“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” Ozymandian thoughts crowd in on Mediterranean shores, where sun-bleached ruins memorialize great civilizations and testify silently to their inevitable doom.
Here, outside modern Tunis, Arab invaders destroyed Roman Carthage 13 centuries ago. Little is left of building work started by Julius Caesar except the massive walls of Emperor Antoninus’ baths and a few Corinthian capitals cooking under the African sky.
But the Romans, too, were newcomers. Crushed beneath their foundations is the dust of the Phoenician civilization of Hannibal, which Scipio Africanus the Younger razed in 146 B.C. It’s said that he sowed the ground with salt to complete the extirpation and ensure there was no fourth Punic War. Yet even the Phoenicians had been arriviste colonists once, many driven from the Levant by imperial Persia pushing west.
Now another civilization is struggling to be born. Can a modern, self-confident democracy germinate in the dregs of a post-Ottoman society that began its decline half a millennium ago?
Tunisians want to find that out in their third presidential election since the 2011 Arab Spring. They face a tortuous path, recalling the joke about a lost traveler seeking directions to his destination and being advised unhelpfully, “I wouldn’t start from here, if I were you.”
Why is that? Election monitors could not travel to the extreme south of the country because al Qaeda in the Maghreb is active there. But nowhere is free of threat. Some election monitors, for example, spent voting day in the coastal city of Sousse, where terrorists murdered 22 people in a museum in 2015.
I was on another observer team put together by the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, and we were all earnestly and necessarily briefed on safety. What do you do if you are attacked? Not so astonishingly, the first thing to do when fired on by terrorists is to get behind something that will stop bullets, such as a brick wall. Then, when convenient, run like hell. (My monitoring partner and I, plus translator and driver, spent our election day in the cities of Monastir and Mahdia, where the greatest danger seemed to be posed by the food.)
While jihadists plague Tunisia’s fringes, the biggest impediments to democracy and the rule of law across the country come from corruption, apathy, repression, and cynicism. Enthusiasm for democracy and modernity surged in 2011, but many Tunisians have since become disillusioned by a lack of economic progress. Polls suggest as many want a strongman leader as yearn for those Western ideals of freedom and democracy.
As if to cater to members of the old school, one of the presidential candidates with the most support, a TV populist called Nabil Karoui, was arrested and jailed a month ago on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. These accusations may not entirely lack foundation; it’s almost impossible to do business in Tunisia within the strictures of its stifling bureaucracy. (It was a frustrated Tunisian fruit peddler who started the entire Arab Spring when, after he was put out of business for not paying officials the right bribes, he doused himself in gasoline and set himself ablaze.)
But whatever the truth or falsehood of the accusations against Karoui, they were widely taken to be politically motivated. And they were also utterly incompetent, for his arrest was big news and generated great publicity. He duly romped home a strong second in the election. Naturally, there is now talk that he’ll be excluded from a runoff against the first-placed finisher, Kais Saied, a technocrat sometimes referred to as “Robocop.”
This is the sort of stuff that makes people despair of change. But there is a palpable, popular desire for it. And election officials displayed more conscientious effort to do their jobs well than I’ve seen applied to any task, great or small, in my 50 years of intermittent travel in the Arab world.
People went to the polls as though it was routine. Only the sight of parents and grandparents taking children with them to experience this epochal event reminded us onlookers that democracy is a novelty here. Voters were proud of what they were doing. They wanted it for their children. It was moving.
And only if this becomes an actual habit, if this becomes really routine rather than just appearing to be so, can the people of the Middle East cast off the bitter sense of inferiority with which they have for so long looked defiantly and counterproductively at the rest of the world.
No U.S. election goes by without someone tediously saying it’s the most important of our lifetimes. But maybe for Arabs, this election in Tunisia really is. Look on thy works, ye lowly, and hope.
