Tunisia’s Islamists and the “Turkish Model”

Monica Marks

Journal of Democracy, Volume 28, Number 1, January 2017, pp. 102-115 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0009

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645541

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 Tunisia’S Islamists and
the “Turkish Model”
Monica Marks

Monica Marks is a Rhodes Scholar and PhD candidate at Oxford Uni-

versity. She was based in Tunisia from 2012 to 2016, and currently re-
sides in Turkey, where she has also been a Fulbright Scholar and Visit-
ing Instructor at Istanbul’s Bo¢gaziçi University.

Can Islamist parties be loyal contributors to long-term democratic con-

solidation, or are they likely to abandon pluralist pretenses and swallow
up state institutions if the opportunity arises?1 Authoritarian regimes
in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have historically
excluded Islamist parties from the political process, making it difficult
to assess assumptions about how they would behave in power, let alone
their potential to stimulate and steward a democratic transition. Until
Tunisia’s Ennahda party won elections in 2011, no Islamist party in (or
beyond) the MENA region had managed to lead an elected government,
with a single exception: Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (better
known by its Turkish acronym AKP), which scholars have described
either as Islamist or post-Islamist.
In the late 1990s, Turkey’s Islamist opposition expanded beyond its
religious roots to unite a rainbow coalition of liberals, Kurds, and other
groups that felt marginalized by the sclerotic nationalism of Turkey’s
Kemalist establishment. This process culminated in the formation of the
AKP, which in 2002 overcame what political scientist Stathis Kalyvas
has termed the “commitment problem” of religiously oriented parties and
succeeded in winning two-thirds of the seats in parliament.2 The AKP’s
single-party government arguably then became the primary engine of
democratic change in Turkey. It advocated European Union member-
ship and inaugurated prodemocratic constitutional reforms to help har-
monize Turkish and EU legislation. By the late 2000s, the AKP’s ap-
parent successes in power seemed to have proven that Islamists could
act as drivers and defenders of democracy. Talk of a “Turkish model”
abounded, and scholars and Western policy makers—along with some

Journal of Democracy Volume 28, Number 1 January 2017

© 2017 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Monica Marks 103

Arab Islamist parties—began approvingly citing the AKP as an example

of moderate Islamism shepherding economic development and demo-
cratic reforms.
This was not to last. The Turkish model began losing its luster fol-
lowing the AKP’s complicity in the politicization of the judiciary, its
support for widespread military purges, and its crackdowns on media
freedom—trends that had become visible by 2010. By the time the gov-
ernment crushed the civil society protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in
2013, academic and policy-making circles had largely abandoned talk of
the AKP as a model. Liberals who had supported the AKP in its earlier,
more pluralistic days became targets for mockery from anti-Islamists
who labeled them na¦ve dupes and authoritarian enablers. Many of these
disillusioned liberals began to resent the AKP, believing that the party—
and its increasingly domineering leader Recep Tayyip Erdo¢gan—had
betrayed the cross-ideological coalition that swept them to power in the
first place.
As the AKP’s star faded, however, another party of self-proclaimed
Muslim democrats was on the rise. Tunisia’s Ennahda party—brutally
oppressed during the twenty-three-year rule of dictator Zine al-Abidine
Ben Ali—earned well-deserved plaudits for its leadership in advanc-
ing Tunisia’s post-revolutionary transition. After winning a plurality
of votes in Tunisia’s first nationwide democratic elections in October
2011, Ennahda led a three-party coalition government including two
secularly oriented parties.
Although dogged by economic and security challenges, the Troika
government, as it came to be known, helped keep Tunisia’s transition
afloat. Ennahda, as the coalition’s leader, deftly negotiated through
Tunisia’s postrevolutionary waters. Through canny maneuvering in
mid-2013, for example, Ennahda’s leaders defused a soft coup attempt
known as the Bardo Crisis that could easily have derailed Tunisia’s
transition. To stave off such threats, Ennahda’s leaders adopted a
pragmatic approach focused on securing the long-term survival of the
party itself and of Tunisia’s nascent democracy. Especially follow-
ing the Bardo crisis, Ennahda’s leadership adopted hedging positions
that opened space for, and even created alliances with, holdovers from
the ancien régime. Such political concessions—far more than those
dealing with religious issues—initially proved repugnant to Ennahda’s
base. In response, the party’s leaders held countless regional and lo-
cal-level meetings to persuade grassroots members that forgiveness of,
and even compromises with, their former oppressors represented the
best way forward.
Despite the significance of these internal political deliberations, lib-
eral and Western observers have generally been preoccupied with En-
nahda’s stances vis-`a-vis more ideological issues, such as the role of
shari‘a, women’s rights, and blasphemy. For these observers, two cap-
104 Journal of Democracy

