Only a few weeks after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, Ennahda returned to Tunisia from exile. The same year Ennahda won Tunisia’s first free and fair elections in its history. On the night of the election, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, vowed to uphold the revolutionary goals of building a free and prosperous Tunisia. And his party kept this promise to build Tunisian democracy with other stakeholders. Why did Ennahda adhere to democratic principles in power and became a force for compromise, deliberation, and engagement? This chapter shows that competing political visions have coexisted within the party organization since its establishment in the 1980s, and since the 1990s liberal Islamists pulled Ennahda towards democratic commitments not only when they were in opposition but also after coming to power in 2011. To explain this process, the chapter first turns to the origins of the Islamist movement in Tunisia and its political and ideological evolution over time including Ghannouchi’s philosophical contributions. Then it explores the shifting balance of power among factions and factors, determining this balance with a specific emphasis on organizational resources and implications for Tunisian democracy.

The Libyan case study in Chapter 3 reveals how harrowing the introduction of democratic elections can be in countries without national unity or any of the attributes of a modern state. Qaddafi’s ideology of a stateless, egalitarian society based on an idiosyncratic blend of Islamic and Marxist concepts left Libya’s transitional regime largely without a bureaucratic apparatus to implement policies. Qaddafi had also reinvigorated Libya’s tribal system by favoring his own and punishing the region and tribes that were the base of support for the prior monarchical regime. Competitive elections in Libya were implemented in a country without a national military that could monopolize the use of violence. In its place, during the civil war, a welter of regional, local, tribal, and ideological militias – some more powerful than the “national military” – emerged and prevented transitional governments from being able to provide peace and security for Libyans. There was also a military strongman in Libya, General Haftar, seeking to utilize the near anarchic conditions to forge a military authoritarian regime – by reining in the militias and providing desperately needed security.