By the time the old man reached the stage, there was a turbulent sea of strobe lights and fireworks and drifting colored smoke in the dark esplanade of Kasbah Square. It looked as if half the population of Tunis was out there. The young MC had to bellow into his microphone to break through the chanting. “Let us welcome the leader of the Islamic movement, the leader of Ennahda, Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi!” Instantly, the chants changed into deep roars of approval. The old man stepped forward, the spotlight illuminating his tall, gaunt figure and dark suit, and began doing his trademark wave, a slow, mechanical motion. It was as familiar to this crowd as the gestures of their own parents. So was his voice, a dry, nasal instrument that one Tunisian comedian had compared to a car that won’t start. Rached Ghannouchi had been guiding the Tunisian Islamic movement for more than three decades, longer than most of this crowd had been alive. His long face, with its peaked brows and downward-sloping eyes, gave him the look of a benevolent crocodile. “This is the largest crowd Tunis has ever seen!” Ghannouchi said as he took the microphone. “This vast crowd is proof that the revolution has not died. It’s a revolution all over again.” The crowd roared approvingly at the sound of his voice. They began to chant: Loyal, loyal, to the blood of the martyrs!
It was the night of August 3, 2013. Ghannouchi smiled uneasily as he gazed out at the crowd: he knew the enthusiasm was laced with anger. His Ennahda-led government was under attack, and this was their moment for a show of force. It had been nine days since the left-wing politician Mohamed Brahmi had been gunned down in front of his house by assassins on a motorbike, and Tunis was on fire. Demonstrations had started before the body was cold, big crowds gathering every day to accuse the Islamists of murder and to demand they resign. Ghannouchi is a killer! they chanted. Egypt has a hero named Sisi, where is ours? No reconciliation, No compromise! They were following the same script as in Cairo, where the Brotherhood had been overthrown a month earlier. The Tunisian secularists had adopted the same names: Tamarod, the National Salvation Council. They were begging the army for a coup. Dozens of them resigned from Parliament. Our blood is red, theirs is black, was one of the phrases you heard. As if they were preparing alibis for a murder not yet committed. There was tear gas in the streets almost every day, and the police seemed unable to control the crowds. Tunis, some said, was on the brink of civil war, the last domino of the Arab winter.
It was hard for outsiders to take it all in. Tunisia had been the cradle of the 2011 uprisings, and in many ways the most hopeful. This was a small, pacific country that seemed—on the map—to hover in the Mediterranean between Africa and Europe. It had none of the gunpowder of its neighbors: no sectarian rifts, no tribal strife, no violent insurgencies, no oil. The army was weak and apolitical. Walking down Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, with its parallel rows of pollarded ficus trees, its umbrella-sheltered espresso bars, its cathedral, and its century-old theater, you could easily imagine you were in southern France or Italy. Like those countries, Tunisia had strong labor unions, run by Communists. It even had potty-mouthed comedians and topless beaches. Tunisians were more literate than most of their Arab neighbors, and mostly healthier: the state had followed the European model there too, investing in education and state-sponsored health care instead of defense.
Tunisians had risen up against a dictator they believed was imperiling this legacy. It was their good luck that Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, for all his corruption and misrule, was not nearly as brutal as most other Arab autocrats, and he did not have the army behind him. The protests came boiling out of the Tunisian bled in December 2010, and soon the trademark Arab Spring line emerged for the first time: ash sha’ab ureed isqaat an nizam, the people want the fall of the regime. (This being Tunisia, it was mostly voiced instead with a single French word: “Dégage!”) President Ben Ali fled the country with his inner circle on January 14, 2011, barely two days after the demonstrations reached the capital. A new civilian government emerged almost immediately, and within another six weeks, the protesters had secured further victories, banishing more tainted regime figures. Unlike so many other Arab countries, Tunisia still had a few veteran politicians who were relatively untainted and acceptable (more or less) to all. A former stalwart of the postcolonial era presided over a bloodless transition and paved the way, in the autumn of 2011, for elections that were deemed free and fair. The revolution’s first year ended well.
The descent started soon after the elections, in October 2011. Ghannouchi’s party won more than 41 percent of the new Parliament, enough to form a government. It was well organized, and it was the mildest and most democratic Islamist party in history. Their vision of Turkish-style Islamism and an entrepreneurial economy—a more liberal version of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—appealed to many swing voters who were willing to try something new and had some sympathy for the Islamists’ mistreatment by the old regime. But like any political party, Ennahda was reluctant to alienate its ideological base, which included many harder-line Islamists. They thought they could control them. As in Egypt, it worked the other way around: their radical cousins dragged them down.
The trouble started with a Salafi group called Ansar Sharia, or supporters of Islamic law. It had first appeared on the scene in 2011, one of several seemingly unrelated groups by the same name in different Arab countries. At least one of them was a front group for Al Qaeda, which was trying to rebrand itself to suit the age of populist revolution. The Tunisian version presented itself as a peaceful and independent organization, at least at first. But like the others, it was committed to building an Islamic state, and its tactics grew progressively more militant. The leaders of Ansar Sharia saw Ennahda as a convenient umbrella under which it could launch a cultural jihad. In 2012, Ansar Sharia held rallies all over the country and brought Salafi speakers from the Gulf. They demanded sharia law, and they organized boycotts and threats when Tunisian TV stations or newspapers aired “un-Islamic” material. They were behind the mob that stormed the U.S. embassy in Tunis in September. Even then, when the danger should have been obvious, Ennahda failed to crack down.
When jihadis with ties to Ansar Sharia assassinated two leftist politicians in 2013—one in February, one in July—it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger. Ennahda took the blame. In a sense, they deserved it, and Rached Ghannouchi knew it. They had let it happen. Their mistakes had allowed a furious anti-Islamist movement to form, as in Egypt. And as in Egypt, it was threatening to destroy them.
