Tunisia

Ben Ali: president for life?

Saturday 02 August 2008

Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali told his supporters that he would stand for re-election next year after 20 years in power. He has made it easier for other candidates to enter the race, but will this make a difference?

At the beginning of the 2000s, Mohamed Charfi, a former Tunisian minister of education and ex-president of the Tunisian Human Rights League, said that Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was preparing “in all evidence, a presidency for life”.

Charfi, who died on June 8, was one of the most innovative ministers of education in the Arab world, promised to fight institutional immobility and political monopoly in Tunisia.

Six weeks after Charfi’s death, Ben Ali announced he was running for a fifth term. In power since November 1987, the Tunisian leader is most likely to win.

Tunisia’s constitution doesn’t call for a lifetime presidency, as was the case under Ben Ali’s predecessor, Habib Bourguiba. However, the constitution doesn’t limit the president’s unshared power or the number of mandates.

“Ben Ali doesn’t need constitutional clauses to remain in the Palace of Carthage,” says Beatrice Hibou, a research fellow at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and author of “The Force of Obedience: Political Economy of the Repression in Tunisia”.

“We’re in a system that imposes a de facto presidential monopoly and reduces the presidential election to an exercise of form,” she adds.

As prime minister to Bourguiba, in 1987, Ben Ali used the president’s poor health to engineer his removal, a coup that came to be called Tunisia's “Quiet Revolution”.  

Ben Ali began his time as president with movement toward democracy. Between 1987 and the beginning of the 1990s, he distanced himself from Bourguiba, removed the presidency-for-life clause, limited the number of presidential terms to three and freed political prisoners.

He was elected in 1989, then re-elected in 1994 and in 1999. In 1992, his rule became more authoritarian, the rational being that the country needed a strong leader to fight a fundamentalist menace. In 2002, revisions to the constitution ended limits to presidential terms, extended the maximum age for holding the office to 75 years and guaranteeing legal immunity to the office holder. The way was laid for a lifetime presidency.

Checks to presidential power in Tunisia are few, so opposition political parties have little room for maneuver, swinging from activism to compromise.

“The opposition has been totally discredited,” says Kader Abderrahim, associate researcher at the Institute of International Strategic Relations in Paris. “They have been marginalized by association with those in power between 1987 and the 1990s,” when Ben Ali was lightening the authoritarianism of Bourguiba’s iron fist.

According to Abderrahim, the only people left to raise a voice of opposition are a few figures who have had to choose between exile or prison, and the Tunisian human rights league. Without freedom of the press and a level political playing field, their actions remain ineffectual.

“Under these conditions, the opposition has little chance of changing anything,” says Béatrice Hibou.

Ben Ali’s re-elections have been by surrealist margins of 99% of the vote. In 1989 and 1994, he was the sole candidate, and in 1999 and 2004, his “adversaries” were figureheads. But for the next elections, Ben Ali seems to aspire to a more open process.

He recently signed a law designed to encourage more candidates. The new law exempts presidential candidates from having to be supported by at least 30 elected officials. In a nation where 80% of the national assembly and locally elected officials are controlled by the ruling party, it would otherwise be nearly impossible for new candidates to run without the exemption.

If he does want more challengers in 2009, Ben Ali is choosing them carefully. A legal clause limits the contests to elected party officials who have held office for at least two years. Observers see this as a maneuver to scuttle the candidacy of Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, the only challenger in the race. Chebbi was a founder of the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), but he no longer leads it.