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Chapter 2 De-democratizing through the Rule of Law Tunis’s main thoroughfare, Avenue Bourguiba, is a broad avenue lined with ficus trees, where men and women in business suits walk briskly across the grassy divide, navigating the lively open-air cafes and stately embassies. Until January 2011, twin billboards flanked each end of the avenue, each with a picture of the country’s president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, smiling imperiously into the distance. These looming pictures of the president had been a fixture of the landscape for so long that most of the city’s denizens had ceased to notice them. To a visitor, however, the portraits stood out as a memorable facet of the downtown Tunis landscape, and the imposing pictures of Ben Ali seemed to be scrutinizing everyone who passed by. The fact that the Arab revolts of 2011 began when a mass protest movement engulfed Tunisia surprised some in the region. For years, analysts, academics, and local activists considered President Ben Ali’s political rule to epitomize the type of ossified authoritarian rule that was stable and enduring . Although Ben Ali had come to power in 1987 promising to oversee a series of reforms, including abolishing lifelong presidencies, twenty-four years later he comfortably presided over a one-party state controlled by his Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) party.1 For over two decades, Ben Ali and his regime had executed a thoughtful, deliberate campaign to weaken every element of political and civil opposition—from lawyers’ and journalists’ unions to opposition political parties to the once vibrant network of independent women’s rights organizations. By the 2000s, all of the president’s opponents, including the main Islamist movement, en-Nahda, were in exile, forced underground, or in jail. Political dissent was nearly impossible, with the Ministry of Interior, conveniently located on Avenue Bourguiba, wielding absolute control through its intimidating network of plainclothes police.2 Reporters without Borders listed President Ben Ali 46 Chapter 2 among the world’s thirty-four ‘‘worst press freedom predators’’ by the mid2000s .3 In 2008, Freedom House ranked Tunisia 177th out of 196 countries in terms of freedom. Tunisians demanded free expression but did so cautiously , with the public sphere limited by tight governmental control. Given these constraints, free expression had not expanded to the extent described in Chapter 2, suggesting how some but not all of these drivers were present in regional countries before the revolutions of 2011. Ben Ali’s strategy of ‘‘de-democratization’’ by way of specific rule-oflaw reforms in the short term eviscerated his opposition and prevented independent civil society activity. Over the longer term, however, this strategy undermined the legitimacy of Tunisian institutions and the substantive meaning of the rule of law.4 In Ben Ali’s case, by exploiting the rules of the game to serve his own personal and party ends, he forced a reckoning among many members of the political elite: by 2011, most had concluded that only dramatic change, including the dissolution of the ruling RCD party, could advance political freedoms and civil liberties, rather than piecemeal rule-of-law reforms undertaken with an autocratic regime still intact.5 Some analysts observed in the late 2000s that Ben Ali had been able to eliminate the independent spirit and will of the Tunisian people, creating a passive society acquiescent to authoritarian rule.6 Yet, the opposite was the case: his de-democratization created a fundamental rejection of the political system in its entirety. President Ben Ali’s deliberate and methodical process of dedemocratization over a twenty-year period included two particular rules of law, which are the subject of this chapter. First, he passed a civil society organization law in 1992 intended to cripple a key nongovernmental organization that had successfully challenged the policies of the Tunisian government for decades—the Tunisian Human Rights League. The law did not ban the League outright but cleverly allowed regime loyalists to infiltrate and to exert control over its membership and activities. Second, in 2002, Ben Ali irrevocably revised Tunisia’s constitution, rolling back previous constitutional constraints on executive power, including presidential term limits. This ‘‘legalistic coup d’état,’’ as it was dubbed at the time, assured Ben Ali’s presidency through 2014 and narrowed the field of possible presidential candidates. Though the regime cast each of these reforms in the language of democratization, in actuality these two laws—combined with a series of additional legal changes initiated in the 1990s...

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