Ghannouchi knew all this as he addressed the crowd on that August night in 2013. He had already made up his mind that the only way to avoid the Egyptian fiasco was with radical change. He had shared his decision with a few top confidants just before going onstage: the Islamist movement could survive only by giving up everything it had won at the polls. Tonight he planned to give the crowd a warning of what lay ahead. He knew it would not be easy. After a few minutes of familiar applause lines, he paused and shifted his tone. “We call for national reconciliation in this country,” he said. “We want Tunis to reconcile with itself, to reconcile with its people.” The crowd did not respond. This was not what they were expecting. They had come here to bare their teeth against the coup makers. They wanted words of defiance, not of compromise. They had all seen the footage of Rabaa Square in Cairo, and some of them seemed to be consciously parroting the slogans there. Ghannouchi retreated a bit, threw them some more red meat. “We will never accept a coup in this country!” he thundered. The crowd was with him again, the flags waving, the cheers lasting on and on. But a few minutes later, he tacked back away from them again. He hinted that the years of dictatorship had not been all bad, that the years after independence had brought achievements. And again he spoke of reconciliation and unity. “National unity is the highest goal, and we will need to make sacrifices for this unity,” he said. “Tunis is older than Ennahda, Tunis is older than all of us.” Now part of the crowd was openly booing the father figure who had led their movement for decades. This was unheard of at an Ennahda rally. “Listen to me a little more,” Ghannouchi said, struggling to penetrate the din. There were chants in the back of the crowd: Death to the coup makers. “Listen to me…” He had lost them. It would take almost a full minute before his young aides, bellowing patriotic chants for the crowd to follow, had regained control.
As his speech came to an end, Ghannouchi was thinking about the enormity of the task he faced. He was convinced that the only way to avoid civil war was for Ennahda to resign from the government and agree to new elections—elections it was likely to lose. But it was clear that his own people did not want to concede anything. Perhaps he couldn’t blame them; the slogans on the other side of town were just as bad. The secularists thought they owned the street, and they wanted blood. Ghannouchi didn’t only need to convince his own people. He also needed a partner on the other side, someone with the power and the will to disarm. He wasn’t sure there was one.
* * *
On that same evening, Beji Caid Essebsi was perched on a couch in his elegant Tunis villa, watching the news of both rallies on TV. He was the country’s last remaining elder statesman, and he looked the part. At eighty-six, he had the stoical air of an admiral standing erect on a sinking ship, with his pale, collapsing jowls, perennially pursed lips, and eyes that seemed to be fixed disapprovingly in the middle distance. He was a rigid secularist and had spent his entire career in the service of Tunisia’s great postwar modernizer, the dictator Habib Bourguiba. Essebsi was the last living link to that era—now seen through a thick cloud of nostalgia. He had inherited the mantle of the country’s new anti-Islamist movement, and many of the protesters were calling for him to take power, like General Sisi in Egypt. Part of him would have loved to. He hated the Islamists. They seemed determined to ruin everything he’d achieved. He wanted to snap his fingers and banish them forever from his beloved Tunis. But he knew it couldn’t be done. There were too many, and the Tunisian army was far too weak to pull off a coup.
The phone rang, and he recognized the number: Nabil Karwi, the owner of Nessma, Tunisia’s biggest TV station. The words began pouring out of the receiver, rapid-fire. Even on the phone, Karwi emanated the verve of a born impresario and adman. You could almost see him through the telephone: a small man with a big voice, strutting back and forth as he talked, unable to sit down, his eyes gleaming behind rimless designer glasses, one hand reaching up to stroke his coiled, slicked-back hair. Essebsi was used to hearing Karwi’s bright ideas. The two of them had been partners for almost two years now. It was in the wood-paneled penthouse office of Karwi’s TV station that they’d hatched the plans for Nidaa Tounes, the anti-Islamist political party that was now rallying all the opposition to its side. Karwi had been the prime mover back then. He’d been vilified by the Islamists for his station’s liberal programs and threatened with death. He’d been forced to flee to Paris, and even there he’d been attacked. On his return, he recruited Essebsi to help him fight back. In that first meeting, in early 2012, he had told Essebsi, “You and I are like two men in a bar on a highway in an old American movie. The Hells Angels are coming, and we can wait for them to kill us, or we can go out and fight.” (Karwi loved repeating this story, and he recited his conversations with Essebsi for me line by line, like an audio play.) Essebsi began appearing regularly on Nessma, fulminating against the Islamists and reminding Tunisians of the great legacy that was being destroyed. It struck a nerve. Many Tunisians feared that the Islamists they’d voted into power in 2011 were turning Tunisia into Afghanistan. They turned to Essebsi as a savior, liberal youth and old regime cronies alike. Karwi used to say he saw the new party as Noah’s ark: we have Noah, now all we need is to get the animals on board.
“Si Beji,” Karwi was saying—everyone used the term of deep respect with Essebsi—“I’ve got people coming into my office all day, saying, Kill them, destroy them, the Islamists have got to go. And look, I hate them as much as anyone does. But let’s be realistic: Do we have the army or the police behind us, the way they did in Egypt? Do we have millions of dollars to bring people to Tunis? I think we should calm down a bit and think. If we do this full tilt, the Islamists will fight back. They will call for holy war, and then no one can stop it. The country will be destroyed.”
Essebsi listened. When he spoke, his cold staccato formed a sharp contrast with Karwi’s flowing monologue. “It’s true,” he said. “So what do you propose?”
Karwi shot back: “You must meet Ghannouchi. Go on TV and throw down the glove. He can’t refuse.”
Ten days later, Ghannouchi was on a private plane bound for Paris. The meeting was set to take place in the Hotel Bristol, just across from the Élysée Palace. Essebsi had to be in Paris for medical checkups, but meeting outside the country made sense anyway. They wanted strict secrecy. No one in either of the two political camps could know, because both sides were dead set against any gesture of rapprochement. Apart from the two men, only a handful of intimates were told. Karwi had recruited his billionaire friend Slim Riyahi to approach Ghannouchi and arrange the flight to Paris, and the hotel. The Islamist leader brought only one aide with him.
