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In addition, they were giving small lectures and sermons after prayers. Most of the lecture topics were about how to reform and improve society, using the Koran and Hadith [traditional Islamic teachings] to support their arguments. “This was like some kind of brainwashing but it happened slowly over  six months. I was attending many of those lectures and, after a time, I was preparing in advance the Koranic verses and Hadith texts relevant to the topics. There were weekly competitions between groups of youths. I won two competitions on these religious topics and each time I received 300,000 Iraqi Dinars.”

The administration—including the interior and other ministries, the police, the army and regional governors appointed by the ruling party coalition—can refuse cooperation with the electoral body. For instance, the interior ministry could refuse to open identity registers to remove dead citizens from the voter registration lists. Or the police could refuse to protect the polling stations, usually located in schools. The new law allows the ISIE to turn to the administrative court for redress if the executive blocks the election in any way, but this is an unwieldy process that can take several weeks. “This is a blatant power grab by Nahda,” says Ghazi Ghraïri, secretary-general of the International Academy of Constitutional Law, an NGO based in Tunisia. “The ruling party is running scared that they will be voted out in the next election and are thus not willing to ensure free and fair elections.”

While the assembly is wrangling over the electoral commission’s appointments and structure, the assembly’s committee charged with writing a new constitution presented its third draft on April 22nd. Observers are predicting that the assembly will adopt the new rulebook in July or August. But strangely enough, the constitution will not define an electoral system. A draft electoral law, also the subject of much heated debate, will outline the election structures to pick a new full-term president and parliament. So far, Nahda and the opposition, a motley collection of anti-fundamentalists, have agreed to compromise on a hybrid system. A general election will be held to elect the president and parliament. The majority party in parliament will then choose the prime minister.

Proportional representation was used to allocate the seats for the constituent assembly after Tunisia’s October 2011 elections. Many African countries, including South Africa, use proportional representation to minimise dominance by larger parties and to ensure that small parties can gain access to the legislature. Tunisia, like other emerging democracies, is discovering the difficulty of writing a new rulebook and establishing a new system of government. Wrangling over the constitution and the electoral law will continue for many more months, as will the process of choosing members for the new electoral commission.

Although Tunisia is often cited by the Western media as the most stable state among those that experienced upheavals and regime-changes in 2011, the country has experienced political unrest and assassinations. Two leading left-wing politicians, Mohamed Brahmi and Chokri Belaid, members of the same Popular Front alliance, were killed by gunmen just months apart during 2013.

The EU along with NATO and led by the US are responsible for the current chaos in Libya. This pattern of sanctions, massive bombings, ground interventions through direct occupation or proxy forces have failed throughout the entire region of North Africa and the Middle East. Any real reversal of the political crisis in the regions must take on an anti-imperialist character stressing the necessity of genuine political independence and territorial sovereignty designed to break with the legacy of imperialism.