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Now, almost three years later and after much political tumult — including one year of Muslim Brotherhood rule when they led the opposition — internal divisions and organisational problems have taken a toll on nascent liberal and leftist parties, leading to the resignation of hundreds of their members.

Variance gave the party diversity and strengthened the party’s positions at first, as a result of the synthesis of the opinions of its members, in contrast to “cadre parties” that would have a fixed outlook, like for example the Muslim Brotherhood, who would recruit people who would adopt it, Attia explained.

Believing that differences weakened the party, a bloc was formed of certain members with more organisational experience who started working against the party’s diversity. Attia says this group attempted to prevent those it differed with from being elected to the party’s central committee in the founding conference, but failed. However, the superior organisational skill of this group compared to others eventually enabled it to suppress other voices within the party and take political positions unfavourable to many others in SPAP — for example, aligning with the state following the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

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.

he Muslim Brotherhood were mobilized to control the polling stations, which made it impossible for the others to vote, to such an extent that the Egyptian judges who normally oversee the election were disgusted and withdrew their support for the election process. Despite that, the US Embassy and the Europe declared the election was perfect.

The Tomarod movement started a petition campaign calling for the removal of Morsi and for a new, real election. 26 million signatures were collected, which is the true figure. Morsi had not taken this campaign into account. So it was decided on 30 June — which is exactly one year after his inauguration — that there should be a demonstration. And the demonstration was gigantic, the largest in the whole history of Egypt: 33 million people moved into the streets of Cairo and all Egyptian towns, including small towns. When you say 33 million people out of the total population of 85 million people, it means everybody.

The western media are continuously repeating the words of Morsi ‘we are moving to a civil war’, but it is not possible. Facing the situation, the army operated in a very wise, intelligent way.

Egypt was never cleansed of corrupt figures by the Muslim Brotherhood, which instead joined them. Key figures in Egypt, like Al-Azhar’s Grand Mufti Ahmed Al-Tayeb (who was appointed by Mubarak), criticized the Muslim Brotherhood when Mubark was in power, then denounced Mubarak and supported the Muslim Brotherhood when it gained power, and then denounced the Muslim Brotherhood when the military removed it from power.

Unless a democratically-elected government is killing its own people arbitrarily and acting outside the law, there is no legitimate excuse for removing it from power by means of military force. There is nothing wrong with the act of protesting, but there is something wrong when a military coup is initiated by a corrupt military force that works in the services of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Expecting to win the 2012 elections, at first the Egyptian military fielded one of its generals and a former Mubarak cabinet minister (and the last prime minister to serve under Mubarak), Ahmed Shafik, for the position of Egyptian president. If not a Mubarak loyalist per se, Shafik was a supporter of the old regime’s political establishment that gave him and the military privileged powers. When Ahmed Shafik lost there was a delay in recognizing Morsi as the president-elect, because the military was considering rejecting the election results and instead announcing a military coup.

In a way counterrevolution started already mid-March 2011 when Saudi and Emirati troops invaded Bahrain to put an end to the movement. Precisely at the same moment NATO forces struck Gaddafi. Cracking down on the uprising in Bahrain, while supporting Benghazi ?

It was an Arab movement in the sense that it happened from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian-Arabian Gulf, which constitutes a cultural and linguistic zone, even if the local dialects are different, a significant number of people have a mother tongue other than Arabic (Tamazight, Kurds…) or do not consider themselves Arabs. A region stretching out from its common destiny.

Through the policies of infitâh (economic opening) and the process of privatization, the coherence of the system built post independence has vanished. Neoliberalism has deepened the differences between rich and poor. For the oligarchies, privatization was the opportunity to plunder and control the benefits of oil and other raw materials but also to snaffle the grants of foreign aid. In each country the gap between oligarchy and society has widened. And rage has accumulated.

Yet, one local trade union may save the day.  If it did, it would not be doing so for the first time.  For this is no ordinary union.  The Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT) has affected the character of Tunisia as a whole since the late 1940s.  It impacted significantly the 2011 revolution and the transition period, and is likely to impact the future. In this, it is unparalleled elsewhere in the Arab world.  And it is largely because of it that one may confidently say that Tunisia is not Egypt, or Syria or Yemen. Indeed, to understand Tunisia, one must get to grips with its labour movement.

UGTT has been the outcome of Tunisian resistance and its incubator at the same time.  For example, in 1984 it aligned itself with the rioting people during the bread revolt; in 2008, it was the main catalyst of the disobedience movement in the Mining Basin of Gafsa; and, come December 2010, UGTT, particularly its teachers’ unions and local offices, became the headquarters of revolt against Ben Ali. 

In 1978, UGTT went on general strike to protest what amounted to a coup perpetrated by the Bourguiba government to change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional and too powerful.  The cost was the worst setback in the union’s history since the assassination of its founder in 1952.  The entire leadership of the union was put on trial and replaced by regime loyalists. Ensuing popular riots were repressed by the army, resulting in tens of deaths.

A new dictatorship, much more violent than the one it displaced, is consolidating its control over the country. This time, it enjoys the express backing of the vast majority of non-Islamist political forces, including self-proclaimed liberal parties. Egypt has now returned to the status quo ante, not of January 24, 2011, but of the dark days of the fifties, when the Free Officers, under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, consolidated their rule by destroying all opposition, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Egypt’s liberal parties.

And the consequences of this go well beyond targeting Islamist opposition to the coup; both the state-owned and privately-owned pro-military media condemn all opposition, Islamist or non-Islamist, as being secretly part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore designating the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist threatens all opposition to the emerging military-backed order. . .

The notion that elimination of the Muslim Brotherhood would produce a liberal democratic order was wishful thinking. . .

