Supervisor: Martin Beck

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Constraints: Steering Tunisia and Egypt’s Islamists down the narrow path to democracyBIRGITTE VESTERMARK (221065-0698)

Student no: 428818University of Southern Denmarkbives15@student.sdu.dk

Introduction:

The first democratic elections after the Arab Uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia resulted in a victory for moderate Islamist parties e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt and its sisterparty Ennahda in Tunisia. Even though the two parties stem from the same ideological roots they took a very different approach to democracy and to the “art” of being in power. This assignment examines how the two parties handled their electoral victories and why their democratic attitude was so different from one another.

The difference in attitude was particularly evident in the approach they took to writing new constitutions, and the events that surrounded the constitution-writing process revitalized the discussion of whether Islam was indeed compatible with democracy. This subject will also be addressed here.

Theoretical framework:

This assignment takes its point of departure in the inclusion moderation theory originally developed by Robert Michels, who in his book Political Parties (1911) offers a classic study of the Social Democratic Party in Germany.

The theory has since been developed further (Schwedler 2013) to explain the evolution of Islamist political parties in a number of countries with a Muslim majority population – with the evolution of successive Islamist political parties in Turkey from the early 1970s till the culmination in the election victory of the AK Party in 2002 as a powerful example.

Moderation is characterized by the American professor Jillian Schwedler as “a process of change that might be described as movement along a continuum from radical to moderate whereby a move away from more exclusionary practices equates to an increase in moderation.”(Ibid. p.3)

According to the theory radical political actors will become more moderate if they are included in the legitimate political process. That is if they are allowed to participate in a free civil society, run for democratic elections, hold rallies etc. (Ibid. p.4)

This is because once an extremist group organizes as a vote-seeking party the wish to please voters and gain popularity will be stronger than their original radical ideology and the group will therefore sooner or later replace its revolutionary agenda with a vote-maximizing strategy. And even parties that do not hold deep democratic convictions have strong incentives to comply with democratic rules (Tezcür 2010, p.31).

Schwedler points out that a number of scholars has taken the theory further to argue that once a party has renounced revolution and violence and decided to play by the democratic rules of the game, the vote-seeking strategies will make the moderate (Islamist) parties not just stick to their moderate agenda - in order not to scare potential voters away - but will continue to draw them towards the center of the political spectrum in order to appeal to an even broader voter segment (Schwedler 2013, p.13).

Critics of the inclusion moderation theory mainly focuses on what is known as “the paradox of democracy,” namely that a radical group only behaves like they respect democratic norms and processes while in reality they sticks to their core values, even if these run counter to democratic norms. (Ibid. p.5)

The neo-conservative American historian Daniel Pipes who is often characterized as “Islamophobic” is probably the strongest academic proponent of this view. He considers all groups, parties and individuals who seeks to implement Islamic reform as “Fundamentalists,” and categorically defines them as “anti-democratic”, “anti-moderate”, “anti-Semitic” and “anti- Western” (Pipes 1995). They will participate in elections alright, but there is not much evidence that they will behave democratically once in power. (Ibid.)

Another critic of the moderation hypothesis is Hillel Fradkin, a likewise neo-conservative and a specialist on Islamic Studies. He notes that the core project for Islamic parties is to build an Islamic state where religion sets strict limits for politics. He therefore questions whether the Islamists are only using the democratic tools to pursue their hidden agenda and achieve their ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state. (Fradkin 2012)

The critics of inclusion moderation theory argue that as soon as the opportunity arises, Islamist parties will simply high-jacks the process and abandon the democratic system that brought them to power - this is sometimes referred to as “one man-one-vote-one time” - an expression first coined in the early 1990’s by US diplomat and government advisor Edward Djerejian.

The prominent French professor and expert on political Islam Olivier Roy disagrees. He contends that the constraints Islamists and even Salafists will face while in power will not only limit their supposed hidden agenda of establishing an Islamic State, but will also push them towards a more open and democratic way of governance, because this is their only chance to stay at the center of political life. “Thus the Islamists, and even the Salafists, will become reluctant agents of democratization” (Roy 2012, p.8).

Schwedler is not quite as optimistic. She admits that democratization is not a given once a radical party has enrolled in the democratic political game because a moderate party might revert to radical strategies if it find its way to gain influence by democratic means somehow blocked.