They met on the following morning, a Thursday, in a cavernous hotel suite with ocher walls and a view of the Eiffel Tower. Ghannouchi walked in looking almost clerical: black suit, white shirt, no tie. Essebsi wore his usual blue suit and tie. The two men shook hands, and Essebsi asked him about the trip from Tunis. Riyahi and Karwi helped to break the ice with some small talk, and then they arranged chairs around a coffee table and sat down. There were only four of them. Ghannouchi had held his aide back, and only after a half hour of talk did he ask if it was all right for him to come in. He’d been warned about Essebsi’s Gallic preoccupation with protocol, his insistence on gestures of respect. That was all right with him. Ghannouchi had never worn his ego on his sleeve. He played the long game.
The two men had met before, but this summer morning in Paris was the first time they really took the measure of each other. They could scarcely have been more different. Essebsi was the embodiment of the old political elite in Tunis, the heir of a family that had been close to the Ottoman beys for generations. His pale skin hinted at his non-Arab origins. Like many of the Tunisian elite, he was part Turkish and part European. One of his great-great-grandfathers had been an Italian boy, kidnapped by corsairs from a Sardinian beach at the age of about ten and pressed into service in the maison beylicale. That first Caid Essebsi—the name came from his official role as tobacco master in the palace—passed on his status to his descendants. The family had preserved a quasi-aristocratic standing, marrying into the tiny circle of power and wealth in the capital. Beji’s own father had died when he was young, and after attending Tunisia’s best schools, Beji was sent to France to study law. It was there, in 1950, that he encountered Bourguiba, then the exiled leader of the Tunisian anticolonialist movement, who became a substitute father and lifelong inspiration. Years later, Essebsi described in a reverent memoir how Bourguiba took him on their first day together to the Place de la Sorbonne to pay homage at the stone statue of Auguste Comte, France’s great advocate of science and the “religion of humanity.” The message was unmistakable: Tunisia’s future lay with a rigorous secularism. France would remain the beacon for all development, even if French colonialism at home was the enemy. It went without saying that Bourguiba’s vision was entirely de haut en bas. Building the state came first, and democracy, perhaps, in a distant future. Essebsi still breathed this air of austerity and high purpose, as if he too expected someday to be memorialized in stone in a Paris square.
Ghannouchi had come from the far end of the Arab social world. He was the son of a farmer in Tunisia’s remote southeast, a village with no electricity or paved roads, and did not ride in a car until he was fifteen. He and his nine brothers and sisters worked in the fields every day and then gathered for a simple meal of couscous and broth. They ate meat only a few times a year. During the long winter nights, the family would sit together for hours weaving baskets from palm leaves, to help supplement their income. They would sip hot tea and sing hymns about the Prophet Muhammad to keep up their spirits and stay awake. Ghannouchi’s father was one of a few villagers who had memorized the Koran, and that gave him a certain status in a place where Islam was the fulcrum of daily life. His son Rached might never have left the village if not for an older brother who got a job that paid enough for his schooling. He went to the local branch of Zaytouna, an ancient network of Arabic-language schools that included a strong Islamic component (and was later abolished by Bourguiba). When he made his first trip to Tunis, at the age of eighteen, he was amazed by its French-style cafés and boulevards, its women dressed in revealing European clothes. He became, he later wrote, “a stranger in my own country.” He formed an aspiration to speak for all the other villagers who found themselves exiled at home.
These two opposed life trajectories now faced each other in Paris above the clinking of teacups and the soft hum of the air-conditioning. Essebsi started first, as they all knew he would. “Clearly, we are in a very big crisis,” he said. “The situation could not be more serious, and you cannot handle this by yourself.” He began reviewing the previous two and a half years, since Ennahda had first formed a government after winning the elections of 2011. He enumerated a long list of mistakes, starting with the Salafi preachers who’d been allowed to come to the country, often greeted like heroes at the airport. The extremists of Ansar Sharia had been left to do as they pleased, flying the black flag in public rallies and building training camps in the desert. Members of Parliament had openly espoused the jihad in Syria, including members of Ennahda’s own guidance bureau. The party had done nothing to stop this. Then, in September 2012, had come the attack on the U.S. embassy in Tunis, a preventable catastrophe. “It is very clear that you do not know how to manage the state, you have no experience,” Essebsi said at one point. He went on to the mismanagement of the economy: Ghannouchi had poor relations with the French, an essential trading partner. He had done little to shore up the ailing tourism industry.
Through it all, Ghannouchi just kept nodding his head, saying, now and then, “You’re right.” Karwi remembers being amazed by the man’s patience. Not once did he speak up or try to interrupt. Finally, after forty-five minutes, Essebsi had exhausted himself. The lecture was over. The men sipped their tea in silence for a moment.
Then Ghannouchi began. “I believe that the most important thing now is to save the republic and its institutions, to make sure we do not go to civil war,” he said. “We must find a path of reconciliation that will guide us through this period.” He went on to talk about his own mistakes. His movement had been in opposition, and mostly in exile, for decades; they had much to learn about governing. He was willing to see Ennahda step down, though it would take a lot of work to persuade people inside the party. He was also willing to make significant concessions on the constitution. He even hinted that he saw no obstacle to Essebsi himself becoming president. After outlining all this, he asked Essebsi whether he’d be willing to go on TV and calm his followers, to urge patience and compromise. Essebsi politely demurred. “The pressure right now is on you,” he said. “I cannot simply take it away. But let us continue to meet, and we may find ways to manage the situation.” Ghannouchi agreed. Karwi then asked the men to pose for a photograph. Slim Riyahi, the businessman, stood between them. He is smiling for the picture, but the other two look sternly into the camera. They signed a joint press release about the meeting, then shook hands and said goodbye.
