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

the PDP, its lavish spending on overly polished, personality-driven advertising fed into
the rumor that the party was tied to the old regime and whether true or not, this
perception hurt the party at the polls (Interview with Laryssa Chomiak, SAIS group
meeting, 26 January 2012).
While the dominant secular parties focused on the potential Islamist threat, the
unknown populist party Al-Aridha, founded by London-based TV tycoon Hechmi
Hamdi, demonstrated the potential appeal of populism in Tunisia. The party placed an
astonishing third thanks to unrealistic promises, such as providing 100 dinars a month for
the unemployed, universal health care, and affordable electricity and water (McCurdy, 31
October 2011). The surprise success of Al-Aridha has been dismissed by other political
parties, which cite the apparent violation of campaign advertising rules and the reliance
on unrealistic promises to gin up support in the under-educated regions of the interior.
Such quick dismissal of the Al-Aridha phenomenon, however, misses a few important
lessons. First, the meteoric rise of Al-Aridha showed that much of the population,
especially in the interior, cares far more about bread-and-butter issues than questions of
national identity and freedom of speech. Secondly, Hamdi comes from Sidi Bouzid,
where the revolution started, and targeted his campaign to the concerns of people in the
underdeveloped interior of the country. While other Tunis-based parties paid lip service
to the development issues of the interior, Al-Aridha’s focus on the problems there, made
more resonant with Hamdi’s background, likely was perceived as more genuine
(McCurdy, 31 October 2011).
Problems in the Current Party Landscape
The post-election political climate closely resembles the campaign period—polarized and
frozen by the Islamism-secularism debate. Distrust of Ennahdha among secularists,
particularly the elite, remains high, despite the party’s coalition with CPR and Ettakatol.
Secular critics cite Ennahdha’s “double speak”—one party representative saying one
palliative to its traditional base and another to appease its more moderate, secularist
supporters. Unsurprisingly, a stalemate has emerged, with Ennahdha being too weak to
impose its vision and opposition parties acting as obstructionists.
100