Back Where It All Began...

...Tunisian Voters Say No to Islamists

"Tunisia just held a parliamentary election and Ennahda, the sort-of-moderate-but-not-really Islamist party lost to the ardently secular Nidaa Tounes, which translates into Call of Tunisia.

Ennahda is the Tunisian Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood under another name, and it wears a more moderate face than the Egyptian branch. Tunisia is a genuinely moderate country and Ennahda’s leaders have no choice but to tone down their rhetoric and their platform if they want to seriously compete in elections."

[---]

"Tunisian politics might be more coherent if a viable mainstream conservative party were to compete with a more-brazen Ennahda and split the votes of religious moderates and religious extremists, but Ennahda certainly won’t split itself. The Islamists would have even fewer seats in the parliament if that were to happen. Ennahda can’t even win an election with its ostensibly moderate platform.

Much hay is being made of the fact that a large percentage of Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Iraq hail from Tunisia. We can speculate about the reasons for that, but I can tell you with absolute confidence that it’s not because Tunisia has a broader base of support for totalitarian political Islam than other Muslim countries.

On the contrary, Tunisia is the most liberal Arab country in the world. I’ve known that for a decade. In such marked contrast to Egypt, Libya, and Syria, it has emerged from the upheavals of the Arab Spring as a more-or-less properly functioning democracy. On January 26, 2014, Tunisia ratified the most liberal constitution in the entire Arab world."

Bit by bit.