During the 2010–11 Tunisian revolution, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), failed to organize a single major counterprotest in his favor. The RCD could only mobilize a few hundred supporters, despite claiming between one to two million members. Worse yet, on January 14, just hours before Ben Ali fled the country, the few who turned out ended up defecting and joining the much larger anti-regime protest in downtown Tunis.
Although it is difficult to prove the counterfactual, it is possible that regular RCD counterprotests could have saved Ben Ali. If the regime had remained unified and mobilized, it may have deterred the defections in the security forces that ultimately led the president to flee. Accordingly, it is worth asking why the RCD could not fulfill the role played by other ruling parties in the region—such as the Baʿath Party in Syria—and mobilize on Ben Ali’s behalf.
That is the question motivating Anne Wolf’s gripping second book, Ben Ali’s Tunisia. Wolf persuasively argues that Ben Ali over the course of his reign had steadily marginalized the traditional elite of the RCD, empowering instead his in-laws (the Trabelsis) and nonpartisan technocrats. That left the party cadres frustrated and resentful and, in turn, willing to entertain “passive resistance” during the revolution, with some low-level members also more actively joining the protests.
Although other scholars have advanced similar claims, none have narrated them with nearly the level of data and detail that Wolf brings to bear. Wolf conducted 216 high-level interviews, most notably with six RCD secretaries-general and six of Ben Ali’s family members (including his daughter Nesrine). The amount of fieldwork Wolf has undertaken and the degree of access she has attained make this book truly a model for the field. These interviews shed new light on the panic that these actors faced during the uprising and the calculations—and contingency—that shaped their decisions.
Moreover, Wolf takes the analysis one step further by explaining how Ben Ali was able to marginalize the RCD in the first place—how, within two years of coming to power, he was able to transform a party-based dictatorship into a personalist one. Although the comparative politics literature on authoritarianism might expect dictators to use repression to consolidate their rule, Wolf argues that Ben Ali personalized his regime largely through “the politics of ideas.” First, Ben Ali invoked a “correctivist” framing to shunt aside the old guard of the RCD in favor of his new appointees. He then developed “new normative priorities,” namely security and economic growth, that generated popularity for himself and allowed him to sideline the party even further. However, by the 2000s, Wolf notes that these new narratives began to ring hollow, with the Islamist threat more or less vanquished and the economic reforms producing inequality and elite capture. By 2011, therefore, Ben Ali was left with neither the support of the party nor the population.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the description of dynamics within and between the family and the party elite in the 2000s. Wolf describes how different family clans in the 2000s competed with one another for leverage over the inevitable succession to Ben Ali, and how the party elite tended to view the family of Ben Ali’s first wife, Naima El Kefi, more favorably than that of his second wife, Leila Trabelsi, who hailed from a lower class and competed more directly with the economic interests of the traditional elite families.
The book might have benefited from a clearer exposition of the costs and benefits the party elite faced when deciding what to do in the revolution. On the one hand, Wolf convincingly shows that some RCD elites hoped that passive resistance would lead Ben Ali to restore them to influence and put the Trabelsis back in their place. But the risks and costs were considerable: the RCD elite, Wolf notes, also were ideologically committed to the regime and did not want Ben Ali toppled. They likely also anticipated that his toppling would lead them to lose even more influence, not to mention suffer the dissolution of their party and potentially their imprisonment.
Those risks might explain why the party elite, even if resentful, largely exhibited loyalty during the uprising, rather than resistance. RCD secretary-general Mohamed Ghariani seemed to do everything he could to oppose the uprising. The RCD daily Le Renouveau presented pro–Ben Ali counternarratives, and party statements denigrated the protesters as violent anarchists. Presidential guard chief General Ali Seriati told me that the RCD agreed on January 9 to try to infiltrate the protests and guide them away from confrontations with the police; that might explain Wolf’s interlocutors repeatedly speaking of trying to “calm” the demonstrators. And the RCD leadership did try to organize counterprotests; it was just that very few party members showed up.
Wolf accordingly puts the focus on the grassroots of the party and why the midlevel and lower ranks of the RCD might have ignored the call. She notes that they had little ideological commitment to the regime in the first place and that many shared the protesters’ grievances of unemployment and corruption, especially in the interior regions of the country. Yet, it also is notable that as late as 2009 the RCD was able to mobilize almost 60,000 grassroots members to celebrate Ben Ali’s reelection that year. That is, apparently, equal to if not more than the peak number of protesters in the revolution. It is not clear why the RCD was unable to mobilize these numbers just one year later, when seemingly the most important slight to the party (the entry of Belhassen Trabelsi and Sakher El Materi into the RCD Central Committee) had already occurred in 2008.
Perhaps the answer lies in the final theme Wolf raises in the book: contingency. Few in the RCD expected that Ben Ali would actually be toppled, and therefore perhaps few thought that counterprotests were necessary. Ben Ali himself did not ask the RCD to mobilize supporters until January 11. Had the RCD grassroots instead understood that Ben Ali might have been toppled and the party might have been dissolved, they may have mobilized on his behalf. But Ben Ali’s toppling, as Wolf notes, came as a surprise to everyone. Ben Ali, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, chose to accompany his family to Saudi Arabia, all the while intending to return. Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi likewise was not intending to oust him when he declared the president temporarily absent; he was anticipating Ben Ali’s return. But once the media and protesters interpreted Ben Ali’s trip as ceding the presidency, and the judiciary declared Ben Ali overthrown, the revolution became a fait accompli.
Once that realization set in, and the threat to the RCD became clear, it becomes difficult to separate reality from narrative. As Wolf acknowledges, RCD members after the revolution had an incentive to paint themselves as having resisted and defected from Ben Ali, even if they had not consciously done so at the time. It is therefore challenging to assess the true extent of this “internecine contention” and whether it may have been strategically exaggerated by these actors post-revolution. Cognizant of this, Wolf astutely points also to episodes of internal dissent prior to Ben Ali’s ouster, like the Destourian Democrats’ declaration in 2005. Regardless, although we may never know the true extent of dissension in the ranks, there is no doubt that Wolf has captured, to a greater degree than anyone before her, a woefully understudied and critically important dynamic in the trajectory of Ben Ali’s rise and fall.
