Belaid’s killing is merely the culmination of disturbing trends that have been present in Tunisian public life for some time. Above all it makes clear that the rise of political violence is far and away the biggest threat to Tunisia’s transition to democracy

Ennahda is already on the defensive. Its coalition is crumbling beneath it as MPs have resigned in droves from its junior partners in protest at what they allege is Ennahda’s lack of consultation and its apparent determination to put its members in key positions across the state. Public opinion appears to be turning against Ennahda because of its failure to make any headway in dealing with Tunisia’s pressing economic and social problems. And the Islamists also face a political threat from the secular centre-right, in the shape of the recently-established Nida Tounes (“Call of Tunisia”) party under the leadership of the former interim prime minister (and former official under the country’s post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba) Beji Caid Essebsi

there has been a sharp increase in polarization between the Islamists and secular groups. Many secularists are convinced that Ennahda is working to undermine the country’s tradition of tolerance, especially through the apparently permissive stance it has taken to acts of violence by Tunisian Salafists, who are at once a smaller and more radical group than their Egyptian counterparts

The activation of such Salafist neighborhood patrols after Belaid’s assassination has sparked debate among Tunisians. Due to a perceived lack of security, patrols sprang up in areas such as Tunis’ suburbs, Sousse, Hammamet, Sfax, and Bizerte. Some media reports have claimed these groups conducted their patrols in coordination with Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia and the Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution

Salah Edhaoui, a deputy chief of police in the Omrane Supérieure suburb of Tunis, called such efforts “parallel security” and claimed that they tarnished the image of official security institutions in Tunisia. “If such behavior is repeated, people will think that Salafist groups will take the place of policemen, which is harmful to the public image of security institutions as well as to the image of the state’s institutions,”

Minister of Interior Ali Laarayedh denied the existence of a coordinated Salafist security system and said an investigation into the patrols would be opened

resource curse

Oil concentrates a nation’s economy around the state. Instead of putting resources into making things and selling them, ambitious people spend their time currying favor or simply bribing the politicians and government officials who control oil money. That concentration of wealth, along with the opacity with which oil can be managed, creates corruption

Money given out to citizens, of course, is money that the government can’t use to build schools, roads and health clinics. Spending it that way might improve social welfare even more than simply passing out cash — or it could if the government were actually doing it. But governance tends to be so poor in oil-rich countries, so inefficient and corrupt, that social welfare programs end up never reaching the poor

draft laws currently being prepared by various ministries about the right to information and free circulation of information. As a society, we have come a long way on this subject since the 1960s; Military Intelligence (which today we refer to as “sovereign entities”) has loosened its grip on the media, and we have made huge progress in media freedom after the emergence of independent newspapers and satellite channels, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Nonetheless, the security mentality still controls much of freedom of publication, and I believe we need to launch a serious dialogue about the relationship between national security on the one hand and freedom of opinion and free circulation of information on the other.

Information is vital for the democratic process; if the people don’t know what’s happening and if the actions of government officials and public figures are concealed and secret, then the citizenry would not be able to participate in events in their society.

Availability of information also allows the citizenry to oversee state agencies, and thus effectively contribute to curbing corruption and abuse of power. This makes free information flow vital to raising the efficiency of the government apparatus and improving its performance

A spokesman for President Marzouki's Congress for the Republic ( CPR) told Reuters news agency that it would withdraw its three ministers from the Ennahda-led government because its demands over key portfolios had been ignored.

Another leader of the centre-left CPR, Chokri Yacoub, told the state-run TAP news agency that the withdrawal would be confirmed during a news conference on Monday.

Sources within the Congress for the Republic (CPR) also said they believed that a technocratic government was not the solution to the crisis. Instead, party leaders are reported to support the creation of a national unity government, led by Mr Jebali and supported by technocrats.

the stances of your administration have given political cover to the current authoritarian regime in Egypt and allowed it to fearlessly implement undemocratic policies and commit numerous acts of repression

Statements that “Egypt is witnessing a genuine and broad-based process of democratisation” have covered over and indeed legitimised the undemocratic processes by which the Constituent Assembly passed the new constitution, an issue which has in turn led to greatly heightened instability in the country. Calls for “the opposition [to] remain non-violent” and for “the government and security forces [to] exercise self-restraint in the face of protester violence” have allowed the police and the current Egyptian administration to shirk their responsibilities to secure demonstrations and to respond to the demands of the Egyptian people, and have allowed them to place the blame for violence and instability on protesters themselves. Urging “the opposition [to] engage in a national dialogue without preconditions” undermines the ability of the opposition to play a real role in the decision-making processes of the country, as these “dialogues” seldom result in anything more concrete than a photo-op with the president.

when these statements come from the world’s superpower — the one most able to have a positive or negative impact on policies in Egypt and the region, not to mention the biggest donor and material supporter of the Egyptian regime for the past 35 years — they become lethal ammunition, offering political protection to perpetrators of murder, torture, brutality and rape.

Tunisia’s worst crisis since the revolution that toppled the country’s long-serving, secular-minded dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled into exile in January 2011

In the past few months Islamist thugs have been taking the law into their own hands. Neighbourhood “committees to defend the revolution”, often including Nahda members who were political prisoners under Mr Ben Ali, have been accused of trying to intimidate opposition parties and have incurred growing hostility from more secular types. In December they violently broke up a trade-union rally.

The veneration of local saints across north Africa harks back to pre-Islamic Berber and sub-Saharan cultures. Muslim reformists in 19th-century Tunisia dismissed such traditions as demeaning and superstitious. Under Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first president after its independence from France in 1956, many shrines were turned into museums, cultural centres or even cafés. Others were officially tolerated for giving succour to people with medical or psychological worries. Nahda, which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, has proclaimed an “Arab and Islamic identity”, implying distaste for shrine worship. But the desecrations obliged them to declare their respect for Tunisia’s diverse cultural and ethnic heritage.

the power struggle within Iran’s ruling circle is becoming more vicious

Ali Larijani, a former presidential candidate, is the current speaker of parliament. He accused Mr Ahmadinejad of “waging war on God” by accusing a good Muslim of corruption with insufficient evidence—and threw the president out of parliament. “The judiciary is not a special family organisation,” said Mr Ahmadinejad, according to Iran’s state news agency, attacking the Larijanis as a whole.

an edict issued in November by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, explicitly prohibiting political infighting before the election. In response, Mr Ahmadinejad, with studious ambiguity, thanked him for shutting up political figures who talked out of turn and reminded him of the value of the presidency and the constitution

As Jebali spoke Friday, thousands of Tunisians were demonstrating in the streets of the capital in outrage over the assassination, calling on Jebali to resign. Jebali denied that his party had anything to do with the killing -- the first assassination since Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" -- and urged his fellow countrymen to act with restraint. "I already told them -- don't play role of the law, do not respond with violence," he said. "Otherwise, we are trapped, because the goal of those who shot Belaid is to make us react violently."

"Tunisian people made the Jasmine Revolution for two goals: revolution against dictatorship and revolution against corruption, and they also wanted social justice," he said. Those goals have not been betrayed, he said. "The biggest proof is what is happening in the streets -- protests, free press. I don't think that another press in the world enjoys more than here in Tunisia. Beside, we are not corrupt people, but if people made a revolution against us, that's their right, and we will bow to the will of our people."

A general strike called by trades unions for Friday, the first such action in Tunisia in three decades, closed many shops, cafes and other businesses. The national airline, Tunisair, warned of possible flight disruptions.