By Nathaniel Greenberg
Telos Press - Monday, December 30, 2013
The appointment of the Minister of Industry, the so-called “technocrat”
Mehdi Jomaa, to form a caretaker government in Tunisia on the eve of the
revolution’s third anniversary, threw into stark relief the country’s
complex struggle for democracy following the January 14 revolution. The
announcement came in the wake of the Islamist party Ennahdha’s sudden
renunciation of the Prime Minister’s office in September, ostensibly a
sign of cooperation in the face of mounting criticism surrounding the
government’s failure to investigate the assassinations of two political
opposition figures. A number of Western media outlets, including the New York Times,
quickly absorbed the narrative advanced by Ennahdha’s leader and
spiritual guide Rachid al-Ghannouchi referring to the appointment of
Jomaa as a “yielding of power.” This narrative of concession, however,
elides the fact that neither of the Parliament’s largest secular
opposition parties supported the vote to appoint Jomaa, or, for that
matter, that the vote failed to achieve a majority.
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