Behind her are portraits of members the party says died under torture during the dictatorship. After the 2011 protests, Ennahda member Yamina Zoghlami won election to parliament. But she concedes that critical demands for change remain unmet. Once excluded from public life as a conservative Muslim, she won election to the parliament and helped draft one of the region’s most progressive constitutions. Yamina Zoghlami, 50, who joined Ennahda as a teenager, embodies the party’s success after the revolution. But along the way, Ennahda has abandoned some core principles and forged alliances that have angered some supporters - prioritizing stability and its own survival over radical change, its critics and Ennahda defectors say. It emerged from the 2011 uprising as a standard-bearer for Tunisia’s revolutionary ideals and became a dominant political force, even as other Arab countries banned Islamist movements.

The path of Ennahda, Tunisia’s most prominent Islamist party, highlights this quandary. Many other governments, led by monarchs or autocrats, remain fearful of democratic contagion and have stepped up repression of dissent since 2011. Tunisia’s robust and resilient democratic experiment stands virtually alone in the Arab world. At critical moments when the Tunisian experiment has appeared to be on a cliff edge - after assassinations or terrorist attacks - dialogue and concession have pulled the country back from the brink. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)Īt the heart of its success lies a willingness, unique among those countries buffeted by the uprisings, to compromise and accommodate a range of forces, including Islamist political parties. A Tunisian flag flies over the grave of Mohamed Bouazizi, the vendor who set himself on fire in December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, triggering Tunisia's Arab Spring uprising. Only in Tunisia has a fragile democracy endured. Ten years after the Arab Spring uprisings began in Tunisia with a street vendor’s lonely protest, revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world have ended in failure. “Loyalty to the blood of martyrs,” the protesters chanted, before police dispersed them. It would prove the revolution had mattered, especially now, when some politicians were arguing for a return to the old authoritarian system. For him, the past decade had been a grim cycle of protest, poverty and pain, with struggles to find work, two dozen surgeries and an amputation. Walid Kassraoui, 31, was among the demonstrators that day in December, sitting on a low wall, his rolled-up slacks revealing a prosthesis of silicon and metal where his right calf used to be. The years since the 2011 revolt had whittled down the size of their gatherings but not the urgency of their demand: that Tunisia recognize those killed or wounded in that uprising by publishing an official list. TUNIS - They were young men in wheelchairs and mothers gripping portraits of lost sons.

Brotherhood of steel build