Despite radically different attitudes and levels of experience, deputies from all factions took their task overwhelmingly seriously and debated in an open and fruitful atmosphere. The time factor was decisive here. Though criticised by some as “lengthy” and “not efficient”, the fact that the NCA took two and a half years (instead of one as planned) contributed to the creation of cross-party trust – which became one of the “secrets” behind NCA’s success.

The enduring contribution of external players constituted a third factor that contributed to the NCA’s success. Particularly the influential UGTT trade union, not least with the inclusion of the Employers’ Association UTICA, the League of Human Rights LTDH, and the Bar Association of Lawyers in the “National Dialogue” roundtable meetings, who pushed for keeping talks about the 149 constitutional articles ongoing.

Surrounded by the pressure of Islamists and civil activists, Tunisia’s deputies have managed to achieve something unique in the Arab world: making the parliament the centrepiece of political discourse and power. 

Too many of those who participated didn’t see – for generational reasons, largely – that in order to hit home you have to have some form of political movement. It wasn’t surprising that the Muslim Brotherhood, which had taken part in the protests in Egypt at a late stage, took power: it was the only real political party in Egypt. But then the Brotherhood played straight into the hands of the military by behaving like Mubarak – by offering deals to the security services, offering deals to the Israelis – so people began to wonder what the point was of having them in power. The military was thus able to mobilise support and get rid of the Brotherhood. All this has demoralised an entire generation in the Middle East.

At the lunch, he said: ‘Now it’s time for questions – I’ll start off. Tariq Ali, I read the piece you wrote in the Guardian arguing that Tony Blair should be charged for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. Do you mind explaining why?’ I spent about ten minutes explaining, to the bemusement of the Syrian guests. At the end the ambassador said: ‘Well, I agree totally with that – I don’t know about the rest of you.’ After the guests had left, I said: ‘That was very courageous of you.’ And the MI6 man who was at the lunch said: ‘Yeah, he can do that, because he’s retiring in December.’ But a similar thing happened at the embassy in Vienna, where I gave a press conference attacking the Iraq war in the British ambassador’s living room. These people aren’t fools – they knew exactly what they were doing. And they acted as they did as a result of the humiliation they felt at having a government which, even though the Americans had said they could manage without the UK, insisted on joining in anyway.

The Greeks are being punished not so much for the debt as for their failure to make the reforms demanded by the EU. The right-wing government Syriza defeated only managed to push through three of the 14 reforms the EU insisted on. They couldn’t do more because what they did push through helped create a situation in Greece which has some similarities with Iraq: demodernisation; totally unnecessary privatisations, linked to political corruption; the immiseration of ordinary people.

Under European colonialism the Middle East had a few decades of classic liberal rule in the first half of the twentieth century. Egypt, Iraq and Iran had elected parliaments, prime ministers and popular parties. However, liberal rule was eventually discredited insofar as it proved to be largely a game played by big landlords overly open to the influence and bribery of grasping Western powers.

These governments took steps in recent decades toward neoliberal policies of privatization and a smaller public sector under pressure from Washington and allied institutions—and the process was often corrupt. The ruling families used their prior knowledge of important economic policy initiatives to engage in a kind of insider trading, advantaging their relatives and buddies.

The policies of these one-party states created widespread anxiety among workers, the unemployed and even entrepreneurs outside the charmed circle, seeming to create an insuperable obstacle to the advancement of the ordinary person.

This youth uses two platforms to produce the political: the streets and the social media.  Both of these platforms function concomitantly for the production of the political in two ways.

Other than the already politicized groups such as the Kurds and the leftists, the majority of this population has not been in online or offline activism as part of the masses at large. The youth, just like Turkish society as a whole, is fragmented into enclaves of identity groups; however values such as individualism, freedom and liberty seem to constitute the commonality among these groups.

Due to the minimum coverage of demonstrations and police brutality across the mainstream news media, the social media take up the role of traditional forms of news to spread the information from the site of  the demonstrations.

What has been lacking is the required level of political uniformity and ideological orientation that could provide a people’s roadmap into the future. Obviously the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) government of President Morsi does not have a broad outlook that is conducive to the overall unity needed to move Egypt forward.

In light of the mass demonstrations which have swept the country, the military said that if the politicians could not reach some agreement on how to resolve the crisis within forty-eight hours, they would put forward their own program for the country. Such a statement raises questions about the character of the military’s ultimatum.

All of the groups that consider themselves revolutionaries have opposed the notion that the military should seize power from the FJP and its allies in the government. During the period of rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), between February 2011 to June 2012, the country was marked by widespread unrest resulting in mass arrests, injuries and deaths.

‘We’ve heard so much negativity, but can you tell us what you are actually doing about it?’ The question came from the back of the hall at the Africa Centre in London, where over 100 people had gathered to hear about the state of contemporary African protest movements from a panel of African activists including Ayanda Kota of the South African Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, Bayo Oyenuga of Occupy Nigeria, Osama Zumam of the Sudanese Communist Party and the respected commentator and political activist Yash Tandon.

However, these events have rarely been articulated into an African narrative, with the result that western audiences end up being drip-fed stories reinforcing the impression of stereotypical African instability and ‘Afro-pessimism’. Yet if the under or mis-reported uprisings, protests, revolts and changes of regime in many parts of Africa over the past few years (including, amongst others Cote D'Ivoire, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Mozambique) have told us anything, it is that politics on the continent does not always, or mostly, take place at the point of a gun. 

Shrinking the state in Africa (an outcome of these policies as enforced by international donors) has produced the very conditions which protestors have revolted against: corruption, rising utility prices, and growing inequality.