As left-wing politician Moncef Marzouki is named new Tunisian president in a power-sharing deal with the Islamist Al-Nahda Party, what might the future hold from this perhaps unlikely combination, asks David Tresilian in Paris The announcement last week that Moncef Marzouki, a French-trained physician and leader of the left-wing Congress for the Republic Party, had been offered the post of president in Tunisia's transitional government will have been welcome to many observers of the country, who have expressed concerns that negotiations on the new Tunisian government might have reached deadlock after the October elections. According to a deal announced last Thursday, Marzouki, a former head of the Tunisian League for Human Rights who returned to Tunisia from France following the ousting of former president Zein Al-Abidine bin Ali, will become the country's transitional president while a new constitution is drawn up by the constituent assembly before further elections next year. The Congress for the Republic Party, founded by Marzouki in 2001 and legalised in Tunisia following Bin Ali's flight in January, won 29 seats in the elections to the new assembly, down one from the 30 originally announced. It is the second-largest bloc in the assembly after the Islamist Al-Nahda Party, which in the revised results won 89 seats out of a total of 217. Under last week's deal, Al-Nahda Secretary-General Hamadi Jebali becomes the country's new prime minister, and Mustafa bin Jaafar, head of the left-wing Ettakatol Party, the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties, which won 20 seats in the elections, becomes president of the assembly. Marzouki's nomination will be particularly welcome to those wanting to see a secularist counterweight as head of state to the Islamist Jebali's nomination as the country's prime minister. The latter replaces interim prime minister Beji Caid Essebsi as head of government, Caid Essebsi having taken over the post following Bin Ali's ousting in the wake of the popular uprising in January. Marzouki is well known in both France and Tunisia for his opposition to the former Bin Ali regime, having served as both vice-president and president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights in the 1980s and standing in the country's 1994 presidential elections against Bin Ali, in order to "denounce the electoral masquerade" operated by the then ruling regime. He was imprisoned for four months between March and July 1994, fired from his job as a professor of medicine at the University of Sousse, and forced into exile in 2001. In a book published in French in 2004, Marzouki warned against what he called the "Arab malaise", Arab societies being caught "between dictatorship and religious fundamentalism" and having limited prospects for democratic transformation, he said. Now that Marzouki, formerly a prominent opponent of the Tunisian regime, is poised to become the country's head of state, attention has turned to what may be expected of him. Marzouki, reputedly a confirmed leftist, secularist, francophone and defender of human rights, will be working closely with the Islamist Al-Nahda Party in governing Tunisia during the country's transitional phase and in deciding on its new constitution. Following the relaxation of the censorship that took place in Tunisia in the wake of the January Revolution, Marzouki's books have been rushed out in locally produced editions and given pride of place in the country's bookstores. Among them is his most recent, Dictateurs en sursis, une voie démocratique pour le monde arabe (Dictators on Notice: a Democratic Path for the Arab World), published in Paris in 2009 and now republished in Tunisia for Tunisian readers. In this book, a collection of interviews with French academic Vincent Geisser, Marzouki touches on many issues likely to interest Tunisian and Arab readers over the months to come, among them the end of dictatorship and transition to democracy in the Arab world, the role of Political Islam in Arab countries, the Arab-Muslim character of Tunisia and North African societies, and the place of religion in the Arab private and public spheres, as well as the relationship of the Arab Maghreb countries to their European and other neighbours. While Marzouki's larger thesis -- that dictatorship and religious fundamentalism have tended to go together in the Arab world -- may not auger well for the new Tunisian president's relationship with the Islamist Al-Nahda Party, Marzouki also argues that "the Islamists are part of the political spectrum in the Arab world�ê� Though I may fight against them in terms of ideas, I will always demand that they be included in the political system." Like for Egyptian author Alaa El-Aswani, whose newspaper columns end with the words "democracy is the solution," for Marzouki the ills of the Arab world can be traced back to the absence of democracy and an "occupation from within" by authoritarian regimes that have "acted like a plague with visible consequences on the physical and mental health of Arab populations." Dictatorships such as the Bin Ali regime in Tunisia, Marzouki writes, caused "citizens of the Arab world to spend most of their time trying to protect themselves [from the attentions of the regime], exactly as one might seek to protect oneself from a shameful or contagious illness." "A strategy of passive resistance characterised, and still characterises, the relationship of ordinary citizens to the regime, with all the avoidance mechanisms, absenteeism, retreat to