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As the revolution gathers strength, an old Islamist party looks likely to win any election – if the west respects its legitimacy
As the world's spotlight remains trained on the carnage in Libya, tensions are mounting in nearby Tunisia, where the first of this year's Arab dictator-dominoes fell. Mohamed Ghannouchi, a holdover from the Ben Ali regime that collapsed in January, resigned as prime minister on Sunday after three days of huge street protests in which three people were killed, apparently by police.
Ghannouchi's interim government was under heavy pressure to move faster towards democratic reform, and his departure may not end the protests, unless the entire cabinet changes course or resigns. It has released political prisoners and granted a general amnesty, but protesters want fundamental guarantees of human rights and a new constitution.
Before the last few days of marches outside the hated interior ministry, the epicentre of the January protests, hundreds of young people had occupied the courtyard outside Ghannouchi's office last week for an indefinite sit-in. "Hypocrite minister" was written in Arabic on the name plate in such a faithful copy of the size and style of the original words "prime minister" that the title looked official. On the opposite side of the courtyard the finance ministry sported a "democracy wall", where demonstrators drew slogans or glued lists of political demands.
The rising temperature has not escaped the United States' attention. Rightwing senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain were here a week ago, and last Thursday the state department's top Middle East official, William Burns, held talks with Ghannouchi, who served in the same job for more than 10 years under Ben Ali. Although all three men hailed the Tunisian revolution, there is little doubt they want to keep it – as far as possible – in check.
After Ben Ali fled, Ghannouchi's government was given two months to implement reforms. With the deadline of 15 March nearing, two broad approaches have emerged. The conservative one, backed by the old political and business elite and most of the print media, is to extend the interim government's term until presidential elections in July. France and the US are thought to be pressing for the formation of a new centre party that will absorb leading members of the old ruling party, the RCD, and provide a good candidate for the presidency.
The secular left and the Islamists want deeper change. Along with the main trade union federation, they are displaying remarkable unity and recently formed a National Council for the Defence of the Revolution (NCDR). Far more people were driven into exile or imprisoned for long terms under the old regime than occurred under Hosni Mubarak's rule in Egypt. Welcome parties still turn up at Tunis airport almost every day to greet returning friends and heroes.
After all their personal sacrifices, they are determined not to be cheated into accepting a system that amounts to a sanitised version of Ben Ali's rule, with only a mild softening of the old top-down political control and the same economic inequalities between the capital city and the provinces that sparked the January uprising.
They want power to be handed, on or before 15 March, to a caretaker team of independent technocrats. They also want the NCDR to be given official status and the right to monitor the new government pending elections. These elections should be for a constituent assembly that will work out a constitution that enshrines all the basic civic freedoms as well as mechanisms to prevent or punish torture in prisons and police stations.
"After suffering under a presidential dictatorship and de facto one-party rule, most leftists and Islamists are calling for a parliamentary system," says Radhia Nasraoui, a lawyer who heads the Association against Torture in Tunisia. Her husband, Hamma Hammami, leads the Tunisian Workers' Communist party and was only released from prison when Ben Ali was toppled.
There is a widespread consensus that the old Islamist party, al-Nahda (Renaissance), is Tunisia's strongest political force. It is more powerful morally, if not yet organisationally, than its Egyptian counterparts because so many hundreds of members suffered torture and exile under Ben Ali, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which was banned but not brutalised (apart from very few).
Nahda's leader, Rached Ghannouchi (no relation to the departing prime minister) returned last month from exile in Britain. "The big challenge is how to move from a one-party state to democracy," he said over a glass of mint tea in his brother's house where he is living. "There is an attempt to reinvent the dictatorship with new faces, but it's difficult for them because people are watching".
At the age of 70, he is proud of the role played in the protests by young Tunisians, using the new media. "A quarter of a million unemployed graduates – that's the basis of this revolution," he said. "Its success is 30% to 40% thanks to Facebook, and the rest to al-Jazeera."
The establishment newspapers and some secular politicians are trying to raise the alarm about the Islamists and sharia law, but Rached Ghannouchi and his colleagues insist they want a broad-based coalition to reflect all the movements that toppled the dictatorship. They say arguments over whether policies should be secular or non-secular are a diversion. The main issue is democracy.
In Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the scene of the latest attacks on protesters by the police and pro-Ben Ali thugs, pedestrians conduct animated debates over the country's options. Many speak with pride that Tunisia, one of the smallest Arab states, was the first to mount a successful uprising for democracy. But there is also relief that Egypt followed quickly, so that Tunisia was not left exposed.
Western leaders like to think that they are bringing democracy to less enlightened parts of the world. In Tunisia things look different. They see a west that supported a string of Arab dictators and they remember how western countries led the boycott of Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 election.
With Nahda poised for a major role if elections are permitted in Tunisia, western governments face a new test over their respect for political Islam. Will they fail yet again?