Worth reading this interview with Tunisian Trotskyites:
The British press has made a lot of the Islamist parties’ election victory. How do socialists view it?
The ‘moderate’ religious party Ennahda was the main winner of December’s parliamentary elections. It made gains at the expense of the other parties because it exploited the pressing social issues – poverty and unemployment, etc – of the majority.
Ennahda was also able to convince many voters that the other ‘secular’ parties were ‘anti-religious’ and wanted to attack Islam. This was made possible because most secular parties encouraged the political debate to be polarised in such a way that the burning social issues were not really addressed.
Ennahda also bought votes with money from the Qatar regime and elsewhere. Ennahda members promised voters gifts of all sorts, such as sacrificial sheep for the feast of ‘Aid al-Adha’. When these didn’t materialise there were protests.
It is not so much that Ennahda is a strong force in society; rather it is the case that the other opposition parties are very weak. And Ennahda was then able to fill the vacuum.
However, Ennahda will lose support as it fails to deliver in terms of improving the social conditions of the poor. This cannot fail to happen, as Ennahda’s policy is nothing but a new version of the old regime’s policies. And many people are drawing such a conclusion.
In January Ennahda attempted to impose figures associated with the old regime at the head of the public media. This provoked such an outcry that they had to step back.
Already Ennahda has experienced a fall in support in the opinion polls, from 41% to 28%. And a certain part of Ennahda’s electoral support is on the streets to protest against the party they voted for in October. That does not mean an automatic drop in support for right-wing political Islam in general – as more fundamentalist wings are also trying to step in – but it shows that a significant layer of Ennahda’s votes is not based on firm ground.
According to the Guardian, these people are Islamophobes.