Much depends on the nature of the political environment where the events unfold, e.g. how strong are the opposition and the state institutions in the specific country, meaning how effective are the constraints being placed on the winning (Islamist) parties. (Roy 2012, Schwedler 2013).

But also the specific orientation of the opposition seems to play an important role, and as we shall see in the two cases of Tunisia and Egypt there is a huge difference in this respect.

The assignment further draws on transition theory that deals with the factors and processes in countries moving from dictatorial rule to democracy. Though it can be argued that not all countries labeled “transition countries” are in fact in transition to democracy (Carothers 2002) the theory still contributes to a more nuanced picture of the causes that lead to the transformation and helps to explain the hugely divergent outcome of the transition process in the two countries.

Because Ennahda and MB shares the same ideological roots and background and yet acted very dissimilar once in power – especially when it comes to the process of writing a new constitution - it makes sense to use the English philosopher John Stuart Mills method of difference (described in his main work A system of Logic from 1843) in my comparative analysis of the two parties initial grapple with post-uprising democracy.

The main problem with this method is the fact that it can be difficult – if not outright impossible – to define just one variable that alone explains the different outcome in Tunisia and Egypt respectively. More likely there are a number of different factors ranging from historical, to socio-economic, political and others that all offers part of an explanation to this intriguing puzzle. So my aim here will be to go through a number of different variables that all played some role for the degree of democratic behavior displayed by Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood, and pinpoint the most likely factors for the two parties diverging attitude towards democracy.

Outline

This text first outlines the political landscapes in Egypt and Tunisia on the day after the first free elections and gives a short presentation of the history of Islamic parties and the popular attitude to political Islam in the two countries.

Part II paints a broad picture of the socio economic conditions in Egypt and Tunisia that led to the uprisings against the authoritarian regimes.

In part III we take a closer look on how MB in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia handled their electoral victories – especially when it comes to include other parties and political forces in the process of writing a new constitution – and analyze the reasons for their different approach.

It is fair to say that Ennahda acted in a much more democratic manner than was the case for the MB. And therefore it seems that the Islamic nature of the parties was not the decisive factor for whether they could embrace democracy or not.

Part I: A new Era begins - Sweeping victory for long repressed Islamists:

As the votes were being counted after the first democratic elections ever in Tunisia (Oct. 2011) and Egypt (Nov. 2011-Jan. 2012) it turned out that they had been an overwhelming success for the moderate Islamist parties – Ennahda and the Muslims Brotherhoods political wing The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) that both became legal only after the fall of the authoritarian regimes in early 2011.

Ennahda secured 89 of the 217 seat in the Constitutional Assembly in Tunisia amounting to 41 % of the seats while MB netted an astonishing 46 % of seats available.

After years of marginalization, exclusion and harsh repression by the authoritarian regimes the Islamic movements had finally come out as the leading political force in both countries. Hence the result heralded a completely new era for political Islam in North Africa.

Political Islam in Egypt and TunisiaThe Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. Right from the start it was a form of resistance to all forms of Western colonialism – be it political, cultural economic and military. It was soon perceived as a threat to Egypt’s ruling elite and was banned in 1948.

It continued to work underground and gave up violence as a political tool in the beginning of the 1970’s. (Cammett et al. 2015, p.454) And although MB was not allowed to exist legally as a political party until Mubarak was toppled in February 2011 it was tolerated as a movement. Hence it did charity work among the poorer segments of the Egyptian society, organized associations of professionals and its members could run for parliament as independent candidates. So while the Egyptian regime was cracking down on political Islam the Brotherhood was still left with room to maneuver and the religion as such was not a target for the regime.

This was not quite the case in Tunisia. Here the repression went even further as the Tunisian regime had a very negative attitude towards Islam in all its manifestations. The country’s first post-independent president Habib Bourghiba harbored a vision for Tunisian society based on republicanism, secularism, populism (Ibid p.102) and what is known as laïcté – a term used to describe a special variant of secularism that can be characterized as outright anti-religious. (Stepan and Linz 2013, p.17)

This boded bad for the Tunisian Ennahda party that trace its roots to the Brotherhood-inspired group Islamic Action. It was founded as a party in 1981 under the name Mouvement de la Tendence Islamique that allegedly was behind bombings of tourist hotels in the 1980s.

