TUNIS, Tunisia — Lina Ben Mhenni’s blog isn’t banned in her home country anymore. Secret police no longer shadow her every move, and she doesn’t fear thugs breaking into her parents’ home again and making off with her laptop and camera, as they did last spring.
Still, Ben Mhenni isn’t sure she’s happy with how things are going, three months after a people’s rebellion overthrew this small North African nation’s 23-year dictatorship and sparked the historic wave of protests that are remaking the Arab world.
“I don’t think that the country is on the right track,” Ben Mhenni, 27, said, shaking her head as she watched a small demonstration on the steps of the municipal theater call for criminal trials for the country’s deposed president and his associates. “The government is trying to say these demonstrators have personal demands, but they have political demands. The government is not really working toward real democracy.”
In the new Tunisia, there’s no denying the first tentative steps toward democracy.
The transitional government has dissolved former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s ruling party, broken his family’s mafialike hold on the economy, forced the resignation of a prime minister who had ties to the old regime, disbanded the reviled secret police and lifted a stranglehold on free speech.
New elections are scheduled for July, while a high council of jurists and intellectuals drafts new electoral laws and determines whether to try ex-regime figures for corruption, torture and other abuses. For the first time in two decades, Tunisia’s countless cafes are abuzz with open debates about the country’s political future.
“Under Ben Ali we were a country of 10 million soccer coaches,” said a radio host, Noureddine Ben Ticha, referring to the old national obsession. “Now we are 10 million political analysts.”
But there’s also a struggle to maintain the momentum for change.
More than 50 political parties have registered for the July elections, including some headed by well-known former members of the ruling party and others by total unknowns.
Sporadic sit-ins demanding swifter reforms and economic progress have snarled traffic outside government buildings, leading to several arrests in the first significant confrontation between demonstrators and security forces since the uprising.
Even the high council has come in for criticism for meeting behind closed doors and has nearly doubled in size after Tunisians complained that it excluded women, Islamists, young people and residents from outside the capital.
Channeling the zeal of its revolutionaries into a new political system is difficult for any country in transition. With Tunisia’s small, homogenous and well-educated population, experts say that this former French colony may have the best chance of any Arab nation to build a representative democracy from the rubble of its toppled autocracy.
Failure, however, could also have ripple effects in the region.
“All these factors mean it probably will succeed and that it will be a positive model for other countries,” said a Western diplomat in Tunis whose government wouldn’t authorize him to be quoted by name.
“Conversely, if it doesn’t work here, then there’s a real risk that people who don’t want democracy to work . . . will point to the reasons why we shouldn’t go down the democratic path.”
The transitional government seized the assets of 110 Ben Ali family members and associates, but some argue the list needs to be expanded.
Other reforms are needed, many argue, if the old guard’s lock on Tunisian politics is to be broken forever.
Omar Mestiri, a human-rights activist and member of the high council, applied to start an independent radio station but was told by officials that a one-year license to broadcast nationwide would cost about $845,000 — “out of the question for anyone except members of the old elite,” he said.
