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

have an organizational mechanism with a platform that was well understood by the
people. Furthermore, the splintering of the secularists into several factions made it
difficult to discern the ideological differences between them and to secure a significant
amount of seats for any one party. The secular parties also did not do a good job of
campaigning on their own or engaging with Tunisians, particularly within the interior.
While the election outcome brings into question the popularity of secular ideology
in post-revolution Tunisia, some of the people that we spoke with questioned this
conclusion. Oussama Romdhani, the former Ben Ali Communications Minister,
speculated that a large percentage of those who did not vote in the elections, of which
there were many, would have voted for the secularists (SAIS Group Meeting, 25 January
2012) . This speculation is credible, as the religious parties had a major “get out the vote”
campaign and only garnered 17.7% of the vote when considering votes received out of all
those eligible to vote including those who did not. Nevertheless, this assertion is largely
speculation and it is very difficult to hypothesize about why people did not vote as well
as whom they would have voted for and why. It does give credibility to the idea that
secularism is more predominant than one might expect based on voter turnout and the
results of the elections. Mostly, this makes sense because, while the Ben Ali regime lost
credibility toward its end, this loss was in large part due to corruption. Therefore, some
secular principles must have been nascent within the population for Bourguiba and Ben
Ali to remain in power for so long. Whether or not it started out that way, most likely the
policies and education created by both regimes acted as a form of cultural hegemony to
socialize the population to favor a particular form of secular ideology. While this will be
explored later in this chapter, it is essential to understand the intricacies of politics,
organizational mechanisms, complications in ideology and identity, bias as a result of the
previous party, and a lack of voting culture to realize why it might appear that secularism
is less popular than one might expect.
Currently, there is a large push among the secular parties to consolidate their
platforms and thereby try to unite and streamline their points of view during the next
elections. Furthermore, depending on the capacity of the coalition government to resolve
the problems of economic reform as well as the lessons learned by the secular parties in
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