TUNIS, Tunisia — On a recent warm evening, hundreds of men and women mingled outside the offices of Tunisia’s Islamist party. They sang and cheered. They waved little red-and-white Tunisian flags. It looked as if they had won an election.
In fact, they had just lost control of parliament. But in a strife-torn Arab world, this young democracy had pulled off a rare feat: a clean, peaceful election.
“What are we celebrating today?” the Islamists’ leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, 73, cried into a microphone as fireworks popped overhead. “We are celebrating freedom! We are celebrating Tunisia! We are celebrating democracy!”
Three years after the Arab Spring, the hopes unleashed by the mass uprisings have largely given way to despair. Egypt suffered a coup. Libya is lurching toward civil war. Syria has experienced a blood bath.
Tunisia is the only country to overthrow a dictator and build a democracy. On Sunday, Tunisians will cast ballots in the second round of national elections, choosing a president after the Oct. 26 parliamentary vote.
Still, the Islamists’ defeat in the first round reflects clear discontent with what democracy has yielded. Ghannouchi was symbolic of Islamists in the region who surged to power after the uprisings and hoped to transform countries ruled by secular autocrats. But Tunisia’s government has struggled to contain terrorism, to revive the economy and to win over a secular society.
And Tunisia’s political stability is hardly assured. The leading candidate in Sunday’s elections is Beji Caid Essebsi, 87, who served in authoritarian governments before the revolution. His staunchly secular party also won the parliamentary elections. While Essebsi is seen by many as a moderate, Islamists are alarmed.
“I fear that if Essebsi wins the presidency, it’s game over,” said Radwan Masmoudi, a Tunisian-American Muslim activist and longtime supporter of Ghannouchi, speaking in Tunis several days after the rally. “It’s basically the old regime controlling everything.”
Tunisia is overwhelmingly Muslim, but was forcibly secularized during five decades of autocratic government.
Secret police harassed men who frequented the mosque; female students were forbidden to wear the headscarf — “that odious rag,” in the words of Habib Bourguiba, the ambitious modernizer who led the country to independence from France in 1956.
Today, abortion is legal, female students outnumber men at universities, and bikini-clad sunbathers crowd the Mediterranean beaches.
Many Islamists despaired of ever coming to power, but Ghannouchi never gave up.
In the first post-revolution election, his Ennahda party won over 40 percent of seats in the Constituent Assembly, making it the biggest party.
In exile, Ghannouchi had become one of the world’s best-known Islamist thinkers. But back in Tunisia, governing proved harder than Ghannouchi had ever imagined.
“The reality is more complicated than any sort of theory,” he said this month in an interview in his office.
These days, strings of red-and-white Tunisian flags flutter over Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the central avenue in Tunis, marking the elections. But in the packed cafes along the tree-lined boulevard, it is easy to find signs of disillusionment with Ennahda.
“We voted for Ennahda mainly to have social justice and equality,” said Labidi Jaouher, 27, a mechanical engineer, who sat with two iPhone-tapping colleagues, sipping espresso.
“They did not tackle the economic issues. That was one of their big mistakes,” said his friend, Hamdi Abdessalem, 24.
Ennahda made some mistakes, Ghannouchi acknowledged. But the Islamist party can recover. “If you compare what happened in our neighbors,” he said, “we are living the best situation in the Arab world.”
