How Tunisia beat Egypt in the democracy game

This week, both Tunisia and Egypt are expected to approve new constitutions. The comparisons are almost inevitable. The twin uprisings in the North African neighbors, started by self-immolating Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010, sparked the regional upheaval broadly called the Arab Spring. In the three years since, Tunisia and Egypt have followed separate paths. Not surprisingly, this week finds them at different destinations.

Tunisia is now "setting a standard for dialogue and democracy that is the envy of the Arab world," say David Kirkpatrick and Carlotta Gall in The New York Times. Egypt "has become a study in the risks of revolution, on a violent path that seems to lead only in circles."

In Tunisia, where popular protests forced the corrupt, authoritarian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country three years ago, an elected assembly is widely expected to approve a constitution The New York Times calls "one of the most liberal in the Arab world," with religious freedoms and women's rights indelibly written into the charter.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Egyptians, meanwhile, are finishing voting today on their third constitution in as many years. This one, The Times says, "validates the military ouster of their first fairly elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and gives power and immunity to both the military and the police."

There are plenty of reasons Tunisia and Egypt are in such different places on the winding road to democracy, but two stand out. First, Tunisia's professional military has traditionally steered clear of politics, and when Ben Ali's regime and fearsome security apparatus collapsed, the military remained neutral and was widely respected for that.

In Egypt, the military has been perhaps the strongest political faction since the 1950s, and not only did it forcibly retire President Hosni Mubarak, but also his democratically elected successor, Morsi. After ousting Morsi, the military has overtly called the shots, outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood and jailing its leaders, shutting down independent news organizations, and otherwise quashing dissent. This week's constitutional vote is widely viewed as the beginning of the bid by the country's leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to formalize his rule with a run for president.

The other big difference between Tunisia and Egypt is that "Tunisia's politicians have opted for compromise rather than zero-sum politics," says The Economist. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was handed a majority in parliament in the first free elections, and it wasn't keen to compromise with the secular minority. Tunisia's Islamist party, Ennadha, won a plurality of seats in parliament, but had to — and chose to — compromise with the more-or-less evenly matched secular parties. The Economist fills in some details:

Egypt's democratic failures may also have helped Tunisia's relative political comity. Last summer, Tunisia's fragile peace was at the cusp of falling apart after suspected Islamists brazenly assassinated two secular politicians, sparking protests against the already flailing moderate Islamist government. It was at this point that Egypt's military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood, sending "shivers through Ennadha," says Eleanor Beardsley at NPR News. "They agreed to sit down with the secular opposition to draft the country's constitution."

Significantly, Ennadha also agreed to turn over power to a non-political caretaker government until elections later this year.

Tunisia's relative success has deeper roots, too, says Robert Zaretsky at The Jewish Daily Forward. Its surprisingly secular new constitution is "building upon the foundation that has been in place since Tunisia's independence from France in 1956."

It's too bad that the foreign media has largely ignored Tunisia's "remarkable effort to reject disaster at home," Zaretsky adds. The Egyptian train wreck has been getting plenty of press, but for "embracing a politics of the possible and taking the measure of moderation, Tunisia deserves the world's attention," too. Unfortunately, "nothing, it seems, fails like political success."