More good news from the Middle East. Millions of Tunisians cast votes Sunday for a new legislative assembly that will write a constitution; a constitution that Tunisians expect to give them a government responsive to the people.
“Tunisians showed the world how to make a peaceful revolution without icons, without ideology, and now we are going to show the world how we can build a real democracy,” Moncef Marzouki, founder of a liberal political party and a former dissident exile, told David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times.
“This will have a real impact on places like Libya and Egypt and Syria, after the fall of its regime,” he added.
It is too early for celebration. But the fact that millions — out of a population of less than 11 million, 25 percent of whom are illiterate — voted is enough by itself to guarantee that Tunisia is one Arab nation that won’t fall back into a dictatorship any time soon. Whether it can build a Western-style democracy based on Muslim religion and philosophy is more problematic. That is, however, the goal of leaders such as Marzouki.
The Tunisians who waited patiently in long lines to vote also said they wanted and expect to have political freedom and to break out of the bleak poverty which afflicts so large a percentage of the population, a goal that can be reached only through a stem-to-stern reordering of Tunisia’s society and economy.
Mr. Marzouki’s great-grandchildren may look back at 2011 and tell the children at their knee that the Arab Spring was real; that it started when Tunisia ousted their despotic ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January of that year, created its own democracy and began the arduous journey from that revolutionary beginning to the day when a prosperous, stable, freedom-loving Tunisia was finally built.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