the family sphere and return to a certain form of religiosity" that go with it, together with a disengagement from the official political process and wider social stagnation. The only solution to these ills, Marzouki argues, is genuine democratic participation. "Democratic politicians have long had difficulty explaining to ordinary people that even if they try to avoid politics, politics nevertheless affects them. Dictatorship in the Arab world has managed to create a generalised sense of apathy in the population, with the regimes not having any popular support but managing to work nonetheless as a result of the apathy of their populations." "Arab citizens have a traumatic relationship to [authority and] the police," he writes. "When the Arabs have the same relationship to a policeman that they have to a postman, they will definitely have been cured of the effects of dictatorship." Early on in his book, Marzouki traces the dictatorship in Tunisia back to Habib Bourguiba, leader of the Neo-Destour independence movement against French colonial rule and the country's first president. Bourguiba, Marzouki writes, was obsessed with security from the start of his rule, sacrificing meaningful popular participation to exaggerated goals for development. Marzouki's father, a supporter of Salah Bin Youssef, Bourguiba's main rival in the Neo-Destour, fled the country, while Bin Youssef himself was assassinated by Tunisian agents in Paris in the early 1960s. As writers in the Tunisian blogosphere have been pointing out this week, Marzouki thus has a double pedigree as an opponent of the Tunisian regime, having been both imprisoned by Bin Ali and having had a father forced to flee the country by Bourguiba. Yet, whatever Marzouki's pedigree as a democrat, human-rights activist and opponent of dictatorship in the Arab world, it is his views on Political Islam that are now perhaps most exercising commentators. According to comments made in Dictateurs en sursis, the growth in the influence of Islamism in Arab societies has been a result of dictatorship, "a form of passive resistance to the state�ê� that expresses more a state of despair about the possibility of change than change itself." "Arab citizens have been distancing themselves from politics and taking refuge in mosques as an attempt to find a way of saving themselves through morality and values while leaving the regimes intact," he writes. Islamism in the Arab world was never a real challenge to the dictatorships in Tunisia or elsewhere, since "either it implied a taking refuge in the private sphere," leaving the public sphere untouched, or it "legitimated policies of repression by justifying the struggle against terrorism." "In 1956, Bourguiba introduced a personal status law that swept away the heritage of the prestigious Islamic Zitouna University in Tunis, the equivalent of Al-Azhar in Cairo or Al-Qaraouine in Fez. Tunisia seemed to be on the way to "Turkish-style" secularisation, but now we seem to be seeing the resurgence of an ancient phenomenon after its disappearance for several decades." "If democratic elections lead us to live under an Islamist government, then we should accept that. It would be a much better choice than to try to extend the lifespan of corrupt dictatorships�ê� However, we must also firmly oppose any attempt to call into question the principle of the equality of the sexes," Marzouki writes, introduced into Tunisian law by Bourguiba. For all his criticisms of the Arab world's former dictators in Dictateurs in sursis, it is perhaps the European and other countries that supported the dictatorships that receive Marzouki's greatest scorn. For many years, European countries were happy to support such regimes, he says, giving the impression that "barbaric systems could be improved by reforms carried out from within." "If one takes the Tunisian case, the Bin Ali regime created "home-made parties" designed to reflect different political tendencies in the country. These included socialists, Arab nationalists, liberals and even a home-made ecology party. The idea was to organise the opposition in order to set up a genuine-seeming, but false, democratic parliament. We saw the same thing happen in Morocco, Egypt, and to a certain extent also in Algeria." However, in supporting this form of "dictatorial pluralism," Western countries, Marzouki says, were only contributing to the growth of clandestine emigration and terrorism, exactly the phenomena they were most concerned to stop. "The first dictators in the Arab world -- Nasser, Bourguiba, Boumediene and so on -- at least brought a measure of social justice through redistribution programmes based on the idea of development. The second-generation dictators -- Bin Ali, Mubarak and Al-Assad -- bring neither justice nor liberty. For this reason, they are dead men walking. The West must realise that in supporting these dictatorial regimes they are working with corpses." Dictateurs en sursis, published in Tunisia earlier this year after appearing in France two years ago, reveals the new Tunisian president to be an intellectual and a democrat, about as far away as it is possible to be from his predecessor, the former intelligence officer Zein Al-Abidine bin Ali. With Tunisia's economy still struggling after the events earlier this year and the elections revealing little consensus on the direction the country should take, Marzouki will need all his powers of persuasion and skills at compromise as the head of Tunisia's first genuinely democratically elected government.