They made it public three days later, a Sunday. In Tunisia’s small political world it was, as Karwi put it, a “media bomb.” Instantly both Ghannouchi and Essebsi were the subject of furious criticism within their parties. When Ennahda’s Shoura council—the main deliberative body—met the next day, more than 100 of the 120-odd people present voted their disapproval of what he’d done. Ghannouchi gave a speech asking the members to let him try a policy of conciliation. If it failed, he said, he would take full responsibility and resign. Some members wanted another vote to expressly forbid him from holding any further meetings with Essebsi, but they were voted down. As the meeting broke up, Ghannouchi sensed that he was taking a risk. He wasn’t yet sure whether he could trust Essebsi. But he got his first inklings of success a few days later. On August 23, on the eve of a big opposition rally, Essebsi announced that he would not attend. The rally fizzled, and the message was clear to everyone: Beji wants to lower the temperature. He was giving Ghannouchi what he’d asked for in Paris after all.
It was hard to say whether the policy of détente would succeed. Protests smoldered on, even as Tunisia’s business and professional elite began holding an endless round of talkathons. They were led by four groups: the big labor union, known as the UGTT; the lawyers’ and business leaders’ councils; and a human rights group. They began coordinating with the main political parties and drew up plans to resume a “national dialogue” that had collapsed earlier that year. But there were plenty of leftists who still held Ennahda responsible for Brahmi’s assassination and wanted revenge.
On the morning of October 5, Ghannouchi walked into the Palais des Congrès, a huge banquet hall used for public functions in downtown Tunis. He did not know it, but he was walking into an ambush. The entire political class was there, clustered by a bank of TV cameras: the leaders of the “quartet” running the national dialogue and the heads of all the parties. That much was expected. But instead of a discussion, he was being presented with a fait accompli. A “road map” for the national dialogue had been prepared for all parties to sign, and it included the demand that the Ennahda-led government relinquish all power to a caretaker authority. This was a huge concession, one his party was not yet prepared for. He sensed right away that many in that room were expecting him to refuse. They wanted the event to turn into a public denunciation of Ennahda and its leader. As he waited his turn to sign, Ghannouchi later told me, he felt “a mountain on my shoulder.” His party’s Shoura council had already voted overwhelmingly that they would join the national dialogue only on condition that Ennahda not be forced from power. He now had to weigh his own judgment against the party he represented. He signed, in full view of millions of Tunisians.
Then came the most difficult moment in his political life. He got into a car with his aides, and they drove straight to Gammarth, a Tunis suburb on the coast. The party’s entire Shoura council was waiting for him in the conference room of a hotel. A murmur of angry voices was audible as he walked in and took his seat. One by one, members unleashed their fury. More than sixty spoke against the decision to sign. Some said it was treason against the movement and a betrayal of those who had died defending it. One of Ghannouchi’s advisers told me he had never seen him facing this much anger.
Finally it was Ghannouchi’s turn to speak. He acknowledged the anger and said he felt it was a bitter moment for him and for the Islamic movement. But he then said he believed that signing the road map was necessary in order to save Tunisia from civil war. It was a moment when the movement’s interests had to be weighed against the country’s, and the country’s interests were higher. He concluded with these words: “If you want to go to a confrontation, go. But I will not be part of it.” Once again, he was threatening to resign. It was his trump card. Ghannouchi had the status of a philosopher-king in the movement, and they knew they would be crippled without him. After three hours of discussion, the council agreed reluctantly to let the signature stand.
Much of Tunisia was now asking: What is Ghannouchi’s game? How did he get the strength to go against his own party? And to win? You could say he’d been scared into compromise by the coup in Egypt. Everyone had. By October, even the fiercest Tunisian secularists had to admit that the “hero” of Egypt looked a little tarnished. The massacre at Rabaa had shocked everyone, and the gathering insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—billed as retaliation—was bearing out the worst fears.
But Ghannouchi’s signature on that document wasn’t just about fear. It was the product of a half century of political and intellectual evolution. He was an Islamist, but in a vastly different sense from the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose education consisted mostly of rereading the Koran in prison. Ghannouchi escaped the narrow mental world of his village as a young man. He lived abroad for decades, reading widely in three languages and constantly weaving new strands into the fabric of political Islam. In a sense, he was the opposite of Sayyid Qutb, the notorious Egyptian radical whose work helped shape the leaders of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda. Qutb traveled to the United States in 1948 and spent almost two years there, but he never breached the wall of his own deep resentments and anxieties. Qutb’s famously hysterical description of a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, has become a touchstone for analysts of radical Islam: he recoiled from the “animal instincts” on display, the sacrilegious mingling of unmarried men and women. Everything he saw strengthened his own convictions about Western materialism and Muslim superiority. He learned nothing in his two-year journey, apart from some facts and figures on American industrial output. In his later writings, he cast America as the torchbearer of a diabolical Western effort to separate the sacred and the secular, one that had begun centuries earlier with the Enlightenment. Only through violent jihad, he concluded, could this modern-day barbarism be defeated.
Ghannouchi had read Qutb as a young man, and sympathized with his desire to reclaim a lost Islamic heritage. But he soon rejected Qutb’s apocalyptic certainty. Ghannouchi’s own exposure to the West started much earlier and went much deeper. In his twenties, he spent time bumming around Europe, working as a grape picker in rural France, washing dishes in a restaurant, watching left-wing protests in Paris in 1968. He read Marx, Freud, and Sartre, and debated their ideas with the high school students to whom he taught philosophy back in Tunis. A few years later, after committing himself to political Islam, he was humbled by the courage of left-wing Tunisian activists who risked their lives in street protests and suffered torture in jail. His own Islamist peers abhorred the dictatorship but did nothing about it. He decided to make common cause with the leftists and the trade unions. This was an unusually pragmatic gesture at a time when many Islamists still considered Socialists to be infidels, as bad as or even worse than the dictators. At the end of the 1970s, Ghannouchi briefly found inspiration in the Iranian revolution, which seemed to offer a model for melding faith and politics. He helped found the movement that would become Ennahda, articulating a democratic Islamism that would later be copied by the Egyptian Brotherhood.
