Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label ennahda

Tunisia: Ten years after the ‘revolution’ the social and economic issues that provoked it remain unaddressed.

From an old article I have selected some points that are still relevant today after 10 years of the beginning of the Tunisian ‘revolution’. In fact, the situation today is worse than in 2014. None of the social aspirations that sparked its December 2010 uprising have been fulfilled. Was bringing the Islamists into the political fold a gamble that paid off? Yes for those who maintained that their coming to power would not be irreversible. Yes also for their enemies, who predicted that once they were in power, they would reveal their obsession with identity and religion, and the limitations of their economic and social policy. “With [the Islamists] we are pre-Adam Smith and David Ricardo,” Hamma Hammami, spokesman for the leftwing Popular Front, told me. ‘The Muslim Brothers’ political economy is a rent-based economy; it’s about parallel trade. It isn’t about production, or wealth creation; it isn’t about agriculture, industry or infrastructure; and it isn’t about reorganising education

“Arab Spring”

The author here does not consider the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Ennahda in Tunisia, for instance, part of the counter-revolution–socially and economically. He does not mention how and why they got support from the major imperialist powers, either. It is also a liberal journalistic piece that does not mention the class character of the Islamist parties even once. The end of political Islam as we know it
Tunisia "Protests in  Kasserine  last year and in  Kef and Tataouine  last month — driven by socioeconomic marginalization in Tunisia’s long-suffering interior — underscore that no post-revolutionary government has substantially mitigated grievances that provoked Tunisia’s 2011 revolution. Upcoming local elections will gauge the cost of Ennahda’s strategy. The stakes are high, and socioeconomic conditions worsening. The Tunisian government’s ability to deliver on revolutionary promises nationally and locally carries with it the fate of the Arab world’s best democratic experiment." Why do Tunisia's Islamists support an unpopular law