The Tunisian transition: a winding road to democracy

Abstract

Tunisia is the country where the anti-authoritarian uprisings known as the ‘Arab Spring’ started in 2010 and the only country in the region with an ongoing democratic transition process. The current paper will develop the historical pathway of the Tunisian transition from the overthrow of the former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to the latest political developments after the elections in 2018 and 2019. The analysis emphasises factors that could be hampering the consolidation of the Tunisian transitional process, such as the priority of the institutional agenda vs the social one, the parliamentary fragmentation, the consociationalism, and the blockage of the transitional justice process.