There were flickers of success, especially after the senescent Bourguiba was pushed aside in 1987 by his former prime minister, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. But after a few gestures of openness, Ben Ali soon proved himself more brutal and far more corrupt than his predecessor. A crackdown on the Islamists left hundreds in prison, and most of the leadership fled abroad. By the decade’s end, Ghannouchi was living in London, along with much of the group’s leadership. An exile community of Islamists formed—Pakistanis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians—and began comparing notes. They watched in dismay as the Algerian elections of 1991 spiraled into a murderous civil war. It was a time of hard questions. “We had to ask ourselves, why have we failed?” one of Ghannouchi’s closest advisers told me. “Is the Islamic movement a force for unity or a force for division? We talked endlessly about this. And we decided we had to make changes. Ennahda doesn’t say this, but most of our members don’t accept women not wearing veils. And Tunisian leftists do not accept openly religious people. Some of us felt the society would have to overcome these divisions before any progress could be made.”
These debates were still under way when Bouazizi set himself on fire in December 2010. Nothing had been resolved; no one was prepared. Ghannouchi returned to Tunis with no playbook in hand. It was not until three years later that he was forced to face head-on the dilemma that had preoccupied the Islamists in London: how to reach an accommodation with political enemies without losing their own base. The national dialogue that began in the autumn of 2013 was long overdue.
It was also painful, as they’d known it would be. “People did not like each other,” I was told by a lawyer who played a prominent role. “They all had a great need to talk, to yell at each other, to get the feelings out. Sometimes one man would talk for thirty or forty minutes straight.” He smiled wearily at the memory. “But he needed to say it.” The dialogue meetings were arranged by the leaders of four pillars of Tunisian society, known as the Quartet: the federation of trade unions, known as the UGTT; the employers institute; the Tunisian human rights league; and the lawyers’ syndicate. Houcine Abassi, the secretary general of the UGTT, played the role of referee. He was a short, compactly built man with a dour expression stamped on his face and a reputation for honesty and fairness. One of the ground rules of the talks was that no one could smoke—it was intended to limit the marathon meetings—but an exception was made for the chain-smoking Abassi, whose mediating role was essential.
It was the Quartet itself—not the political bosses—that was ultimately awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for its efforts to ease the Tunisian political crisis and avert civil war. But the national dialogue’s heart and soul was the ongoing conversation between Essebsi and Ghannouchi. They were present during almost all the meetings, which sometimes went on until dawn. They also continued having their own one-on-one meetings. These remained mostly secret, because Tunisia’s pundits and party bosses were still paranoid about a “deal” being made behind their backs. They met once every two weeks or so, alternating between Essebsi’s upscale villa in the Sukra district and Ghannouchi’s more austere apartment in Nahli. They had a new go-between, a mutual friend named Ali ben Nsib who sat in and sometimes took part. The mood at their meetings slowly shifted, Nsib told me. An initial tone of polite froideur gave way to ease and some laughter. They discovered that they had some things in common, despite their vastly different life stories. For all his secularism, Essebsi knew the Koran well, and often quoted it. Both men had been traumatized as boys by encounters with the French military, at almost exactly the same age. Essebsi had witnessed a demonstration in April 1938 in Tunis, when French police opened fire on protesters and killed twenty-two. Ghannouchi had a similar experience in 1952, when he saw the bodies of four fallaga rebels in the marketplace of his town. French soldiers had shot them and stood guard to prevent locals from burying them, a deliberate outrage to Muslim sensibility. Memories like those helped form a bond. Essebsi began to feel that his Islamist counterpart was a Tunisian patriot. And Ghannouchi recognized that Essebsi had—like him—grown uncomfortable with Bourguiba’s autocratic ways long before the Ben Ali era began. Another piece of common ground came from economics. Essebsi led a party dominated by free-market businessmen, and Ghannouchi—like most of his peers in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—was all for business-friendly policies. Some of the leftists in Tunisia’s labor unions saw this early, lamenting that the Islamists and Nidaa Tounes could form a right-wing alliance to privatize Tunisia’s state enterprises and do the bidding of the IMF.
Apart from all this, both of them sensed the irony of their geriatric dominance after a revolution supposedly defined by youth. During one chat, the eighty-six-year-old Essebsi said something about his return to politics after such a long absence, and Ghannouchi cracked: “We all thought you’d already been filed away in the national archives.” Essebsi shot back: “Yes. They found you in a different archive.”
They were edging toward each other, sideways, like two ancient crabs. Their parties followed suit, slowly and reluctantly. Two months of hard negotiation over a caretaker prime minister finally bore fruit in December. That decision allowed Ennahda to formally cede power, and the tension in the dialogue sessions eased from that moment onward. The next turning point came in mid-January, when Parliament was debating an article in the draft constitution mandating an age ceiling of seventy-five for presidential candidates. This would exclude Essebsi, whose hunger for the presidency was no secret. Most of Ennahda’s members opposed any change, and their rivals insisted on it. Ghannouchi knew that his relationship with Essebsi—and everything that flowed from it—depended on breaking the deadlock. He convened an emergency 6:30 a.m. meeting of Ennahda’s twelve-member executive bureau on the day of the vote, and once again laid all his political weight on the line. Again, the hard-liners complained and leveled bitter accusations, and then buckled. This was “a red carpet for Essebsi to reach the presidency,” Ghannouchi later put it. As soon as the meeting broke up, his aides telephoned Essebsi to let him know. Ali ben Nsib was with the old man when he got the word. “He was genuinely moved,” he said. “This was the moment when their relationship became one of real mutual trust.”
At midnight on January 26, 2014, 204 out of 217 Parliament members voted to pass the new constitution. No one could quite believe it. Shouts of joy filled the vast opera-style deputies’ chamber, with its limestone columns and velvet-seated balconies. Old Islamist firebrands hugged their rivals across the aisle, tears streaming from their eyes. In the hallway outside, people picked up legislators and heaved them into the air, singing the national anthem. “Our blood and souls we sacrifice for you, our flag!” they chanted. “With the blood of the martyrs, we have succeeded!” Women ululated, and people broke into ecstatic call-and-response songs. The parties spilled out into the streets and in homes across the city, almost until dawn. The feeling was universal: the worst of the crisis was over. Civil war had been averted. But the days afterward brought a more somber recognition. The reconciliation was only a signed document. The elections were still to come, and they had the power to knock down everything that the two old men had built.
