Contrasting Progress on Democracy in Tunisia and Egypt

by Alfred Stepan | The Immanent Frame



Reflecting on a recent trip to Tunisia and Egypt, and comparing these contexts to the more than twenty democratic transitions that he has observed and analyzed across the globe, political scientist Alfred Stepan asks, "What are the chances of successful democratic transitions in Tunisia and Egypt?" 

The first reality to appreciate is that, despite worries about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy, over 500 million Muslims live in Muslim majority countries that are commonly classified as democracies: Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Senegal, Mali and Albania. But, for almost forty years, not a single Arab majority country has been classified as a democracy. Thus, if Arab-majority Egypt and Tunisia become democracies, it would thus be of immense importance for the Arab world and, indeed, for world affairs.

I believe Tunisia's chances of becoming a democracy before the year ends are surprisingly good. This is for six, largely political, reasons. Most importantly, the military is not complicating the transition to democracy. Tunisia not only has a small military of only about 36,000 men, but since independence, in 1956, the country has been led by two party-based non-democratic leaders who strove to keep the military out of politics.

Tunisia's interim government has announced that elections for a Constituent Assembly will be held on July 24, 2011, and, crucially, that as soon as the votes are counted, it will step down.

The newly elected Constituent Assembly will, as in the classic democratic transitions of Spain and India, immediately have the responsibility of forming the government.  The Constituent Assembly will be free to choose a presidential, semi-presidential, or a parliamentary system. A consensus is emerging among political leaders to choose the same system for which the ten post-communist countries that have been admitted to the European Union opted, parliamentarianism.

Finally, Rachid Ghannouchi, who leads the largest Islamic-based political party, Al Nahda, went out of his way to tell me that he has signed an agreement with some secular parties that he will not try to change Tunisia's women-friendly family code, the best in the Arab world. In the new democratic environment, while many party leaders do not fully trust Ghannouchi, they think the political costs to Al Nahda of trying to impose an Islamic state would be too great to risk. They also increasingly think the most democratically effective policy of secular parties toward Al Nahda is accommodation, not exclusion.

Democratization in Egypt in the long term is probable, but it does not share the especially favorable conditions that we find in Tunisia. One of the biggest differences between the two countries is that every president of Egypt since 1952 has been a military officer. Post-Mubarak, the interim government, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is led by eighteen generals.

In SCAF's March 30, 2011, Constitutional Declaration it became absolutely clear that, unlike Tunisia, the parliament to be elected in September 2011 will not form a government. Articles 56 and 61 stipulate that SCAF will retain a broad range of executive powers until a president is elected. Instead of the Parliament itself acting as the sovereign body to write a constitution, Article 60 mandates that the parliament is to "elect a 100-member constituent assembly." The big questions now are how many non-elected outside experts will in fact be in this "constituent assembly," and how they will actually arrive there.   
 

From CSID (Center for the Study of Islam and Development)
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