North Africa Archive

Tunisia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday confirm the erosion of trust over the past three years in the Islamist party Ennahda, which failed to live up to its electoral promises and implement an effective post-revolutionary political agenda after the ouster of longtime autocrat Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Nidaa Tounes, the secular party led by Beji Caid Essebsi, an 87-year old anchor of the country’s old guard, won with 39 percent of votes, while Ennahda, which dominated the 2011 elections under the leadership of longtime dissident Rachid Ghannouchi and governed the country until ceding power to an interim government in January 2014, […]

Years have now passed since one could use the term “Arab Spring” without deliberate irony, or at least quotation marks. Even the sad rhetorical spinoffs from the metaphor—the cold winter, for instance, that followed the spring uprisings—have gone stale from overuse. And yet there is one country where the hopes of the once-euphoric revolutionaries did not turn out to have been misplaced. Dare we say it? Yes, the Arab Spring has bloomed; it has yielded something of a harvest in one country, the country of its birth, Tunisia, whose experience offers some hopeful lessons for a despondent Middle East. Tunisia […]

Yesterday, the Egyptian judge who sentenced more than 1,200 alleged members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death earlier this year was unexpectedly removed from his bench. Judge Said Youssef was transferred from the criminal judiciary to the civilian judiciary, according to reports. His court, which investigated and tried terrorism cases—mostly against the Brotherhood—has been “dismantled,” he told The Associated Press. Could the judge’s demotion have wider significance in the yearlong crackdown against the Brotherhood under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi? Given the scale of repression, any sign of an easing, like dismissing the internationally criticized judge responsible for so many convictions, bears […]