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In theory, the personal rapport between Ghannouchi and Essebsi would now extend to their respective political parties and the popular base each one stood for. But Essebsi’s party, Nidaa Tounes, was a very unstable mix of leftists, opportunistic businessmen, and old regime figures. The ink on the constitution was scarcely dry before the first fissures and power struggles began appearing in the early months of 2014, making it more apparent than ever that without the unifying figure of Bejbouj, as the faithful called him, the party was nothing. One sour old Tunisian pundit described it to me as “a sick lion guiding a pack of errant wolves.” Even Essebsi, for all the hero worship he drew, was valued mostly as a link to the past. He’d never been a major figure in his own time. To most of his new followers, he was a stand-in for the country’s one acknowledged father figure, Bourguiba. No one understood this better than Karwi, who had helped build him up. “We built this party on three things,” he told me, as he puffed a cigar and patted the heavy wooden table in his office where the party was first conceived. “First, fear and hatred of Islamists; next, nostalgia; a single charismatic figure; and of course, greed for power. It wasn’t a political party. It was just a way to get rid of the Islamists. Once people thought that was done, things began to come apart.”
This awareness drifted uneasily over Tunisian politics through the spring and summer, when people could still daydream and pretend that all was well, congratulate themselves for avoiding the horror shows under way in Syria and Libya and Egypt. They had many things to be grateful for: Tunisia was a relative oasis of peace and liberty. Dozens of new newspapers and websites had appeared after the revolution, and some critics and comedians were pillorying the Ennahda-allied president in ways that would have been unthinkable under Ben Ali. Some young journalists were producing investigative civic journalism at a higher level than anything available elsewhere in the Arab world, critiquing the new government’s performance on subjects ranging from garbage collection to counterterrorism. The country’s tourism industry had suffered, but it still brought in money. Tunisia’s close ties with Europe seemed likely to sustain a higher standard of living than some of its larger neighbors, despite its lack of oil.
Still, the tenuousness of the political compromise became unavoidable once the election campaign got under way in the fall. One afternoon in October, I was waiting in line outside a sports arena in the city of Sousse, an hour southeast of the capital. Someone with a TV camera was filming the crush of people pressing up against the narrow doors, where the crowd got so large you wondered if there was any room left inside. Once we got through and beyond the cameras, the entry hall was almost empty. The same cheap tactics were on display near the stage, a hundred yards onward. There was a din of whistling and cheering and Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” blasting from huge black speakers up at the front. There were red banners and flags waving everywhere, and party members were screaming like Beatles fans in 1964. They looked like a bused-in crowd. Two huge TV cameras on swivel arms were sweeping over the audience, and the giant video screens up front showed the results simultaneously: a giddy roller-coaster view of the pumped-up crowd. What you didn’t see on the screens was the empty back half of the room. I made my way to the front, where a woman with a clipboard shouted into my ear and led me to a seat in the media section, underneath a giant poster of Habib Bourguiba. After a few minutes, the Nidaa Tounes parliamentary candidates for Sousse began delivering their speeches. They were a mix of local boosterism, anger at the Islamists, and hero worship. Each one ended with the same refrain: “Long live Nidaa, long live Tunis, long live Beji Caid Essebsi.” I tried chatting with a campaign volunteer, a slick-looking young businessman in a dark suit, but when I asked him what Nidaa Tounes stood for, he told me he’d introduce me to one of the candidates. “We want Tunisia to succeed,” he said into my ear.
When the stump speeches were over, the music stopped, the lights dimmed, and a film flickered into life on the two big screens. The familiar figure of Bourguiba appeared in black and white, moving in the jerky sped-up rhythm of old newsreels. We watched him attending parades, meeting women’s rights activists, visiting the United States. “It was an era of golden innovation,” the scroll on the bottom of the screen declared. This went on for twenty-five minutes. Then the screen went black, and an enormous, forbidding photograph of Bourguiba’s face appeared, cast in shades of gray. It loomed over the crowd for a moment, phantomlike. A scratchy voice emerged from the speakers, and the lips on the photograph began to jiggle up and down implausibly, as if squeezed by invisible hands. The great man was delivering his message of Tunisian secularism from beyond the grave, with the help of Photoshop. At last he stopped, and the macabre portrait faded slowly into blackness again.
It was then that the entourage emerged from a back corner of the stage. For a moment, you almost thought they’d brought Bourguiba back to life for a final speech. Essebsi walked briskly onto the stage, lips pursed, eyes somber, as the Tunisian national anthem began blasting from the speakers and the crowd bolted upright, all at once. Once the song was over, Essebsi put out his hand for silence. His face conveyed a cold impatience. “Habib Bourguiba’s vision is the vision of Nidaa, and of the Tunisian people,” he said. “The state Bourguiba created will return.” It was as if he were only a warm-up speaker, readying the crowd for his dead mentor. He went on to talk about the importance of this election, of the need to get everyone out to vote. Then he said something that amazed me: “We will succeed, we must succeed, or else Tunisia will see a new Dark Ages.” I thought I’d misunderstood, but he repeated the line a few minutes later. This felt like desperation. I thought of Karwi’s formula: hatred, fear, nostalgia. Would that really bring people to the polls? And then, after only about fifteen minutes, the speech was over, and people began bolting for the exits. Essebsi was almost eighty-eight years old, and his brevity was understandable. But if this was the best his party could do, it did not bode well for the secularist heirs of Habib Bourguiba.
