off (e.g. corrupt and power-hungry local magistrates - you may remember an agressive inspector was the catalyst for the immolation Mohamed Bouazizi) have gone) have gone largely unreformed.

Both of the major parties, the secular-nationalist Nidaa Tounes (Call of Tunisia) and Islamist Ennahda (Renaissance) have had a fairly tumultuous few years as feuding partners by necessity, and it's been interesting to see them wear each other's clothes (literally). Ennahda, increasingly aware of the regional unpoularity of MB etc., has divorced itself from its proselytisation wing and carefully ensured that its lists had gender parity, foregrounding non-hijabi women (including incoming Mayor of Tunis Souad Abderrahim). They also managed to recruit non-Muslim canididates to their lists, including one of the few Jews living in Tunisia. Nidaa Tounes aware that fighting for Bourguibism is a bit of a lost cuase nowadays, and themselves highlighted that they had pious hijabis etc.  on their lists.

Anyway the official results are out tomorrow, but some preliminary ones are as follows ( a lot of contradictary results are out there, so these might be wrong)

Independent LIsts 32.2%
Ennahda gaining 27.5%
Nidaa Tounes 22.5%,
Popular Front 5.3%
Democratic Current 4.9%.

(Popular Front is a leftist formation led by an charismatic ex-Hoxhaist, Democratic Current (Elyar) is one of the succesor groups to Ennahda's liberal-left junior ally in the Troika years, Congress of the People. Other parties that apparantly are in  the mix are secular Machrou Tounes and  Moncef Marzouki's Al-Irada)

Turnout was of a rather disappointing, but not disastrous 33.7%. Tunisia continues to be mired in low wage growth, inflation, austerity, a lack of investor confidence and is beset with Islamist agitation.

[Foucaulf]

Some of you may remember me from the last Tunisia thread on their presidential elections, back in 2014. I clearly dropped the ball on this race due to trouble with finals, but with results trickling in I can get into a deep dive again.

Electoral System: As of the latest electoral law, Tunisia is divided into 350 cities. Each city will elect a municipal council under proportional representation. I think there is a 3% threshold and seats are allocated using D'Hondt system (similar to the 2014 legislative elections, but that had a higher threshold).

Similar to French legislation, the number of seats in the council is scaled according to city size. For example, Tunis will have 62 councillors and the smallest cities have 12.

Flavor text: It's a fact that Tunisian government in the last few years has been sclerotic. Laws take forever to pass, the government is implementing austerity measures following resorting to an IMF credit line, and these local elections are taking place without ratification of the law codifying said local authorities' powers. In an ideal world, these local elections would put serious pressure on the remnants of Ben Ali's domestic security apparatus, whose powers have encroached once more following the state of emergency enacted in 2015. If that does not occur, I'm not surprised people are disappointed.

These elections themselves have been delayed for close to a year and a half now, due to an electoral law not being passed and then the national elections commission lacked leadership. The head of the commission, the ISIE, has admitted irregularities are possible though unsure how much there really is.

It's not really that helpful to frame the race as "Ennahda gaining:" the Tunisian president's party itself, Nidaa Tounes, has fractured and I would imagine they ran a hodgepodge of candidates in various cities. Something that I'll try to do as results trickle in is look at specific cities and look at swings between 2014 and now. Obviously I'll check off Tunis, but there's also the industrial city of Sfax; the coastal cities from Sousse going up to the Cap-Bon peninsula; as well as the interior city of Kasserine, the "hotbed of revolution."

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I was hoping you'd show up.

I think more than Ennahda gaining, the important thing is they haven't fractured and the brand name is stiill viable. I think it's very interesting that despite seemingly capitulating on everything, they haven't leaked partisans to more hardcore factions.

What's the deal with Machrou Tounes btw?

[Foucaulf]

First things first, I found a crowdsourced map of all but one Tunisian municipality's results, so I'll refer to results here from now on.


To start on answering some questions, I should note that the main tenor of Tunisian politics since 2014 has been the grand coalition between Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes. The coalition has survived for three years now despite acrimony and finger-pointing, I think partly because both parties think it's better to have an organized opponent in a bipartisan system to unify their base and strengthen party leadership.

On the Ennahda side, the party's agreement in 2014 to approve a constitution lacking Islamist language was a turn that hasn't really waned (that turn was also motivated by the Egyptian Coup, and Ennahda's perpetual fear of being persecuted by the military/state security apparatus.) It was a big deal in 2016 when Rachid Ghannouchi, the party's "eternal president" of sorts, went all-out and said Ennahda is not an Islamist party as it is a "Muslim Democracy" party.

This reflects Ennahda's secondary role as a regional interests party - representing southern, non-coastal Tunisia - as well as a post-2014 role where they say they're the social justice, anti-austerity force in the coalition. It is pretty likely that Ghannouchi himself will run for President in 2019, a victory in which would hand an executive presidency to someone not in the Bourguiba-Ben Ali authoritarian secular tradition for the first time.