stone moments have suggested that Ennahda—not the AKP—might of-

fer a promising new model of “Islamist-lite” democratization. The first
came in January 2014, when Ali Laarayedh, the outgoing prime minister
and an Ennahda member, signed Tunisia’s first democratic constitution,
a document that neither referenced shari‘a nor criminalized blasphemy,
while obliging the state to seek equal representation for women in public
office.3
The second came in May 2016 at Ennahda’s historic tenth party con-
gress, where the party was widely seen as having abandoned political
Islam to advocate a clear separation between religion and politics.4 In
the months since, observers have increasingly invoked Ennahda as shin-
ing example of an Islamist party dedicated to strengthening democracy.
Mentions of a Tunisian model for Turkey, as opposed to a Turkish mod-
el for Tunisia, can now be heard among academics and policy-makers.
Yet critics familiar with the AKP’s fall from grace—particularly dis-
enchanted former supporters of the AKP who feel “once bitten, twice
shy”—often wonder: Will Tunisia’s “Muslim democrats” repeat the
mistakes of their Turkish counterparts?
Ennahda has indeed been watching the AKP, which it sees as more
similar to itself than any Arab Islamist party. The AKP has followed
Ennahda’s progress as well, but given its longer experience in office
and the fact that Turkey is much bigger and more powerful than Tunisia,
the AKP has tended to approach Ennahda as a mentee rather than as a
model. Ennadha leaders insist that various writings of their party presi-
dent, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, have been translated into Turkish and have
helped shape the AKP’s development. When questioned on the subject,
however, AKP leaders typically display no awareness of this; they de-
scribe Ennahda as a “party of brothers” that “looks up to us.”5
Since the Arab Spring revolts of early 2011, the two parties have
been in greater contact, with AKP delegations visiting Ennahda’s of-
fices in Tunisia and vice versa. They mutually recognize themselves in
each other, in part because of their shared history. Both are center-right
Sunni parties that emerged in the MENA region’s two most seemingly
secular countries. Yet both Tunisia and Turkey, despite being shaped by
a history of French-inspired secular modernism, experienced years of
high-level government intervention in and paternalistic control over re-
ligious life. These state interventions in religious practice marginalized
conservative citizens culturally and politically, restricting their ability
to form parties that referenced Islam and prohibiting women who wore
the headscarf (called hijab in Arabic and baº örtüsü in Turkish) from
working in state institutions such as schools and hospitals, or from at-
tending public universities.
Oppression of Islamists was especially harsh in Tunisia, with tens of
thousands of Ennahda members detained by the Ben Ali regime. Exclu-
sion under secular authoritarianism made both parties crave the political
Monica Marks 105

inclusion that came with democratization. Like the AKP and its Turkish
predecessor, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), Ennahda came to em-
brace democratization as the best bet for its own survival. Ennahda and
the AKP stand alone as the only two Islamist parties that have arguably
overcome Kalyvas’s commitment problem: Both have cohabitated with
secularly oriented parties; both have sought to bring non-Islamists into
the party fold; and both have, at least at some moments, preserved and
promoted prodemocratic reforms.
Thus, the AKP and Ennahda offer a fascinating comparison. Schol-
ars with an interest in the comparative politics of Islamist movements,
however, have tended to fixate instead on the regional impact of Egypt’s
Muslim Brotherhood, the original Arab Islamist movement, which in-
spired kindred parties from Morocco to Kuwait. This Egypt-centric ap-
proach has obscured the growing regional influence of Turkey’s AKP.6
In many ways, the Ennahda-AKP comparison is tighter, and therefore
more illuminating, than the Ennahda–Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
comparison. Comparing the AKP and Ennahda, therefore, can help
scholars identify how different Islamist parties’ impact on democratiza-
tion may diverge.