In 1989 it changed its name to Ennahda, went through a reform process and denounced violence. Candidates with ties to Ennahda were allowed to participate as independents in the elections in 1989. (Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2013)

But this was just a brief exception. In the 1990s after Ben Ali had taken over the presidency in Tunisia state repression increased, and Ennahda became the main target – its leaders were either killed, jailed or exiled. (Cammett et al. 2015, p. 102).

A striking example of the different attitude taken by the Egyptian and the Tunisian regime towards Islam can be seen in their treatment of Islamic institutions. While Egyptian authorities allowed the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo – the most important and influential religious institution in the Arab world – to remain open and functioning, Tunisian authorities were more repressive.

In his drive to minimize and ultimately eliminate Islam’s leading role in the society and diminish the clergies grip on the educational system and the judiciary, Bourghiba closed the Zeytouna mosque in Tunis – a

likewise traditional and prestigious institutions for Islamic studies in the Arab world (Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012, p.190).

Another equally striking difference is the role of women in society. Immediate after independence in 1956 a number of chances to the Code of Personal Status in Tunisia regarding women’s role in society were pushed through to ensure gender equality.

In Egypt gender equality was not high on the regime’s agenda, and when in 2000 the Personal Status Law was changed, a proposal to allow women to travel abroad without the permission of their husband was removed at the last minute due to resistance from conservative lawmakers. (Bernard-Maugiron and Dupret 2202, p.15).

When Ben Ali assumed power in Tunisia in 1987 he continued many of his predecessor’s policies – among them the state’s commitment to laïcté. Wearing the headscarf in public continued to be restricted and religious institutions were kept under tight state-control. (Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012, p.190)

The harsh repression of anything religious and a massive crack down resulted in many Ennahda members being exiled. Most of them – like other Tunisian migrants – went to live in Europe (see table 1), for instance the party’s founding father Rashid Ghannoushi lived in London.

This way they got firsthand experience of the benefits of life in a democratic state, where the population decides who shall rule them, where the judiciary is independent and where rule of law is the order of the day. No doubt this played a modifying role of the mentality of the Ennahda leadership as can be seen in both the party program1 and in the way Ghannouchi and Tunisia’s – at that time prime minister to be - Hamadi Jebali in an interview in May 2011 talks extensively of the political imperative of a ”civil State”. (Stepan and Linz 2013, p.19)

1 The party program from September 2011 states: The power of Tunisia, her progressiveness, the protection and permanence of her independence, her sovereignty, and her republican system; based on the separation between powers, the independence of the judiciary, democracy, (good) governance, equality between its citizens, economic growth, social development and the adherence to our Arab-Islamic national identity (Donker 2013, p. 212)

Ghannoushi and the party leadership explicitly rejected the concept of an Islamic State (Roy 2012, p.13, Donker 2013, p.212).

Instead they point to Turkey’s AK Party as a model of a religious minded and conservative party to follow. This seems to be a position being widely shared by the Islamists in Tunisia. A majority of them do not support “the idea of an “Islamic State” that dominates politics. “Rather they support the idea of bringing Islam to the state, through democratic political means.”(Donker 2013, p.221)

For historical reasons a big part of the Egyptians who went to live abroad – either because they migrated or were forced into exile – went to live in the Arab world. More than half of them went to either Libya or Saudi Arabia (Fig. 2), which can in no way be characterized as democratic countries. Therefore the Egyptian Islamists - and the population more generally speaking - were not exposed to democratic thinking and democratic practices in the same way many of their Tunisian co-Islamists were.

This is clearly reflected in the different attitude towards political Islam traced in Egypt and Tunisia.

Figure 3

As shown in figure Fig. 3 people in Tunisia generally showed less support for political Islam than was the case in Egypt.

Also worth noting is the indication that support for Islamism declines with increased educational level (fig. 4).

Again we see the overall level of support for political Islam is lower in Tunisia than in Egypt in all three educational categories, and the effect is amplified by the fact that the overall educational level in Tunisia is higher than in Egypt. (UNDP 2013).

