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The Tunisian people fought for democracy in January 2011
Photo: ZOHRA BENSEMRA / REUTERS
The corona crisis has dominated Jean Castex's professional life for months.
France's Prime Minister has started this week before Christmas with a comparatively simple appointment: In Paris he received Hichem Mechichi, his Tunisian counterpart.
In addition to the right strategy for dealing with the pandemic and Mediterranean migration, the two prime ministers are likely to have also talked about the Arab Spring, which broke out in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzeid on December 17, 2010, exactly ten years ago.
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Tunisian Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi: A welcome guest on the Seine
Photo: Francois Mori / AP
What exactly happened on that winter day in Sidi Bouzid, there are now countless versions.
Neither is probably complete.
The story, at the center of which is a poor street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, and which is burned into the collective memory of the Arab world, goes like this: A patrol from the local public order office confiscated the goods and the scales of the street vendor without a license.
Bouazizi protested.
A slap in the face with consequences
There was an argument - and a slap in the face.
An employee of the public order office is said to have hit the then 26-year-old man on the street.
In protest against the arbitrariness in the state of long-term ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Bouazizi then set himself on fire.
He died from his injuries in January 2011, the year of the »Arab Spring«.
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Tunisia's ruler Ben Ali at Mohamed Bouazizi's bedside in December 2010
Photo: - / AFP
It feels like an eternity ago: the Germans were discussing the fake doctoral thesis by Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.
They said goodbye to Loriot and Knut, the Berlin polar bear, they mourned Amy Winehouse and Steve Jobs.
The FDP welcomed Philipp Rösler as the new party leader, the world with South Sudan a new country.
And the Tunisians fought for democracy.
»In Tunisia the climate is so sweet that you forget to die there«
Nicolas Sarkozy on a state visit to Tunisia in 2008
The tragic death of Bouazizi was a beacon.
The men and women in Tunisia had had enough of their lives under dictator Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi, nicknamed "Leila Gin".
The trained hairdresser had a penchant for extravagant parties, and her clan plundered the country.
In the West, that didn't bother anyone for a long time.
When Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni visited the Tunisian dictator couple in April 2008, the French president at the time quoted the novelist Gustave Flaubert at a state banquet: "In Tunisia the climate is so sweet that you forget to die there."
Three months later, in June 2008, the then US Ambassador Robert F. Godec wired a completely different assessment of the situation from Tunis to Washington: "The Trabelsis attract the greatest anger among Tunisians," he wrote.
The family is behaving like the mafia, according to one of the secret reports published by the WikiLeaks platform.
That ended in January 2011.
After weeks of protests, dictator Ben Ali had to flee from his people.
He went into exile in Saudi Arabia - and millions of men and women in North Africa and the Middle East followed the Tunisian example.
They took to the streets in Libya, Egypt, Syria and even Yemen.
Young revolutionaries demanded "bread, freedom, dignity".
In two other countries they overthrew their old autocrats in the same year:
In February 2011, Egypt's Raïs
Hosni Mubarak
thanked him
after decades of rule,
and the Libyans hunted down their despot
Muammar al-Gaddafi
in October 2011
to death
.
But only in Tunisia have the Democrats really won the battle for power and freedom.
In Egypt today there is a military junta.
International civil wars are raging in Syria, Libya and Yemen, and millions of men, women and children have fled or been displaced.
"Civil societies in the Arab world look at Tunisia with some envy"
Isabelle Werenfels, Tunisia expert at the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP)
"That is why civil societies in the Arab world look at Tunisia with some envy," says Isabelle Werenfels, Senior Fellow of the Science and Politics Foundation (SWP).
»Compared to other regions, the freedoms there are enormous.
Journalists, for example, can work largely freely, numerous moderate Islamist women sit in parliament and homosexuals are invited to talk shows. "
Habib Bourguiba, who ruled Tunisia from 1956 after independence from France, helped to establish the foundation for the liberal Tunisian society.
In the early 1960s he told the New York Times that in order for his country to develop economically, "Tunisia's women would have to stop producing children faster than we can care for." Bourguiba, according to expert Werenfels, was a development dictator with a vision Man as the West valued him.
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Was popular in the West, including John F. Kennedy: Tunisia's first dictator Habib Bourguiba
Photo: William J. Smith / AP
The European Union also sponsors the new Tunisia, which emerged from the dictatorship in 2011.
The country is considered a showcase project.
There are many reasons:
The Tunisians only fought for democracy in 2011,
In 2013 the "Quartet for National Dialogue" averted an impending civil war,
for which the dialogue group received the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Tunisian people have also given themselves a new constitution,
and since 2018 a woman has ruled Tunis as mayor - the first ever in an Arab capital.
The wages from Brussels: Generous financial support.
At the beginning, "a lot of money was transferred to Tunisia in an uncoordinated and unconditioned manner," says expert Werenfels.
"In the meantime, however, the EU member states are talking to each other a little better and are setting binding targets for the distribution of the funds."
Moderate Islamists and violent jihadists
The ancien régime has not yet completely disappeared in Tunisia.
"There are old networks of business people and a distant relative, the father-in-law of a brother-in-law of ex-dictator Ben Ali, is still quite influential in the country," says Daniel Gerlach, editor-in-chief of the trade magazine "Zenith" and managing director of the Middle East think tank Candid Foundation.
“Some members of the clan have apologized and even paid compensation.
However, nobody believes that the power of this family will be restored, «Gerlach continues.
With the revolution, the Islamists, especially the Ennahda party, a national offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, became powerful.
The religious men's association was founded in 1928 by the preacher Hassan al-Banna in Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood runs soup kitchens, Koran schools and believes in a slogan: "Islam is the solution".
However, the group is more than a Muslim Salvation Army.
It strives for political power, propagates the Sharia as a legal form.
Today the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most powerful political movements in the Arab world.
The Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas emerged from it, and it has branches in Yemen, Syria and many other countries in the region.
In Tunisia, the Ennahda party with its various wings is firmly anchored in mainstream society.
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Likes to act in the background: Rached al-Ghannouchi, a prominent member of the Ennahda party, chairs the Tunisian parliament as spokesman, recently wearing a corona mask
Photo: MOHAMED MESSARA / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
"The Ennahda party has been a member of various government coalitions since 2011," says Gerlach.
“It includes quite sensible people and those who, in the old Muslim Brotherhood fashion, still assume that you can take power through democratic elections and then never give it up again.
There are modernizers there and those who have spent the best years of their lives in Ben Ali's prisons and remain politically in this period. "
But there are also Salafists in Tunisia who are being watched by the security authorities.
"And there is a small, but very violent and violent section of Tunisian jihadists," says Gerlach.
"In the so-called› Islamic State ‹, the Tunisians were one of the largest compatriots."
Integrating these men back into society is a Herculean task.
And yet: almost ten years after the overthrow of ruler Ben Ali, the Tunisians are far ahead of their Arab neighbors on the way to democracy.
They have fought for a peaceful life in freedom and dignity - without a dictator, with less corruption or arbitrary police force.
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