Turkey as a “Reference State” for Ennahda

Interviews I conducted with nahdawis (Ennadha members) in 2011
made it abundantly clear that the party felt an especially strong kin-
ship with Turkey’s AKP. That summer, Ennahda was campaigning for
parliament in the first free and fair nationwide elections in Tunisia’s
history. Curious to learn how Ennahda might govern if it won those
elections, I asked 72 Ennahda leaders and grassroots activists in cities
around the country what kind of Islamic governance model Ennahda
would seek to follow.
To my surprise, not a single respondent mentioned Egypt’s Muslim
Brotherhood as an inspiring example. Instead, the vast majority of nah-
dawis at all levels of the party named Turkey’s AKP as the most rel-
evant model. “Ask anyone in Ennahda,” said Yesmin Masmoudi, a 24
year-old volunteer at the party’s youth wing in Sfax. “We are more ad-
vanced than the Ikhwan [Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood].”7 Like many
nahdawis, Masmoudi cast Ennahda as the progressive nephew to the
Ikhwan’s comparatively stodgy older uncle. Instead of referencing the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, she and other party members repeatedly
cited Turkey’s AKP as representing an enviable combination of piety,
prosperity, and democratic credibility.
Ennahda leaders saw in the AKP a model of gradual and sustain-
able Islamization through democracy—a model that relied on econom-
ic growth, democratic alliance-building, and a long-term perspective.
Having experienced decades of persecution and exile, Ennahda leaders
106 Journal of Democracy

staked their bets on this long-term style of thinking, as opposed to the

shari‘a-centric and comparatively heavy-handed approach of the Ikh-
wan. “The AKP will gradually make Turkey a more Muslim country,
through education, building the economy, and diversifying the media,”
said Ennahda president Ghannouchi. “That’s our model—not law. Make
people love Islam. Convince, don’t coerce them.”8
During the course of those 72 interviews in 2011, some Ennahda mem-
bers—especially those who had been exiled to or educated in the West—
also invoked Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as a model.
Yet more than twice as many party members at all levels invoked the AKP
as mentioned the CDU, and they evinced a deeper connection to the Turk-
ish organization. Under the AKP, Turkey became what political scientist
Nancy Bermeo has termed a “reference state” for Ennahda—a nation that
serves as a point of comparison and source of learning for political actors
in another state, often for reasons of geographic proximity, shared history,
cultural similarity, or some combination of the three.9
In fact, by 2011, the AKP had easily outstripped the Egyptian Broth-
erhood as Ennahda’s chosen reference state. How, then, did the AKP
rise to this status in the eyes of Ennahda members? This shift, which
signalled the reversal of decades of detachment between Turkish and
Arab Islamist trends, happened for three main reasons.
First, the AKP government invested more energy than its predeces-
sors had in cultivating relations with Turkey’s neighbors to the south
and east, especially after its EU accession prospects dimmed. This push
was undergirded by a neo-Ottomanist foreign policy that sought to re-
wind Turkey’s regional relations back to a time when the engagement
of empire, rather than the standoffish insularity of anti-Arab Kemalist
nationalism, held sway. A few high-profile events also helped Turkey
win favor among Arabs for standing up against both Israel and Western
imperialism: Parliament’s vote in 2003 to reject the U.S. request to use
Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base for staging incursions into Iraq; then–prime
minister Erdo¢gan’s denunciation of Israeli president Shimon Peres at
the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009 regarding the situation
in Gaza; and Turkey’s role in supporting the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in
2010 (better known as the Mavi Marmara incident).
Second, Arab Islamist parties aspired to replicate in their home coun-
tries many of the AKP’s economic and political achievements. The
AKP’s time in power coincided with rapid economic growth that trans-
formed Turkey’s infrastructure and boosted its global financial standing.
Politically, the AKP had opened Turkey’s rigidly secular military and
judicial establishments to allow the inclusion of religious conservatives.
Arab Islamist parties, chafing under authoritarian systems that were no
less exclusionary than Turkey’s, aspired to achieve similarly resound-
ing electoral victories—a prospect that looked less distant following the
Arab Spring uprisings.
Monica Marks 107