Therefore the incentive to moderate might be stronger for Tunisia’s Islamist party than for its sisterparty in Egypt.

Part II: The socio economic conditions in Egypt and Tunisia:

As other Resource Poor Labor Abundant countries 2 in the MENA region Egypt and Tunisia has both experienced the ISI-phase,3 that increased state-driven industrialization and expanded the educational system; the oil-boom era of the 1970s, that further discouraged the development of a private industrial sector and stimulated rural to urban-migration; and the structural economic reform and liberalization

2 The RPLA countries consist of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia. They are characterized by huge labor forces, high unemployment and virtually no oil production (below $250 of oil rent per capita) (Cammett et al. 2015, p. 26)3 ISI is short for Import Substitution Industrialization - a strategy followed by many countries in the Middle East and in the wider developing world in the 1950s and 1960s. It was an attempt to create development by building up a domestic industry protected by trade barriers and mainly catering to local demands. It worked for a while but ended up creating huge non-competitive industries dependent on state support. (Ibid. 2015)

Figure 4

period where the countries more or (often) less rigorously followed the neo-liberal recipe prescribed by the Washington Consensus, but which none the less cut back on state jobs, and created big holes in the social safety net (Cammett et al. 2015).

This led to the narrowing of the regimes support base with more and more segments of the population being sidelined in the new post-adjustment political settlement of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. As a result the governments resorted to increased repression and the Islamist movements gained popularity especially among the marginalized middle class (Ibid. p.98).

Ennahda and MB both to some extend managed to fill out a gaping hole in the social safety net left by the regimes when they went through restructuring, and adjustment from the 1980s and onwards. This gave them the opportunity to claim the moral high ground against crony capitalism and corruption in the authoritarian regimes and won them much popular support. (Ibid. p 441.) It also gained them a reputation for good governance, for being more competent, trustworthy and “cleaner” than their competitors in the first free elections after the uprisings – a reputation paving their way to power (Ibid, p.452).

Though Egypt and Tunisia in this way share the same overall development traits, the socio-economic factor were somewhat more favorable in Tunisia. Tunisia’s index of Human Development in 2011 was for instance higher than Egypt’s (UNDP 2011). And when it comes to confessional, ethnic and tribal structures Tunisia also has an advantage because the country enjoys a high degree of homogeneity that might smooth its transition process (Beck and Hüser 2012, p. 18)

But even though this might help Tunisia in its transition to democracy it doesn’t seem to explain the difference in democratic attitude displayed by Ennahda and the Brotherhood.

Part III: The post election period – with special focus on the constitutional process

In the first post-uprising elections in Tunisia Ennahda gained 89 out of 217 seats on the Constituent Assembly translating to 41 percent of the seats. Even though Ennahda came out as the strongest party they still needed coalition partners to form a majority. They chose to work with two center-left parties CPR and Ettakatol (marked in bold in table 1).

In Egypt the victory of the Brotherhoods FJP-led alliance was almost identical (see table 2). They gained 37.5 percent of the votes but ended up controlling 46 percent of the seats.

The core constituency of Islamic parties is only estimated to be around 20 percent (Roy 2013, p.16). So the impressive election results in the first free elections meant that both Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood were able to attract voters far beyond their core constituency.

The party leadership of Ennahda seemed to be aware of the fact that many Tunisians voted for them because they saw them as a counterweight to Tunisia’s French-speaking elite rather than because of their religious affinities, (Beck and Hüser 2012, p. 18). And this probably contributed to their willingness to form a broad political coalition.

The MB on the other hand seemed to see their voter support as a blueprint for taking over of the state institutions and in this way confirm the worries displayed by “the paradox of democracy hypothesis”:

The “Brothers” didn’t even try to form a coalition with non-Islamic parties, and they were outright criticized for excluding their political opponents and for trying to force through their own agenda. (Cammett 2015, p.103)

But according to Roy, this should come as no surprise, as it is not unusual that parties being swept into power by landslide margins, are tempted to think that they don’t need to bother with the tedious and complicated process of forming alliances but can hand out government posts as they see fit. (Roy 2012, p. 6)

Or to put it more directly: if a party thinks it can succeed with plowing ahead on its own the incentives for cooperation with other parties might fade – especially when crucial issues like the content of the constitution, the role of the judiciary and the independence of monitoring institutions are at stake, and elections are far of and hence the leading party faces no immediate risk of being punished by the electorate (Schwedler 2013, p.14).