Of course the turnout this election is pretty miserable, with particular lack of interest among younger Tunisians. The people who did turn out for Ennahda are gonna be older Tunisians who want to protect their democracy from a return to the old days.

The Nidaa Tounes side is a lot weirder, and whose internal disputes have been much more public. At the end of the day Nidaa was founded as a personalist party behind Beji Caid Essebsi. Right after the election, the disparate coalition of Tunisians opposing Islamism was unnerved by two things: the grand coalition as well as concentration of party leadership behind Essebsi's son:

- The latter was the leadership dispute which caused co-founder Mohsen Marzouk to take 20 dissident Nidaa MPs with him, and eventually form "Machrouu Tounes." Both this party and the economic liberal party Afek Tounes sell themselves as less authoritarian versions of Nidaa but appealing to the same base (I think?) In some cities, Machrouu and Afek ran together on a "Civil Union" list.

- The former, as I said, has led to a government that can't really get much done. This opens up room for anti-establishment, non-Islamist parties who criticize the political elite and promoting a totally different kind of politics. Back in 2014 this role was taken up by the communist party leader Hamma Hammami, leading the "Popular Front." However now there's a two way between the Popular Front and the Democratic Current, the party of former dissident Mohamed Abbou which united anti-establishment liberals calling for prosecution of corruption among the Tunisian elite.

Therefore, there are at least four parties jockeying for voters that led Nidaa and Essebsi to victory in 2014. On top of that, outside of the South and Kassarine Governorate, these "independent lists" would be staffed by former members of the RCD, Ben Ali's party. The high number of independent lists in the Mahdia Governorate, which was very pro-Nidaa in 2014, signals this.

This leads to some weird arithmetic in Tunisia's biggest cities. According to the result I linked, Ennahda has 21/60 seats in Tunis proper. The Popular Front will never ally with them, and the Democratic Current and the Civil Union list can't cave and disappoint their base. This means that Ennahda will start by making an agreement with Nidaa Tounes to support Ennahda's mayor candidate, Abderrahim.

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So much good news. Competitive free two-party elections with pluralism and rule of law make me wanna jump for joy (or nut, either one ^^).

[Foucaulf]

Here are some more maps from Nabil Majoul/Data4Tunisia's crowdsourced elections project. The first is a share of vote per party for each municipality - and there are a lot of parties.

The second is a map of which municipalities can be governed with just Nidaa, Ennahda or the "NiNa" national coalition:

https://twitter.com/Nabil_majoul/status/995628534478655488

Last post I mentioned that Tunis can be governed by a Nidaa-Nahda coalition, and indeed the same can be said for most of metro Tunis where the partisan lines are better drawn. But there are big areas of the country where that's not the case! We can also consult this plot of Nidaa-Nahda seat share within each of Tunisia's 24 governorates:



The governorates to the right can be classified into two groups:

- The ancestrally Bourguibist/ancien regime coast: Nebeul, Sousse, Monastir (Bourguiba's birthplace). These places went overwhelmingly for Nidaa Tounes in 2014 as an anti-Nahda vote, but this time many independent lists made up of ex-RCD types fragmented the vote there.

- The interior: Kebili, Kasserine-Zaghouan. This Economist article pinpoints the problem: austerity measures and infighting in the central government means these areas still have not received infrastructure improvements or a better safety net. Why the hell would they want to vote for the governing parties when some other local politicians are promising to fight the centre (if they're more honest) or promising to cover the town with free wifi (if they're corrupt?)

This ties into the discussion last post of secular alternatives to Nidaa Tounes. Among them, the clear rising force is certainly the Democratic Current ("Attayar"): eyeballing it, in the municipalities they contested they got 7-15% of the vote easily, noting they are the third-largest party in Tunis proper and the second-largest in Sfax.

The problem is Attayar made a large impact only in the urban areas they contested (metro Tunis and Sfax). They *could* leapfrog Nidaa as the main secular party in 2019, but this requires breaking through as well in the interior. This is made harder if the interior is not voting in bloc with a few opposition parties but rather elevating independent politicians who are willing to cut deals with the governing parties.

The Popular Front would've loved to rally Tunisians in the interior, but the results do not suggest this. While Hammami made note again by organizing youth protests against the government in early 2018, they are not running up margins in the major cities and are not breaking out much outside of Siliana and Gafsa governorates (Hammami's home region and the home of Tunisia's old phosphate mines respectively). That doesn't mean they're out for the count, but the momentum is not on their side.


In terms of actual news, there's some serious shadowplay going on in the Tunis municipal race, as no less than four candidates are vying for the mayoralty: Abderradim, the Ennahda candidate, but also competitors from Nidaa, Attayar and Popular Front. A comment from a Nidaa spokesperson that Tunis cannot elect a woman who cannot attend certain Islamic ceremonies has gone viral.

[Foucaulf]

My earlier posts kinda leapt right into the weeds without giving a summary of what the hell has gone on in Tunisia, so in a feat of non-chronological storytelling let's start from the beginning!


