The Republique area of downtown Tunis is filled with the markers of a democracy in the making. Banners for the Modernist Democratic Pole, a coalition of leftist parties, compete for the attention of passersby with a honking parade of cars flying flags of the Islamist Ennahda party. Nearly everyone in Tunisia's busy capital says they plan on voting in the first real democratic election in the country's history to be held on Sunday. And if the populace is unused to voting (it rarely participated in the sham democracy of ousted President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali), it is getting a lot of help. For example, the entire wall of an apartment building above the Republique train tracks is devoted to showing how it's done. "I put the paper in the ballot box," reads step 10 on the illustrated chart.
But politics is complicated. There are more than 100 parties vying for spots in the assembly that will write the country's new constitution. Many of them are unknown to voters, having sprouted in the democratic free-for-all that followed the revolution. "I have my ID card and I'm going to vote. I've been waiting for it my whole life," says Rizqi Habib, a retired painter. But he has no idea who he'll vote for. "I'm not going to lie to you," he says. "I can't read. So it will be random. I'm going to just make an X." (See more on Tunisia's election)
Still, Tunisians are among the best educated in the Arab world, and the country has a well-developed middle class. Those two factors combined with a relatively smooth transitional period in the months following their dictator's Jan. 17th ouster ? compared to that of their revolutionary counterparts in Egypt and Libya ? have left Tunisia poised to become the Arab Spring's most likely success story.
And yet, Tunisians are not without worry. "The regime was responsible for the absence of any dialogue between the Islamists and others," says Emna Jebloui, an activist at the Arab Institute for Human Rights in Tunis. "And now we are paying the price for the absence of that debate." Jebloui is one of many Tunisians who have grown fearful at the post-revolution emergence of Islamists and their seemingly broad appeal in what has typically been North Africa's most secular country. Ben Ali had repressed extreme religiosity so intensely that the months following Tunisia's revolution marked the first time that some Tunisians said they had ever seen women wearing the niqob, the all-encompassing black face veil that is more commonly affiliated with the conservative Islam of Saudi Arabia. (See TIME's video, "Tunisia Prepares to Vote.")
But nine months after the revolution, Islamists appear poised to claim the largest chunk of the seats in the constitutional assembly. The most popular Islamist party, Ennahda, is considered moderate, even liberal, by regional standards of political Islam. Many of its new adherents are educated youth. But for the members of Tunisian society who value their rights to drink alcohol, read western literature, and mingle with the opposite sex, the rise of any kind of Islamism is alarming. "The Islamists will try to add that Sharia be one source or a major source of legislation," predicts Hamadi Redissi, a political science professor at the University of Tunis El Manar, who has written critically of Ennahda. (See why the U.S. should cheer Tunisia's risky revolution.)
And then there are other challenges. Some Tunisians, including Ennahda's leader Rached Ghannouchi, have warned of vote-rigging at the hands of ex-regime sympathizers, many of whom have joined new parties. Young revolutionaries, meanwhile, object to any participation by ex-regime members in the new Tunisia's politics. Others fear violence if results are displeasing to one party or another. And still more worry that even if elections run smoothly, the assembly's primary task of drafting a new constitution in the space of a year will prove too onerous for the diverse array of parties and independent candidates that are sure to wind up in the assembly's 217 seats.
The country's transitional leaders ultimately chose an electoral model that would ensure that no single party is able to dominate in a period of democratic fragility, Jebloui says. But parties and politicians have found a way around it. "Tunisians are too smart, and they can do independent lists," she says. "There are many independent lists that will have an alliance with Ennahda after the election."
Indeed, it's the latter point that underscores a national rift that goes beyond religiosity. Ghannouchi has confidently predicted a 50% win for his Ennahda party ? a percentage that is only possible with a coalition of like-minded independents. But it's not Ghannouchi and the Ennahda elite ? returning from abroad and prison sentences after decades of Ben Ali's rule ? that liberal intellectuals fear most. It's their appeal. "Desperate people. The young, and maybe fragile. Unemployed, also," says Jebloui, listing the array of voters who have found the Islamists so enticing. "They have much time, and they haven't enough money to go to the cinema, to read books, to go outside to other countries," she says "They don't have many solutions. So maybe they find in religion the magical solution."
See photos of Tunisia's tumultuous month.
Ben Ali left Tunisia reeling from the effects of a deeply corrupt political economy, a heavy-handed police force, and high unemployment. Few of the unemployed youth in the revolution's epicenter of Sidi Bouzid, where the self-immolation of a vegetable seller set off the uprising, have found relief in the event's aftermath. And the debate over an Islamist versus non-Islamist solution has, in some ways, further highlighted the divide between urban and rural, employed and unemployed, educated and less educated. Most commonly, perhaps, it represents the rift between those who lived comfortably, albeit silently, under Ben Ali versus those who gained nothing from it. "Religion is going to help because it will tame us," says Ayeshi Rabhi, an unemployed 23-year-old from Kasserine in the country's poor interior. "The state is corrupt. We need religion to purify us."
Rabhi plans to vote for Ennahda, but more because it seems obvious, he says, than out of any personal commitment to the party. It's a tendency that some say underscores a political vulnerability in the months ahead. Many of Ennahda's young followers are more strongly influenced by the fundamentalist Wahhabi preachers they see on television than by the party's elites, recently returned from abroad, says Jeboui. (See a video on the uprisings against Tunisia's old ways.)
Last week, violent protests erupted after Nessma TV, a private station, broadcast the award-winning animated film Persepolis about the Iranian revolution, in which a girl's imagined version of god takes human form. Islamists, and even some liberals, deemed the film blasphemous for portraying an image of god. In the uproar that ensued, protesters clashed with police, and attacked the TV station and the home of the station's owner. "What happened with Nessma was very important," Radissi says of the protests that sent Tunisians into a soul-searching debate over the religious character of the state and freedom of expression. "Either people are going to rally around Islamists," he says, giving them an edge in the polls. "Or [what happened] will provoke a fear reaction and people we will say, 'These people are dangerous.'"
If the latter scenario plays out, the Islamists are likely to scale back the religious rhetoric and re-think their strategy. If the protests yield more votes, however, they will be emboldened to pursue dramatic religious-based legislation, he argues. (See the Tunisian resort where Libyans were fleeing.)
There are those who say that Radissi, Jebloui and others who have voiced such fierce opposition to the Islamist rise, are merely overdramatic alarmists. After all, Ennahda officials have given little indication that the party would pursue any policies that deviate strongly from Tunisia's liberal, secularist tradition of government. Polls suggest that other parties, including the old opposition party, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) and the leftist Congress for the Republic (CPR) are likely to gain a sizeable portion of the seats as well.
Either way, few would deny how important this election is. Where Tunisia's uprising last winter was the all-important domino that set off an Arab Spring of revolutions and region-wide dissent, so too will Sunday's vote serve as both a catalyst and a harbinger for what's to come. "It's a very important test," Radissi says. "If it works in Tunisia, I'm sure that all the other regimes in the Arab world will try to imitate the Tunisian case. If it doesn't succeed here, no where will it succeed."
And if the Islamists win in Tunisia, he adds: "Kayf, kayf" ? that is, likewise, they will sweep the region. "And you can put an X through the Arab Spring."
See "Tunisia's New Turmoil: The Unfinished Revolution."
See the top 15 toppled dictators.
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