Third, following those uprisings, Turkey sided strongly with the

Muslim Brotherhood and its regional analogues. When Egypt’s mili-
tary threatened in late June 2013 to overthrow the country’s first demo-
cratically elected president, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, Turkey
advised Morsi to stand his ground rather than take action that might
have defused the crisis, such as transferring power to a newly appointed
prime minister.10 On July 3, Morsi was ousted in a military coup, and
the following month Egypt’s military regime massacred as many as one-
thousand pro-Brotherhood protesters in Cairo’s Rabaa Square. Erdo¢gan
immediately opened Turkey’s doors to political asylum seekers from
the Egyptian Brotherhood. By 2016, Turkey hosted an estimated 1,500
Egyptian Brotherhood asylees, making Istanbul a regional hub for meet-
ings of Islamists and greatly expanding dialogue among the AKP, the
Egyptian Brotherhood, Tunisia’s Ennahda, and Morocco’s Justice and
Development Party (PJD). At the same time that Turkey threw open its
doors to the Brotherhood, it was also accepting millions of desperate
Syrian refugees. This humanitarian act, approved by Erdo¢gan at a time
of Western waffling and hypocrisy on the issue of Syria, bolstered his
image as a man of principle who placed Muslim solidarity over self-
seeking political gain.

Turkey as Defender of Islamism

Interestingly, the symbol of the Rabaa massacre—a raised four fin-
gers printed in black against a bright yellow background—became ubiq-
uitous among AKP members, many of whom changed their social media
profile pictures to include the symbol and used it in signs and banners as
a rallying cry for solidarity against coup-making. Erdo¢gan himself was
photographed making the hand gesture during public addresses. Three
years later, following the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016,
flags, scarves, pins, stickers, and banners with the Rabaa symbol were
featured in pro-government rallies. By extending its umbrella of pro-
tection to the Brotherhood and explicitly adopting Rabaa as a rallying
cry, the AKP symbolically presented itself as an integral partner and
defender of Islamist movements in the region.
Well before Morsi’s ouster, Ennahda had criticized the Brother-
hood’s maximalist approach to power.11 Nonetheless, it felt outraged
and deeply shaken by the coup and its aftermath, which served to re-
mind nahdawis of the fragility of Tunisia’s own transition. For Ennahda,
Erdo¢gan’s bold stance against the coup in Egypt offered a refreshing
alternative to the muted responses and hypocrisy of Western leaders. In
Ennahda’s view, Western countries weighed down by close ties to Isra-
el, a history of chummy relations with Arab autocrats, and a Janus-faced
approach to democratic elections (supporting them in theory, but often
condoning their suppression when an Islamist party won), were strongly
108 Journal of Democracy

predisposed to ethical inconsistency where Islamist parties were con-

cerned. Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia
were even worse: They had acted as the chief opponents of the Arab
Spring uprisings and had bankrolled anti-Islamist autocrats, including
Egypt’s coup-makers. By contrast, Ennahda saw in the AKP a valuable
friend and sympathetic ear in the region.

Comparing Party Congresses

Despite their many real and perceived similarities, the AKP and En-
nahda possess strikingly different internal organizations. Since the late
2000s, the AKP has functioned along increasingly exclusionary lines,
as Erdo¢gan has replaced critical voices with compliant sycophants in
the party and in his advisory bodies. Meanwhile, Ennahda, which was
already more internally pluralistic than the AKP, has pushed to diversify
party membership, and has recently experienced calls for greater bot-
tom-up representation in its internal electoral structures. These differ-
ences were showcased during the two parties’ most recent congresses,
which coincidentally were held at exactly the same time in late May of
2016.
At its tenth congress in May 2016, Ennahda decided to separate
da’awa (preaching) from siyasa (politics), and eased membership reg-
ulations to facilitate the entry of non-Islamists. Members of Ennahda
whom I interviewed before and during the Congress agreed that these
changes recalled the early years of Turkey’s AKP, when boutique Is-
lamist parties were amalgamated into a national conservative party ca-
pable of capturing votes on a large scale.
By far the most controversial issue during Ennahda’s national con-
gress concerned the party’s internal structures. Three proposals were
presented regarding the election of the party’s maktab tenfidhi (Execu-
tive Board). The first, supported by party president Ghannouchi, pro-
posed retaining the existing system, according to which the president
appointed all board members and the elected 150-member majlis shura
(Shura Council) then confirmed them. The other two proposals aimed
to give the Shura Council greater say over the Executive Board’s ap-
pointment. One, proposed by long-time Ennahda leader Abdellatif Me-
kki, called for the Shura Council to elect the members of the Executive
Board. The second, put forward by Abdelhamid Jelassi, called for a mix-
ture of the two models (election of one-third of the Executive Board by
the Shura Council).
The first vote on the issue, held May 22, produced a virtual dead heat:
Almost the same number of delegates favored “democratization” of the
Board’s appointment as backed Ghannouchi’s status quo. A quorum was
not present, however, so a second vote was held after some cajoling by
Ghannouchi, who vowed to withdraw his candidacy as party president
Monica Marks 109

