Op-ed: Years after progressive constitution, Tunisia faces political strain

What Tunisia’s politicians have achieved over the past seven years is remarkable for the Arab world. Parliamentary elections in 2011 and 2014 and presidential elections in 2014 have been free and fair and the losers accepted their defeat. Politicians wrote a new, progressive constitution, and a transitional justice process has slowly begun to reckon with the crimes of the past. [ . . . ] Far from providing the political will to engineer a new social contract, the consensus politics of recent years has instead delivered a conservative transition. Not only have redistributive reforms been sidelined, but there has been an incremental decay in the quality of democracy. A long-promised constitutional court has yet to be established, and Tunisia has been under a state of emergency for the past three years, giving the government the power to suspend some citizen rights. A law last year offered an amnesty to public officials from the authoritarian era accused of corruption, and this has undermined the transitional justice process.
Read the full article here: New York Times