To counter the temptation to high-jack the democratization process and revert to its ideological project of creating an Islamic State it is therefore important with checks and balances – either in the form of a strong opposition or strong state institutions or both - that can make sure that the leading (Islamist) party sticks to its moderation and its commitment to the democratic rules of the game. (Ibid. p.4-5, Roy 2012)

And this goes a long way to explain why Ennahda and MB handled their electoral victories so differently.

Drafting of the constitutions

The checks and balances were very much at work in the drafting of the constitution in Tunisia. It was a drawn out affair than ended up taking almost three years of long and often heated discussions involving parties from across the political spectrum. It was supposed to have been concluded one year after the elections of the Constituent Assembly in October 2011 but was postponed a number of times to allow for further consultation and discussion among the political actors, and it ended with each of the constitutional articles being approved separately by the popularly elected parliament.

In the process Ennahda’s representatives tried to please their core constituency by suggesting things that appealed to their conservative moral norms – for instance a number of articles that would incorporate Sharia into the constitution among them criminalizing blasphemy. But in many cases they later backtracked and accepted a compromise. (Cammett et al. 2015, p.463)

Much fuss also erupted when the party displayed its traditional view on gender by suggesting an article in the constitution defining men and women as having not equal but so called “complementary roles” in the family. The sharp backlash from leftist, secular and liberal parties made Ennahda’s representatives change their minds and the party accepted instead a wording invoking full equality. (Ibid.)

This shows that Ennahda was not just exposed to moderation influence from its secular coalition partners and the opposition, but also that the party – in line with what moderation theorists would expect – responded to it by moderating and adapting its original stand to one that was acceptable to the coalition partners and the opposition.

In Egypt the leading political force (comprising different Islamist strands) took a much more winner takes-it-all-approach that led to the secular actors feeling sidelined right from the start - and worried that the Islamist would use their dominant position to create a constitution reflecting their religious world view.

During its electoral campaign and while in power FJP indeed both articulated and attempted to push through more conservative positions on women’s issues than its Tunisian counterpart. (Ibid. p.464). In the end the party issued no new policies on family law during their short stay in power, but they nevertheless wrote a constitution with a stronger religious emphasis than previous Egyptian constitutions, and some of its articles upheld Sharia as the principal source of legislation. It also seems to pave the way for a much more prominent role for al-Azhar in future legislation, though the constitution as such is not a blueprint for a theocratic state (Albrecht 2013).

The constitutional process in Egypt was a rather hasty one, lasting less than 11 month, and MB mainly pushed through its own agenda with limited discussions and little or no attempt to include the opposition even when sensitive issues were at stake (Cammett et al. 2015, p.465).

Political checks and balances:

As shown above Ennahda was kept in close check by the tri-partite-coalition formed after the election – something that the Brotherhood didn’t have to worry about. But the pressure on the leading party exerted by the opposition was also strikingly different in nature.

Where the nine successive parties who made it to parliament In Tunisia were all leftist or secular (table 1), the second biggest party in Egypt – al- Nour – was of an Islamic nature (table 2). The same goes by the way for the fifth biggest party and together the Islamic parties controlled among them more than 70% of the parliamentary seats after the elections in Egypt in 2011-12. The Islamic leaning parties also controlled among them 85 % of the seats in the upper house – known as the Shura Council (Ibid. p.464).

The Muslim Brotherhood were in other words challenged by a more extreme opposition, that forced them to prove their core commitments to a conservative religious political vision, while Ennahda on the other hand was challenged by a leftist/secular opposition that constantly dragged them towards the political center and forced them to stay there when for instance Salafi groups tried to pressure them to adopt religious values like separation of sexes, full veiling for women in public and other core conservative Islamic social norms and practices.

So while– according to moderation theory - political groups vying for a large following will likely pull towards the political center the incentive to moderate might , as Schwedler argues, lose its appeal if the main opposition is coming from groups with more radical views. (Schwedler 2013, p.8)

If a former radical group going through a moderation process sees the biggest political threat as coming from a fringe group it is therefore less likely that it will continue its drift towards the political center. And this is another powerful explanation why Ennahda was dragged towards centrist views while MB wasn’t.

