Tunisia Postpones Elections for 3 Months

The interim Tunisian government postponed on Wednesday the first election since the ouster in January of the former dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, citing technical problems but also inevitably reshuffling Tunisian political dynamics.

The decision, in the nation whose unexpected uprising ignited the revolts sweeping the Arab world, pushes the scheduled vote for a constituent assembly from July 24 to October 23. The deferral is likely to bolster the fortunes of the dozens of new political parties still scrambling to organize, perhaps at the expense of their better established rivals, both liberal and Islamist.

For just that reason, the postponement is also reverberating in Cairo, where many liberals want to push back the first election since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak — now scheduled for September — because they fear that Egypt’s venerable Muslim Brotherhood has a decisive organizing edge.

In Tunisia, both the leading liberal faction, the Progressive Democratic Party, and the main Islamist party, Al Nahda, initially opposed the postponement. They argued that Tunisia needed to move as fast as possible to a more legitimate authority, ending the continuing outbreaks of strikes and demonstrations by workers and young people anxious to protect their revolution.

“This cannot continue for much longer,” Ahmed Bouazzi, a senior official of the Progressive Democrats, said in an interview Wednesday. “We need an election.” Al Nahda even warned of violence, saying that the public might grown angry over successive postponements, suspecting that officials were trying to avoid elections altogether.

But both groups ultimately assented to the findings of an independent electoral commission that it was impossible to adequately register voters and organize polls in time for July 24. The commission proposed a date of October 16, and the Progressive Democrats and others successfully negotiated to push it back another week to provide more time to campaign after the Muslim Holy Month of Ramadan, which begins in August this year, Mr. Bouazzi said.

In a statement on its Web site, Al Nahda — one of the most liberal Islamist parties in the region — fulminated against obstruction by the committee, opponents who “fear the ballot box” and unnamed forces out to “steal the revolution.”

But its spokesman, Ali Larayd, said it accepted the consensus. “If all the different parties are agreed on this date, then we shall respect it,” he told Reuters.

Tunisia’s interim prime minister, Beiji Caid Essebsi, promised “democratic, free and transparent elections next October 23,” according to the state news service. He repeated calls for an end to disruptive strikes and protests, noting that Tunisia was already straining under the burden of more than 471,000 refugees from the civil war in Libya. Tunisia has a total population of only 10 million

The relatively muted response to the postponement underscored the differences between political transitions in Tunisia and Egypt. After Mr. Ben Ali’s flight from Tunisia, its small and professional military oversaw a swift handover of power to an interim unity government of civilians. The caretaker government, which has evolved through protests, resignations and replacements to maintain some credibility, laid out a plan for the election of a constituent assembly to begin the democratic process. The assembly in turn will draft a constitution while governing the country until the first constitutional elections.

In Egypt, a council of military officers took power to usher out Mr. Mubarak and has kept it ever since. It has assumed an aloof pose, attempting to govern the country with little public consultation and without tarnishing its mystique in the eyes of the public. The military sought the approval of a referendum to schedule a parliamentary election for September, but the exact voting rules, district lines and potential to revise the constitution and elect a president or prime minister remain unclear.

And at the same time the military faces conflicting pressures from all sides. Some civilians want the military to hand over power as quickly as possible for fear of a new military dictatorship, and the military itself appears eager to free itself from the messy business of governing.

But fearful that moving swiftly toward an election will favor the Muslim Brotherhood, many liberals are pushing for the interim military government to postpone the election or put in place constitutional protections of individual liberties before hand — even if such moves would appear to contravene the democratic process.

The unfolding political process has also highlighted Tunisia’s unusually liberal culture, especially on issues of women’s equality. In planning for the election, Tunisian authorities are requiring all parties participating to list as many female as male candidates, and to alternate them on the ballots, in order to encourage a more even representation of women in the constituent assembly.

Al Nahda, cultural conservatives by the standards of Tunisia, supported the idea, perhaps in part because when Mr. Ben Ali put many of its male members in jail the Islamist group developed a strong female cadre to carry on its work.

Mr. Bouazzi of the Progressive Democratic Party said his organization had already planned to field an equal number of male and female candidates, noting that it has two co-leaders, one male and one female.

 

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