unless he could choose his own Executive Board. The delegates then
voted to maintain the current system.
The push to give greater control to the Shura Council, along with
the result of Ennahda’s presidential contest (Ghannouchi won reelection
with 800 of 1058 votes, with Shura Council president Fathi Ayadi tak-
ing second with 229 votes), show that
Ghannouchi’s leadership within Ennah-
The AKP’s glorification da is not uncontested. Most Ennahda
of Erdoğan has no leaders and party members I spoke with
parallel within see the Shura Council—not the presi-
dent or the executive bureau—as the
Ennahda, where the
true seat of power within the party. The
influence of Ghannouchi, primacy of Ennahda’s Shura Council
though powerful, is far has long been enshrined in its internal
from absolute. documents, which list the hierarchy of
its party organs in the following order:
1) the national congress, held on aver-
age once every four years; 2) the Shura Council; 3) the party president;
and 4) and the Executive Board. When asked why Ennahda structures
its internal hierarchy in this way, nahdawis respond that it is because the
party formed during and in opposition to dictatorship, and that institu-
tionalized governance—as opposed to the personalization of power—is
a core part of its identity.
Throughout its May 2016 congress, Ennahda placed great emphasis
on an extensive internal review of the party’s achievements and fail-
ures since its last congress in 2012. This self-critique was the product
of multiple committees and months of research, culminating in a draft
document read to and adopted by the tenth congress. Ennahda used the
opportunity to drive home the importance of learning from its mistakes.
In his opening speech on May 20, delivered before a stadium full of En-
nahda members and a national television audience, Ghannouchi repeat-
edly cited the importance of self-criticism. The internal review also was
highlighted in Ennahda’s summary document of the congress, released
to the public on May 25.
Inside the AKP, by contrast, trends toward pluralism and self-crit-
ical reflection that emerged during the party’s earliest years in power
have been reversed. On 5 May 2016 Prime Minister Ahmet Davuto¢glu
resigned from his governmental post and his position as leader of the
AKP. He did not jump, but rather was pushed by President Erdo¢gan,
who reportedly was displeased with Davuto¢glu’s less than full-throated
support for his ambition to change Turkey’s constitution to a presiden-
tial system. That change would formally grant Erdo¢gan the executive
powers he has exercised de facto since assuming that the presidency in
August 2014 after more than a decade as prime minister. Davuto¢glu’s
ouster was the latest in a succession of party purges that have margin-
110 Journal of Democracy