The contrast with Ennahda’s get-out-the-vote efforts was staggering. The Islamists sent out teams of well-dressed young people to knock on doors in cities and towns across Tunisia. The party had selected a theme that highlighted their confidence: It doesn’t matter if we win or lose, because a fair election is a victory for us all. They repeated it like a catechism. They did the same with terrorism, their great Achilles’ heel. Everyone had blamed them for the black flags and the assassinations of 2013, so Ghannouchi and his lieutenants made sure the new talking points reached every single candidate: terrorism is the nation’s biggest threat. At one rally I attended in central Tunis, virtually every speaker hailed the counterterrorism forces as the “heroes of the nation.” They were assembled on a stage that had been curated like a museum display of Tunisian diversity. Two of the women seated on the platform wore no hijab. Ghannouchi mounted the stage in a shower of applause and gently patted the head of a little boy who was standing by the podium, camera-ready. One of the speakers released a white dove that fluttered up over the crowd. Ghannouchi spoke last. There had been a counterterrorist raid a day or two earlier in which an officer had been killed, and Ghannouchi spoke emotionally of this man, mentioning his name and calling him a martyr for all Tunisians to be proud of.
It was hard to know how much all this political theater mattered outside the party faithful. Early one morning, I drove three hours south from Tunis to Sidi Bouzid, where the protests started in December 2010. The road from the capital passes from the relative grandeur of an old colonial town to a dusty backwater of half-deserted villages and brown fields lined with cacti. Here and there, smoke rises from the horizon. Old women stand by wooden shacks on the roadside, selling loaves of Berber bread for the equivalent of about 10 cents apiece. It is almost meaningless to speak of unemployment in southern Tunisia; the formal economy scarcely exists. Many people depend on smuggling from the Algerian or Libyan borders to get by. Phosphate mining was once the region’s main industry, accounting for more than half the country’s total GDP. By 2014 it was at a standstill, and protests over joblessness were spreading. This kind of discontent could prove far more dangerous than the Islamic slogans that provoke so much fear in the West. It has happened before: the mining towns of the south erupted in protest over corrupt hiring practices in 2008, and that upwelling—brutally repressed by the Ben Ali government—helped plant the seeds for the broader protests that began almost three years later.
Sidi Bouzid is a small, seedy farming town with square cinder-block houses and semi-arid plains extending around it in every direction. It is a world away from the Gallic boulevards of Tunisia’s coastal cities. Near the gatehouse of the governor’s office, where Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in 2010, a huge billboard with his smiling face on it now towers overhead. The town has received some government largesse since 2011, thanks to its role as the birthplace of the revolution. But the unemployment rate is still high, and crowds of young men hang around all day in cafés, watching sports on TV and smoking. It was quiet on election day in 2014, with only small lines forming at polling stations. I spoke to dozens of them as they waited to enter, and most told me more or less the same thing: they were voting for Beji, but not because they really liked or trusted him. The Islamists had failed, they said, and needed to be sent a message. Both parties were untrustworthy, and it was better to keep them both in check. In a café near the center of town, I met a wiry thirty-year-old with green eyes named Basem Abdulli, who was staring up at a television with a few friends. He had been in the same café on the morning Bouazizi died, he told me. “We heard someone had set himself on fire, so we all went to see. We found his cart in the street. We asked what had happened. The police came and told us all to go home. Some more people showed up, from Gafsa. We started stoning the police. It started from there.” After that, he said, the protests were mostly at night. They’d burn tires and block roads. He was arrested once and taken to jail, where the police beat him badly and left him with a head injury. He turned sideways and showed me the scar: a brownish ridge above his ear. “Now we have no jobs, no benefits,” he went on. “We feel we were punished for making this revolution.”
I asked him about the election, and he told me he was voting for a small, independent party. He knew they had no chance of winning more than a seat or two, but he didn’t care. “I have not given up hope,” he said. “There are some good people. Maybe they can make a difference.” Two little boys were standing nearby, listening to us and watching. They looked about eight years old. One of them spoke up: “If I were old enough, I would vote.” The other shook his head. “I wouldn’t vote, no way,” he said. “They are all corrupt.”
A few days later, when the preliminary electoral results were announced, Ennahda held a celebration at their downtown headquarters. They had lost decisively: 27.79 percent of the vote, compared with 37.5 percent for Nidaa Tounes. But they maintained this was good news. A successful election was a victory for all Tunisians. It was a pose, of course. But the confidence was genuine. They knew they were being punished for the mistakes of the past three years, but they also knew they were likely to inherit the country eventually. Anyone with two eyes could see that they were Tunisia’s strongest and most unified political force. And the Islamists knew that their rivals might not find it any easier to govern than they had.
In the days that followed, Ennahda’s leaders disappeared from view. They were holding a conclave, where another punishing internal battle was under way. It was not really about assigning blame for the loss of Parliament, as the rumors suggested. It was about the presidential election, scheduled for late November. Ghannouchi had already persuaded the party not to run a candidate. This had been a relatively easy affair; all you had to do was point to Cairo, where the Brotherhood’s fatal decision to seek the presidency had helped to destroy it. Now, Ghannouchi and his top advisers were asking for another concession. They wanted the party to remain neutral in the presidential race. In effect, this would mean endorsing Essebsi over his chief rival, Moncef Marzouki, who had been Ennahda’s loyal ally for the preceding three years. Ghannouchi’s logic was impeccable: Beji was likely to win anyway. And even if he didn’t, Marzouki would have very little power against a Parliament dominated by Essebsi’s party. Better for Ennahda to back the winning horse and have some influence. More than that: Ghannouchi said Ennahda should join Nidaa in a coalition government.
To Ghannouchi’s critics, this was pure betrayal. To throw one’s own ally under the bus in favor of a man who would just as soon toss them all in jail—or worse? Some of them also argued for a second principle: you need an opposition to keep the government honest. This was the more natural role of Ennahda, they said. Ghannouchi countered that Tunisia was still too fragile for that kind of divided government. Only a unified government could undertake the difficult reforms that were necessary to grow the economy, like cutting back on state subsidies for oil and food. “I told them that we had to put the interests of the country over those of the party,” he told me afterward. “It was a bitter moment. We had to balance our principles against the new reality. That way, we could preserve the country and its institutions—and we can return to power later.” In the end, he won out again, but many in the movement were angry. Hamad Jebali, Ennahda’s first prime minister, announced his withdrawal from the party. Others said they were reconsidering their membership.
