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| Tunisia
Since winning independence from French colonial rule in 1956, Tunisia has been ruled by strongmen who have resisted pressure for greater democracy, despite their relatively progressive social policies.
In 1987, former military officer Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, then prime minister, ousted self-declared “president-for-life” Habib Bourguiba in a “constitutional coup.” Ben Ali has kept the presidency ever since, through elections of dubious fairness. In 2004, he had the constitution revised so as to stand for a fourth term. His contemporaneous promises to open the political system are thus far unfulfilled.
The parliament exercises virtually no influence on government decisions, and human rights and pro-democracy activists experience regular police harassment. Almost all media outlets are state-owned and the Internet is closely monitored by security services greatly beefed up under Ben Ali. Early in Ben Ali’s tenure, the state aimed its repressive measures primarily at the Islamist al-Nahda party, but the Islamists now live mostly in exile.
Women’s rights have more legal protections in Tunisia than anywhere else in the Arab world. In 1956, Bourguiba instituted a personal status code guaranteeing Tunisian women rights in divorce, child custody and inheritance, as well as the right to work and become educated. Under Ben Ali, political parties were required to observe the principle of equality between the sexes, and Tunisian women were allowed to pass their nationality on to their children (a right enjoyed in no other Arab country except post-Saddam Iraq). But women’s actual status has lagged behind the law due to conservative social mores and, more recently, increased unemployment as Tunisia undergoes economic liberalization.
Tunisia receives plaudits from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for carrying out successive structural adjustment programs reducing the role of the state in the economy. As in other countries, these programs concentrated wealth at the top, cost people jobs and raised prices on staples, sparking some of the region’s first “IMF riots” in the mid-1980s and increasing emigration to Europe. If the initial pain of adjustment has passed, on the political level, the state seems to be growing more authoritarian, not less.
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