Tunisian politics in ~900 words
(for the long version, consider this old treatise of mine)

System of government: Once a republican dictatorship in practice, Tunisia's successful 2011 revolution resulted in a semi-presidential system, constitutionally enshrined in 2014. The President is the head of state, popularly elected. The Prime Minister is the head of government, responsible to the Tunisian parliament. Unlike the French semi-presidential system that gives substantial formal power and political clout to the President, Tunisia's constitution and weak party system flips the formula around.

History: Modern Tunisia, since its independence in 1957, has been defined by national norms first enforced nationwide by the first President, Habib Bourguiba. The norms are

• Modernism: Tunisians are Muslims but civil society must be secular, free of public pronunciation of religion.
• Bureaucracy: The central state should be the ultimate authority. Many Tunisians have prospered ascending the civil service, and the military mostly abides and stays out of politics.
• Regional inequality: Material wealth from Tunisia's South and Interior were used to continue improving colonial investments on the Eastern coast. Tensions between neglected Tunisians away from the coast against the centre define Tunisian politics today.

Bourguiba's senility and economic mismanagement led to a 1987 coup by a colonel, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. When Islamists repressed by Bourguiba, led by Rachid Ghannouchi, reemerged, Ben Ali cut off political liberalization and continued the repression. For over two decades Ben Ali would rule through his political party, his domestic security apparatus and cozy up with Western politicians and investors.

Mass protests in 2011, sparked by a fruit vendor's self-immolation, led to Ben Ali fleeing the country and an upheaval in national politics. Ben Ali's RCD party was banned and replaced in government by Ghannouchi's Ennahda movement, in coalition with other opposition figures from the Ben Ali years. In the next three years, Ennahda both continued softening its Islamist campaign agenda while also chastised by civil society for failing to combat domestic terrorism and finalizing a secular Constitution.

Four historically pivotal and renewed organizations, the National Dialogue Quartet, mediated a new Constitution agreeable to Ennahda and anti-Islamists organized under Bourguiba-era high official Beji Caid Essebsi. This led to Essebsi's victory in the 2014 Presidential election, hampered by a parliamentary election under PR that led to a fractured legislature.

In either a sign of detente or oligarchical collusion (choose your adventure), Essebsi's Nidaa Tounes conceded to partnering with Ennahda in a 4-party grand coalition. The government has walked a tight line in maintaining a level of technocratic neutrality, trying to get political reform laws passed, dealing with a post-revolution economic slump and evoking the specter of Islamist terrorism.

None of those four things have been done well. Which brings us to today: national elections are next year, Tunisians of all stripes are fed up and a direction for the future is sorely needed.


Parties and politicians: There are a lot.

Ennahda: The most organized and most controversial party in Tunisia. Historically the home of Islamists and Southern Tunisians, the party has put aside Sharia for what Ghannouchi now calls "Muslim Democracy." Its efforts to recruit from younger generations and women are tarnished by their lukewarm governance record.

Nidaa Tounes: Anti-Ennahda big tent with Essebsi as its founder. Since 2014 the party has continued to splinter, lacking avenues to express internal dissent. Its continued relevance depends on retaining the Presidency and convincing old regime supporters it is the best organized secular party. Also controls the Government with Prime Minister Youssef Chahed, though Chahed's independence from Essebsi is debated.

The other secular parties: Economic liberal/reformist party Afek Tounes, Nidaa splinter Machrouu Tounes, various parties in the "Destourian" tradition run by ex-RCD types. None of them are doing so hot outside of certain fiefdoms on the coast.

The dissident parties: The communist Popular Front led by former political prisoner Hamma Hammami and the liberal, anti-corruption Democratic Current. Many parties in this vein formed after 2011 have died out (notable the secular parties allied with Ennahda in the 2011-4 "Troika"). Never rule out an independent politician or a segment of civil society starting their own.

The oligarch parties: Some of them used to have clout (Hechmi Hamdi's party in 2011, Slim Riahi's party in 2014), not so much anymore; easier to build up a local fiefdom and get Nidaa Tounes's support, it's not as if there are many business magnates from the South anyways.

Key political issues:

• IMF loans and resulting austerity measures continue to weigh on Tunisia's economy, with inflation rising and the interior/south's potential remain unrealized. The vast majority of Tunisians care most about how to have equitable growth for once.
• What can the government do to dismantle the rest of Ben Ali's security apparatus and prosecute corrupt politicians/businessmen?
• Continued identity politics issues: Can Tunis's middle class trust an "Islamist" in charge? Can the South handle cooperating with Bourguiba admirers much longer?
• Local regulations: who can shut down a factory polluting a city's waters? How to make the state more responsive to citizens' concerns? Attempts to modernize and decentralize the Tunisian state have been mired in confusion.
• National security: an informal economy forms around smuggling across the Tunisia-Libya border, while human smuggling from Tunisia to Europe continues. The infamous exodus of Tunisian youth to ISIS is now a problem of taking them back. "Securing the border" is not as urgent as in the past, but the fear still rings.