People’s Power peaks in Tunisia

Its exiled leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, is preparing for return from London to Tunis before the end of the month.

Once the ruling party dissolves, Ghannouchi’s Nahda Party will be the largest political force in the country despite an absence of more than two decades from the country.

The closest force in size and potential to the Islamists are the leftist forces, especially within the powerful labour movement, one of the oldest and most established in the Arab World.

Ghannouchi’s return will complete the political set of ideas that make up the new ideological map of post Bin Ali Tunisia.

Triumphant return

After 20 years in exile in London, he will be returning to a triumphant reception in his home country. However, he will also be returning to a country where the popular uprising means that no outright political guardianship by the elites on the people will be possible.

Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi is now convinced he is not wanted and is looking for an honourable and swift exit.

The people’s power revolution that led to the ousting of President Ben Ali has largely been leaderless, except for the role in the second week of January of the powerful General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) and the increasingly visible and formidable Bar Association.

It is now a matter of time before the post Bin Ali unity government is ousted too.

Already the country’s political machine is working around the clock to defuse the political impasse. For this purpose three elder and veteran politicians are being recruited for a quick settlement that will avert military intervention.

Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi is now convinced he is not wanted and is looking for an honourable and swift exit.

The veteran trio

Ahmed Mestiri, the father of the democratic movement of the mid-1980s, has been called out of retirement to mediate between civil society, the opposition that stayed outside the unity government, and protesters, on the one hand, and the remnants of the ancien regime on the other.

Mistiri is a liberal politician and the first to call for pluralism in Tunisia. He left the ruling Destour party in the early 1980s in the days of President Bourguiba and formed the Social Democratic Movement.

The trio will be acceptable to the key ideological currents in the country, including the Islamists.

His liberalism was also a catalyst for the founding of the Arab World’s first Human Rights League.

The Second veteran politician is Ahmed Ben Saleh, Bourguiba’s architect of socialist and collectivist policies in the 1960s.

Another uprising at the time soured relations between small land holders and the Minister Ben Saleh led to his fall, forcing him to leave Tunisia disguised as a woman through Libya.

He is the other mediator recruited by the current president, Fouad Mbazza to help find a solution to the current impasse.

The third figure is Moustafa Elfilali, who served as a minister in the earliest cabinets formed by Bourguiba in the 1960s. He is close ideologically to the Destour Party, renamed by Ben Ali Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD).

The trio will be acceptable to the key ideological currents in the country, including the Islamists.

I have been with Shaykh Rachid Gannouchi in Doha and he is happy with the choice, stating that the three veteran politicians are well-known to him and all are accommodating of the Islamists.

Political package

The political package that the three men will try to negotiate with all political currents and associations consist of the following:

1. Dissolution of the bicameral house of parliament

Ghannouchi tells me he is not intending to bid for office.

2. Creation of a 50-member Jami’yyah Ta’sisiyyah (Transitional Council) representing all ideological currents and civil society forces. This will be in place for a period no shorter than one year and no longer than 18 months. It will be dissolved after multi-party and free elections in 2012.

3. A new Prime Minister to head a transitional coalition or salvation government will be appointed, mostly made up of technocrats and with the head of government being a neutral nationalist figure.

4. The key work to be entrusted to the Transitional Council is to put together a new democratic constitution.

There will be negotiations of other commissions including a quasi truth and reconciliation committee, as well as a juridical mechanism to take care of corruption.

Ghannouchi tells me he is not intending to bid for office. His role will be one of the key negotiators and mediators in the transitional period. He wants his Islamist Nahda Party to share power with other parties and not to dominate the political scene.

The people’s power revolution is peaking in mass mobilisation with the launch of the Freedom Caravan, a long march to Tunis from the towns and surrounding areas which sparked the protests.

The march will end up in and Government Square and Habib Bourguiba Avenue, literally converted into a Tunis quasi ‘Hyde Parc’ since the ousting of Ben Ali.

It is now a matter of time before Ghannouchi and the remaining RCD ministers resign and cabinet is dissolved.

Dr Larbi Sadiki is a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Exeter.