Moises Saman for The New York Times
Rejecting a nonconfrontational effort by others, protesters Tuesday in Tunis alleged election fraud by the Islamist party Ennahda. More Photos »
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: October 25, 2011
TUNIS — The liberal political parties emerging as surprise runners-up in elections here argued Tuesday that their success had tempered the commanding victory of the Islamists while offering lessons for their secular allies around the region.
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The liberals interpreted the results of the vote in Tunisia, the first of the Arab Spring, as a call for change, not necessarily an embrace of religious rule. But they also cautioned that voters had been looking to punish those secular parties that appeared to pick a fight with religion.
The urgent message for liberals in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere across the region was: “Avoid anything like being for a civil war between secularists and Islamists,” said Moncef Marzouki, a veteran human rights activist, whose party, the Congress for the Republic, ranked second to the Islamist party Ennahda in the preliminary tally.
As the results were being completed Tuesday, liberals said about half the vote had gone to Ennahda and half to various secular parties in Sunday’s election of a constituent assembly. That assembly will govern the country and write a new constitution after the ouster of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
The two strongest ideologically liberal parties, including Mr. Marzouki’s, together earned about a quarter of the vote. The rest of the secular vote went to less ideologically identified parties, some of them regional.
Perhaps the most significant surprise for liberal forces here and around the region was the abrupt collapse of the party that until recently had been their standard-bearer and Ennahda’s principal rival, the Progressive Democratic Party, or P.D.P. While Ennahda had emphasized its commitment to Western-style individual rights and pledged to collaborate with secularists, the P.D.P. had concluded its campaign with blistering accusations that Ennahda was manipulating voters into supporting a hidden theocratic agenda.
The attacks apparently angered voters, because the two liberal parties that succeeded had chosen to say only nice things about Ennahda. The Congress for the Republic and the ideologically similar Democratic Forum for Labor and Liberties, known here by the Arabic shorthand Ettakatol, are now in talks to form a unity government.
“We owe our success,” Mr. Marzouki said, “to the fact that we talked to the secularists, saying: ‘Look, all of us come from a very important human rights background, and we are going to fight for civil liberties. But we are not going to fight against Islamists. We don’t want an ideological war between secularists and Islamists.’ ”
The message to Islamists, he added, was: “ ‘We are for Islam to be the religion of the state, but you must be very cautious. We are not going to give up our fight for civil freedoms.’ I am profoundly convinced that we can promote human rights and women’s rights, etc., without fighting against Islamists.”
Not all Tunisian liberals agree. A few hundred held a demonstration Tuesday to protest what they said were reports of electoral improprieties by Ennahda, including reports that Ennahda members had provided voters gifts such as sheep to slaughter for the coming feast of Id al-Adha.
“We can’t trust them,” said Rym Elbanna, 30, an actress wearing a Gucci handbag across her black T-shirt. “We know they get their money from Qatar.” (Ennahda has denied the allegations by liberals that it received money from the Persian Gulf.)
But other successful liberals here agreed that the election results vindicated nonconfrontational politics.
Elyes Fakhfakh, 39, an auto parts executive who became the campaign manager for Ettakatol, said the party believed that voters had been drawn to Ennahda not because of religion but because of its credibility as a force for change. Its founders had the longest, and most painful, history of opposition to the dictatorship, he said, noting that the founders of the successful liberal parties were veteran dissidents as well.
Tunisians, Mr. Fakhfakh argued, were torn between their identity as Arabs and Muslims and their aspirations to emulate the West. And touching that psychological divide was politically perilous. “We have a schizophrenia problem in Tunisia,” he said, standing in Ettakatol’s dingy, fluorescent-lighted office above a fast-food restaurant.
By making Ennahda’s embrace of religion the issue, Ettakatol candidates said, the P.D.P. turned the campaign into a debate about cultural identity, with the unintended result of strengthening Ennahda’s appeal.
“We did not make identity and religion part of our campaign,” said Lobna Jeribi, 38, a computer science professor and an Ettakatol candidate elected to the assembly. “We are Muslim, and we don’t speak about it. And we don’t talk about secularism, either.
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