1 Beyond the myth of the Tunisian exception: the open-ended tale of a fragile democratization Ester Sigillò Introduction The story began on 17 December 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the governorate building in Sidi Bouzid, a rural town two hundred miles South of Tunis. This desperate act became the catalyst for demonstrations and riots that spread throughout the country, based on pre- existing social and political grievances against the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The wave of protests triggered in turn the so-called Jasmine revolution, with an intensification of public anger and sporadic violence, which led the president of Tunisia to step down on 14 January 2011, after 23 years in power. The revolutionary spirit that was fuelled in Tunisia soon overflowed beyond national borders and affected other countries of the region from Libya to Yemen, creating a broader phenomenon, the so-called Arab Spring. Thus, Tunisia, the smallest country of the Maghreb (with just 11 million inhabitants per 160.000 km2), had been abruptly projected on the international media scene and its post-revolutionary process was put under careful observation. Presented by foreign press as a Mediterranean country open to Europe, Tunisia was internationally legitimated during the years of authoritarian regimes as a peaceful and stable country contributing to the security balance of the region. After its independence in 1956, the ‘father of the nation’ Habib Bourguiba was named as the apostle of a Western modernity in a Muslim society, whilst during the 1990s his successor Ben Ali contributed to reassure the international community against the spectre of the Islamist threat through massive repressions throughout the country. Thus, until the events which unfolded in Tunisia in 2011 the country was internationally acknowledged as a soft dictatorship that could be tolerated. Notwithstanding the interests of the international powers in the stability of the region, this international legitimacy was also possible because of a certain scarcity of protests and uprisings against the two apparently resilient authoritarian regimes. Tunisians, indeed, were described as co-opted citizens bartering their freedom with a ‘security pact’ (Hibou 2006). After the Revolution, the international spotlight focused on Tunisia to observe the country’s transition to democracy after more than half a century of dictatorship. This special attention was due to the fact that Tunisia was the first country in the Arab world where an Islamist party assumed power in response to popular demand. Indeed, the greatest challenge for Ennahda after its outstanding victory on the first free and fair elections in 23 October 2011 was to clear up the widespread suspicion about its commitment to democracy. This general suspicion was exacerbated by the anti-Islamists propaganda launched by Bourguiba and Ben Ali, who felt politically threatened by the religious political movement’s strong popular backing. Actually, the victory of the Islamist party contributed to the normalization of the transition process, which culminated with the approval of the Constitutional chart in January 2014. In fact, the search for a common ground in the name of national cohesion has proven to be the key concept of Ennahda’s public discourse since early 2011, when a process of consensual national decision-making laid down the rules for political transition. The narrative of the ‘Tunisian success story’, which often portrayed the country as a model, nonetheless invites some criticism. Five years after the Revolution Tunisia is still fragile and divided between the horizon of democratic consolidation and the spectre of authoritarian resilience. Although the international community welcomed the young democracy by conferring the Nobel Prize to the