alized and even demonized critical voices within the AKP, including
former president Abdullah Gül and former deputy prime minister Bülent
Arınç.
In response to Davuto¢glu’s departure, the AKP held an extraordinary
congress on 20 May 2016 to elect his replacement as head of the AKP and
Turkish prime minister. Instead of allowing internal debate, competition
among multiple candidates for the post, or even any contested voting,
the congress functioned as a pro-Erdo¢gan loyalty exercise. The AKP’s
Central Decision and Executive Board, a group composed of Erdo¢gan
loyalists, quickly crowned the president’s choice, Binali Yıldırım. “The
AK Party has only one leader,” Justice Minister Bekir Bozda¢g said dur-
ing the congress, “and that is our president, Recep Tayyip Erdo¢gan.”12
For many observers, Davuto¢glu’s ouster marked the moment at which
Turkey’s increasingly majoritarian one-party system mutated into a one-
man system. By ejecting Davuto¢glu from his position of national and
party leadership, Erdo¢gan left himself alone at the top of political power
with no other prominent personality remaining within his party to offer
pushback, regardless of how muted. Turkey has become a de facto (if
not yet de jure) presidential system with increasingly sultanistic char-
acteristics.
The AKP’s May 2016 congress could also be read as the moment
when raw power-seeking (personified by Erdo¢gan) sidelined attempts
at self-critical reflection (personified by Davuto¢glu) within the party.
To justify this shift, AKP leaders and party activists say that Erdo¢gan,
the reis (“leader”), knows best; about Davuto¢glu, a former academic
known for his attempts to moderate Erdo¢gan’s steel-fisted approach to
the 2013 Gezi Park protests, as well as his ill-fated “no problems with
neighbors” foreign policy, they say that the hoca (“teacher”) was grow-
ing increasingly out of touch. Instead of a reflective philosopher, they
argue, Turkey needs a powerful reis: someone who can confidently steer
the country toward a safe harbor in which the AKP will be free from
all threats, whether from the Gülen Movement, Kurdish nationalists, or
antidemocratic Kemalists.
The AKP’s glorification of Erdo¢gan as reis has no parallel within En-
nahda, where the influence of Ghannouchi, though powerful, is far from
absolute. The way AKP members treat their party leader more closely
resembles the situation in Nidaa Tounes, Ennahda’s anti-Islamist rival
in Tunisia. “Beji makes the decisions, but he listens to all sides,” Nidaa
leaders would say with regard to Beji Ca¦d Essebsi, the party’s founder
and Tunisia’s current president. Like Erdo¢gan, Essebsi styled himself as
a charismatic leader, received genuflecting devotion from party mem-
bers, and has had trouble distancing himself from his party’s internal
affairs despite the Tunisian constitution’s requirement that the president
remain independent from political parties.
Though Ghannouchi plays a possibly indispensable role in holding to-
Monica Marks 111

gether Ennahda’s disparate trends, nahdawis never refer to him in rhap-

sodical terms. AKP members, by contrast, routinely refer to Erdo¢gan
as sessizlerin sesi, “the voice of the voiceless.” The words of Meryem
Goka, who works at the women’s division of the AKP’s headquarters in
Ankara, reflect the way many in AKP describe Erdo¢gan:

Women come from their houses when the AK Parti makes visits—it’s
something like a miracle. They come just because of Recep Tayyip
Erdo¢gan, they want to see him, touch him, feel him—he is the voice of
the voiceless. . . . All the people in Turkey, we are all praying that he lives
for a very long time . . . so he can fix the institutions in this country. Then
he can step back, so that Turkey, like a young baby, can walk on its own.13

Such statements about Ghannouchi would be unfathomable inside

Ennahda. In more than four years based in Tunisia, interviewing hun-
dreds of nahdawis, I never met one who attributed the strength of En-
nahda itself, or the success of Tunisia’s transition, to the singular power
of Ghannouchi’s guidance. Unlike Erdo¢gan, Ghannouchi is described by
his supporters as a subdued philosopher-politician—a grandfatherly yet
often quite cunning thinker whose rhetoric is measured, not hostile, and
who has been surprisingly free of paranoia or egoism.
AKP members with whom I have discussed Ennadha tend to describe
Ghannouchi as a hoca, sometimes drawing analogies between him and
Davuto¢glu. But some AKP members have suggested that this type of
personality is not what Tunisia needs in a leader. The implication is that,
though Ghannouchi’s consensus-oriented ideas might sound nice, they
will do little to drive the kind of economic development that Turkey
has achieved under Erdo¢gan. “He is an idealist and a philosopher,” one
AKP parliamentarian said of Ghannouchi. “Not a realist politician like
Erdo¢gan.”14
Some AKP members have advised Ennahda to adopt a stronger model
of reis-style, unilateral leadership within their party. One AKP member
who had met with Arab Islamist delegations, including Ennahda and
Morocco’s PJD, put it this way:

