Tunisia: Understanding Conflict 2012 - Johns Hopkins School of ...

October 2011. The PDP and the UPL flouted this rule without serious repercussions,
except perhaps at the ballot box. The electoral commission attempted to pursue legal
action against the violating parties, but a judge dismissed the charges, highlighting the
lack of enforcement power of the electoral commission (Zouari, 28 September 2011).
Interpreting the Constituent Assembly Elections
The NCA elections on 23 October 2011 provided the first real opportunity to evaluate the
strength of the political parties, and as predicted, Ennahdha was the clear winner.
However, many analysts did not anticipate the performance gap between Ennahdha and
its secular rivals. Ennahdha captured 37% of the vote, while the next closest party,
Congress for the Republic, won only 8%. Of all the parties falling short of expectations at
the polls, the PDP’s poor showing came as the biggest surprise. The party captured only
3% of the vote, despite supposedly being well positioned as one of the main opposition
parties under Ben Ali. The biggest surprise success story may have been Al-Aridha, a
party that emerged from nowhere to place third in terms of seat allocations.
The distribution of seats between the parties is analyzed further below, but first, it
is important to remember who the current NCA represents—half of all eligible voters
who exercised their right to vote. Only two-thirds of those voters are now represented in
the assembly by the party they selected. The other third voted for parties that did not
receive enough votes to receive a seat in the NCA (Pickard 2011, 639). In other words,
the current composition of the NCA reflects the will of approximately 34% of the voting
age population.
For this reason and others, Ennahdha’s victory does not lend itself to a clear-cut
interpretation. Part of Ennahdha’s success owes to its grassroots network of supporters
and apparently deep financial resources, as well as its reputation for being effective and
capable of getting things done. Moreover, Ennahdha enjoyed the greatest level of name
recognition throughout the country, due to its highly visible opposition to Bourguiba and
Ben Ali, as well as its efforts to campaign in both rural and urban areas throughout the
country. It was the only party to make a concerted effort to have a presence on the ground
in all electoral constituencies (Churchill, 27 October 2011). Also important, Ennahdha
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