Institutional checks and balances

One should be careful about correlating moderation with democratization because as Schwedler argues while “the former can be understood in relative terms the latter entails a substantive set of norms as well as procedures “ (Ibid. p.15).

And while it can be said that both Ennahda and the MB has moderated their behavior since they gave up violence and engaged in the democratic game, their attitude towards democracy as such differs.

From the early 1980s the leaders of Ennahda with increasing strength voiced the idea that democracy was not just acceptable but outright necessary. This change of view opened the door for cooperation with the secular liberals and paved the way for their joint effort against Ben Ali. (Stepan and Linz 2013, p. 23)

This cooperation took on a more structured form with regular meetings between them as early as eight years before the fall of Ben Ali, and it led to a political society being created alongside the civil society - in contrast to Egypt which had a more creative civil society but lacked a political one. (Ibid.)

No such cooperation existed in Egypt where four months after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak the Muslim Brothers and the secular liberals – who were the main social groups to oppose the former Egyptian strongman – hadn’t even met one single time to discuss democratic governing alternatives to the ousted dictator. (Ibid.)

This is a very important difference: for while – as Stepan and Linz argues - a civil society might be able to bring down an authoritarian regime it takes a political society to construct a democracy, because only a political society is able to build bridges between different actors that enables them to craft “the rules of the game” for a democratic alternative to the authoritarian political regime (Ibid.)

The MB also proved unwilling to undergo a thorough and genuine process of ideological and organizational transformation and did not democratize the way Ennahda did. And the MB overall appeared less preoccupied with the democratic transformation of society than they were with gaining control over the existing state institutions, which they could then begin to Islamize (El-Sherif. 2014).

The political institutions were also somehow weaker in Egypt than in Tunisia. In Tunisia there was a broad consensus on the rules of the game and the timeframe (even though it was repeatedly extended) for the Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution.

In Egypt the situation was much more in flux. After strong pressure from MB’s newly formed Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafists it was decided to hold parliamentary elections before a constitution was written and that way the Islamist parties secured for themselves a dominating role over the 100 member Constituent Assembly that was elected by the government.

This led to the secular participants boycotting the process – up to 22 liberal and leftist members of the Assembly simply opted out. The same went for the representatives of Egypt’s Christian minority.

And even though the political forces had agreed on two principles to guide the writing of the constitution – namely that the writing process should be broad-based and inclusive and that the power of the president should be limited - in the end the authors abandoned both principles (Albrecht 2013).

Probably aggravating the situation was the fact that both the parliament and the constituency assembly had been declared null and void by Egypt’s courts in the spring of 2012. The military had also drained the presidency of power prior to the presidential elections that brought the Muslim Brotherhoods candidate Mohammed Morsi to power in June 2012. But Morsi managed to turn the situation around and in the absence of a parliament he acquired all legislative power in the country (Fradkin 2012).

Through a number of decrees issued by Morsi from July to November 2012 he reinstated the parliament and mandated it to write the constitution instead of the Constituent Assembly (BBC 2012).

And just a days before the constituent assembly consisting almost entirely of MB and Salafists issued its draft constitution, Morsi issued a decree granting himself the power to issue any decision or law with no authority in the country being able to revoke it. (Sabry 2012)

At the same time Morsi also stipulated that no authority could dissolve the existing Shura Council (the remaining Upper House of Parliament) or the Constituent Assembly. Thereby he effectively blocked the judiciary that was about to issue verdicts that were widely expected to declare the dissolution of both assemblies (Sabry 2012).

The MB in other words controlled almost all the power centers in Egypt, and had managed to amputate the judiciary so the opposition had much less means to reign in the Islamists, than had their counterparts in Tunisia and therefore the MB’s incentives to moderate, and cooperate was not as strong as Ennahda’s.

Conclusion:

As shown in part I the authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunisia both cracked down on political Islamist parties but while the Egyptian authority allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to function as a movement and

didn’t infringe on the religious institutions in the country, the Tunisian regime took a much harsher stand. Not only did Bourghiba and his successor Ben Ali outlaw and persecute Ennahda’s member they also tried to eradicate Islamic institutions and the clergy’s influence over society as such. This caused a much more negative perception among Tunisians to political Islam than was the case in Egypt.

