Lessons from the only remaining Arab Spring democracy

There have been two free and fair nationwide elections since the fall of Ben Ali—in 2011 for a constituent assembly and in 2014 for parliament and a president. A third is scheduled for October. There’s more to a democracy than the vote, and Freedom House reckons Tunisians enjoy fairly high levels of civil liberties as well as political rights. Indeed, the index in which Tunisia has made the most significant gains since the revolution is Freedom House’s Freedom in the World score. On a scale where 1 is the freest and 7 is the least free, the country jumped to 2.5 last year from 6 in 2010. It’s the only Arab nation to merit the rating of “free.” Of the two other Arab democracies, Lebanon, with 5 out of 7, is rated “partly free,” and Iraq, with 5.5 out of 7, is as yet “not free.”

The rankings and numbers don’t adequately capture the feeling of freedom you get in Tunis. The strong arm of the state is conspicuously absent, even where you’d expect it most. Security is scant at the parliament building in the Bardo neighborhood of downtown; leaning against one wall, amid a few desultory tendrils of barbed wire, students from the middle school next door pay no heed to the legislators’ comings and goings. The presidential palace, in the swank suburb of Carthage, is thinly guarded; it, too, shares a wall with a school. Never mind dictatorships, few democracies anywhere afford so little protection to their grandest edifices of state. If Tunisians wanted to storm the barricades, there’d be only a few to storm.