Tunisian electoral officials confirmed the Islamist Ennahda party as winner of the North African country’s election, setting it up to form the first Islamist-led government in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings. The Ennahda party got to work Friday on forming a coalition government after winning a strong mandate in the Arab Spring’s first elections.
But the election, which has so far confounded predictions it would tip the country into crisis, turned violent when protesters angry their fourth-placed party was eliminated from the poll set fire to the mayor’s office in a provincial town. Ennahda has tried to reassure secularists nervous about the prospect of Islamist rule in one of the Arab world’s most liberal countries by saying it will respect women’s rights and not try to impose a Muslim moral code on society.
The Islamists won power 10 months after Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable seller in the town of Sidi Bouzid, set fire to himself in an act of protest that led to the fall of Tunisia’s leader and inspired uprisings in Egypt and Libya. “We will continue this revolution to realise its aims of a Tunisia that is free, independent, developing and prosperous in which the rights of God, the Prophet, women, men, the religious and the non-religious are assured because Tunisia is for everyone,” Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi, a soft-spoken Islamic scholar who spent 22 years in exile in Britain, told a crowd of cheering supporters.
Announcing the results, election commission members said Ennahda had won 90 seats in the 217-seat assembly, which will draft a new constitution, form an interim government and schedule new elections, probably for early 2013. The Islamists’ nearest rival, the secularist Congress for the Republic, won 30 seats, the commission members told a packed hall in the capital, ending a four-day wait since Sunday’s poll for the painstaking count to be completed.
ISLAMIST-LED GOVERNMENT: Ennahda, banned before January’s revolution, fell short of an absolute majority in the new assembly. It is expected to broker a coalition with two of the secularist runners-up and, with them, form a government. Tunisia’s complex election system, which replaced the rigged, one-horse races conducted before the revolution, made it impossible for any one party to win a majority of assembly seats.
Ennahda lies at the moderate and liberal end of the spectrum of Islamist parties in the Middle East. Ghannouchi models his approach on the moderate stance of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. The party’s victory is the first for Islamists since the Hamas faction won an election in the Palestinian Territories seven years ago. Ghannouchi and his party officials have issued a carefully-choreographed series of announcements designed to reassure sceptics that there is no need to fear an Islamist government.
They have said there will be no ban on foreign tourists – a vital source of revenue for Tunisia’s spluttering economy – drinking alcohol or wearing revealing beachwear. The party has also reached out to anxious investors by saying it will not impose Islamic banking rules and that it is inclined to keep the finance minister and central bank governor in their posts when it forms the new government.