The shared economic experience with ISI and the following adjustment-period created high unemployment and crony capitalism which paved the way for the Islamic parties to win the first free elections in their country as shown in part II.

But as we have seen in part III inclusion will not always lead to moderation and the continuous drift towards the political center, as some moderation theorists profess, is not a given. Had that been the case the outcome of the post-election constitutions writing process wouldn’t have differed so much in Tunisia and Egypt.

On the other hand “the paradox of democracy”-argument that Islamists once in power will follow their hidden agenda and create an Islamic state was also effectively proved wrong by Ennahda. What can be said is that inclusion will lead to moderation, but not necessarily to democratization. And the constraining factors, a party is exposed to, seem to be of outmost importance for a successful democratization.

As we have seen the constraints being placed on Ennahda was much more forceful that the ones MB was exposed to.

Not only was Ennahda part of a tri-partite coalition government with two secular parties, they were also under constant pressure from a parliament dominated by secular forces that challenged them to tone down their Islamist ideology in order to obtain compromises.

Likewise the political society created by the Tunisian opposition over a long period had established a mutual understanding between Islamists and seculars on the rules of the game for a democratic alternative to the authoritarian regime of Ben Ali (Stepan and Linz 2013, p.24).

These constraints combined with the constraints displayed by a society with a generally more cautious approach to religion in politics proved strong enough both to keep Ennahda on a moderate course and helped them stick to their democratic pre-uprising commitments, which was ultimately underlined when Ennahda accepted electoral defeat in the subsequent election and handed over power to the winning party.

In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood felt strong enough to bully its way through. They didn’t have to moderate, and hence they didn’t (El-Sherif 2014). Instead it saw its popular support as a token that legitimized its total domination of the political process.

MB hadn’t gone through a yearlong process of reform and democratization as had Ennahda and the main opposition was also not dragging them towards the center but rather challenging them from the fringe and thus the checks and balances in place to drag them towards moderation was not as evident as in Tunisia.

At the same time the political institutions in Egypt were weak. There was not a well established political society, the mutual mistrust between the Islamists and the secular were never over come and the constitutional process led to a total polarization of the political landscape culminating in Morsi’s power

grab right before the constitution was put to a popular referendum. This marked another flaw in the checks and balances that could otherwise have kept MB on the democratic track.

As Ennahda and MB are both Islamic parties with a similar ideological background and yet with a very different democratic attitude it seems fair to conclude that it is not the Islamic nature of the parties as such that determined their approach to democracy but rather because the constraints placed on Ennahda was much stronger than the ones MB was exposed to.

Litterature List:

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Schwedler, Jillian. 2013. Islamist in power? Inclusion, Moderation, and the Arab Uprisings. Middle East Development Journal, 5.1

Stepan, Alfred & Juan J. Linz. 2013. Democratization Theory and the “Arab Spring”. Journal of Democracy, 24.2: 15-29

Tezcür, Günes Murat. 2010. Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey. The Paradox of Moderation, pp. 27-32. Austin: University of Texas Press

UNDP. Human Development Report 2013. The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. Table 1 p. 144-145

UNDP Human Development Report 2011. The HDI index seen here: http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/hdr/human_developmentreport2011.html.)

Tables and Figures:

Fig.1 Created by author on statistics from Migration Policy Center, study conducted by European University Institute and Robert Schuman Center for advanced Studies. June 2013. (seen here: http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/docs/migration_profiles/Tunisia.pdf.)

Fig. 2. Created by author on statistics from Migration policy Center, European University Institute and Robert Schuman Center for advanced Studies. June 2013. (seen here: http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/docs/migration_profiles/Egypt.pdf.)

Fig. 3 WVS, Wave 6, 2010-2014 (taken from Cammett et al. 2014 p. 445).

Fig. 4 WVS, Wave 6, 2010-2014 (taken from Cammett et al. 2014 p. 447).

Table 1: Created by author on information from the Tunisian news website: Tunisia-Live.net.

Table 2: Created by author on information from Egyptian media: Ahram-Online, Al-Masry al-Youm and al-Ahram.