Throughout this period, Ghannouchi and Essebsi continued to meet, discussing ways to steer their movements into a working relationship. On December 1, the project was on the point of foundering. As they stood together in Essebsi’s living room after dinner, with the winter darkness pressing in from the garden doors, Essebsi explained that he’d been unable to broker a deal on the position of parliamentary president. The coalition depended on that appointment. If he couldn’t do it by the next day, the deadline would pass, and their plans for a joint government would collapse. Ghannouchi nodded, his face looking dour.
“Sheikh Rached, have confidence in me,” Essebsi said.
“I have confidence in you,” came the reply.
“We are brothers,” Essebsi said.
“Yes, we are brothers.” They embraced, an awkward hug between two reserved old men.
The next day, Essebsi persuaded his party to extend the opening session, giving him time to secure the joint appointment that allowed the coalition to succeed. It was the first vote of the new Parliament, and the two main parties—ostensibly bitter enemies—had voted in sync.
In the weeks that followed, Ghannouchi returned the favor, moving beyond his party’s official position of neutrality. He hinted broadly in television interviews that his preferred candidate in the presidential runoff was Essebsi. In private, he made clear that he hoped others in the party would follow his lead. Most of them did not, but in the end it didn’t matter: the momentum was with Beji. When the results were announced, Ghannouchi went straight to the house to congratulate him. Essebsi ribbed him a little, saying the tally suggested that many of Ennahda’s members had voted for his opponent. Ghannouchi smiled. “I voted for you,” he said. Essebsi took his hand. “Sometimes one vote is worth a thousand,” he replied.
In January 2015, two weeks after Essebsi took the oath as Tunisia’s next president, his younger brother Kamel died. A public funeral service was planned, but on the evening before, the family gathered in private at Essebsi’s home in Tunis. After leaving them alone for a decent interval, the chief of the presidential guard knocked on the door and discreetly urged the president to return to the palace. Night was falling. Essebsi brushed him off, saying he was waiting for one more guest. A full hour passed. At last a black car pulled up in the darkness outside the house. A man emerged from the backseat: Ghannouchi. He strode up to the group, and as he offered his condolences, Essebsi embraced him. “He wanted to send a message, to the presidential guard and everyone else,” a friend of Essebsi’s told me. “He was letting them know that he regards Rached Ghannouchi as a member of his family.”
Ghannouchi was now a landmark in the history of the Islamist movement. He had not stopped at making common cause with a rigorously secularist old regime figure. His liberal Islam was, in some respects, to the left of many Arab liberals. In early 2015, he told a French interviewer that homosexuality was a private matter and should not be criminalized. He said he had no desire to Islamize Europe, and he advised French authorities to set up their own Islamic schools, to make sure that Muslims there kept their faith within the bounds of secular republican ideology and steered clear of the Salafi doctrines imported from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. At home, he gave full assent to a crackdown on the radical mosques that had been indoctrinating Tunisian youth in a jihadi mind-set. Ghannouchi had always been a reviled figure to jihadi ideologues, but now some said he was worse than an infidel. He was reaching the top of their wanted list. It was an achievement of sorts, but it carried the seeds of a new danger.
On March 18, three gunmen dressed in military uniforms attacked the Bardo Museum in Tunis and took hostages. Within hours, twenty-one people were dead, mostly European tourists, and about fifty were injured. The killers were jihadis loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda’s North African branch, and had trained in Libya. The killings marked a break with the past in several ways. Less than two years earlier, leading jihadis had declared that Tunisia was a place of da’wa—religious outreach and consolidation—not jihad. They believed the Ennahda electoral victory gave them a sanctuary in which to grow and develop. That moment had clearly passed. Tunisia was now a target, a state run by infidels, including Ennahda. The bloodshed was splashed all over newspapers in Europe and the United States, prompting frantic speculation that Tunisia was sinking into the arc of chaos stretching from Libya to Yemen. In a sense, that perception was more damaging than the attack itself. Two months afterward, as I wandered through the winding, cloacal halls of the Tunis medina, I saw scarcely a single tourist. Merchant after merchant told me mournfully that all the cruise ships had canceled their stops in the Tunis port. It was shaping up to be the worst summer season they’d ever had, they said. Half an hour south, in the holiday town of Hammamat, I found the long avenue of beachside hotels almost empty. A few local people sipped colored fruit drinks under the umbrellas. It would get worse.
Some conservatives inside the party felt Ghannouchi had given up too much. One of the movement’s conservative standard-bearers, a sixty-two-year-old businessman named Habib Ellouze, told me that Ghannouchi’s concessions were alienating many people. “They feel the Islamic identity is weakening, that we are becoming just an ordinary political party,” he said. “If this continues, some members will leave the party, and perhaps they will form their own organization.” It is not just a question of faith. Many Ennahda members were tortured in jail, and they believe Ghannouchi is tamping down calls for a more thorough accounting of the old regime’s human rights abuses. Some of those abuses, after all, were committed while Essebsi served as interior minister in the 1960s; he retained a powerful role in Parliament during the early Ben Ali era. These tensions inside the party have led to repeated calls for Ennahda to separate its political party from the broader social movement. That could dilute Ghannouchi’s influence, allowing conservatives to establish a separate base and shatter the ruling coalition.
Even if the equilibrium holds, it is hard to say what kind of legacy will be granted to Tunisia’s two grand old men. The idea that they achieved a historic synthesis, a reweaving of the country’s Islamic and Western ancestries, is an appealing one. And in many ways, Tunisia did seem to have pulled back from the crater’s edge in mid-2015. The coalition government was coalescing and planning reforms, albeit slowly. Most of the Islamists seemed to have come around to the belief in compromise and reconciliation. Leftists spoke optimistically about a working relationship with the people they’d once hoped to eradicate. But the greatest dangers and the greatest opportunities lay beyond the country’s borders. Five years after the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, most Tunisians still hoped that their small country could be a model, spreading its dream of reconciliation across a region troubled by war and tyranny. They also knew the same winds could blow in reverse and smash everything they had built.