We do training programs, and they [Arab Islamist parties] always take us

as a model. They ask how we broke these [anti-Islamist] perceptions. I
always say that we had one person, one four-star general, and we all loved
him. They [Ennahda] need someone who can take them in a similar way
and pull them from these struggles.15

Pro-AKP Turkish newspapers tended to report Ennahda’s May 2016

congress as a positive example of a small Arab Islamist party making
changes similar to those that AKP’s predecessor, the Welfare Party, un-
dertook in the late 1990s. In interviews with AKP members following
Ennahda’s congress, I raised the question of whether there might be any-
thing to learn from Ennahda’s pluralism, its representative institutions,
112 Journal of Democracy

or its support for cross-ideological coalition building. This notion struck

most members of the AKP as mildly absurd. AKP’s longer history in
power, its vastly larger size, and Tunisia’s more limited economic de-
velopment seemed to them to render Ennahda’s achievements irrelevant
to the situation in Turkey.

Can Ennahda Learn from the AKP’s Mistakes?

Meanwhile, surprisingly few nahdawis have expressed concern about
the AKP’s organizational culture, its leadership dynamics, or its overall
direction—even when asked directly whether a post-Gezi AKP contin-
ues to represent a viable model for Ennahda. One exception, a mem-
ber of Ennahda’s Shura Council, expressed concern that AKP members
sometimes advocate for a highly centralized model of charismatic lead-
ership:

Most people in my party [Ennahda] do not see that the AKP has a problem
with this [Erdo¢gan’s leadership style] . . . . [But] If you can’t be a demo-
crat within your own party, you can’t be a democrat outside. The prophet
[PBUH] did not have to ask for advice from anyone, but he chose to. So
should our leaders.16

Such sentiments are the exception, however. All but a handful of

Ennahda members that I interviewed continue to regard the AKP as
successful and worthy of emulation. Following the AKP’s victory in
Turkey’s November 2015 general elections, dozens of nahdawis posted
long messages of congratulations to the AKP and to Erdo¢gan on their so-
cial media feeds. Few acknowledge that the AKP has made any mistakes
at all; thus the prospect of Ennadha learning any cautionary lessons from
the AKP’s mistakes seems unlikely, at least for now.
Several factors help account for why relations between Ennahda and
the AKP have thus far remained warm and uncritical. First, Ennahda
instinctively identifies with the AKP and sympathizes with the Turkish
party’s reaction to many of the criticisms directed against it. Tunisia
and Turkey share strikingly similar patterns of what might be termed
“paternalistic interventionism” in the way that the state deals with reli-
gion. Modern Turkey and postcolonial Tunisia were both influenced by
the relatively rigid French form of secularism known as la¦cité. Neither
state, however, became truly secular according to the five definitions of
secularism commonly cited by scholars.17 Instead, both states adopted
models of extensive government intervention in religious life that were
designed to subordinate religion to, rather than keep it separate from,
the state.
Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba (1956–87), imitated many
of the reforms of Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1923–
38), producing comparable patterns of illiberal and oppressive state in-
Monica Marks 113

tervention in religious life. These included prohibitions on wearing

headscarves in many public facilities and the barring of even peaceful
religiously-inspired political parties. Given these historical parallels, En-
nahda conceives of both itself and the AKP as prodemocratic Islamic par-
ties that overcame dictatorship to foster democracy and economic growth.
Second, when Ennahda members hear the AKP being accused of
nurturing jihadist terrorism, or of pursuing policies harmful to Turk-
ish democracy, they detect echoes of similar criticisms that Ennahda
has received from both local and international actors skeptical of
political participation by Islamists. Many nahdawis feel that such
criticisms are motivated by bias against the AKP’s identity as a reli-
giously conservative party, rather than by any genuine mistakes that
it may have committed.
Ennahda members sensed this bias, for example, in Westerners’ de-
scription of Turkey’s November 2015 elections as free but unfair, and in
their tendency to characterize Erdo¢gan as an autocrat.18 Some nahdawis
observed that Turkey’s allegedly unfair 2015 elections received more
Western condemnation than the sins of Egypt’s murderous government.
“While dollars, euros, and state invitations come to Sisi, [Western poli-
ticians] are criticizing Turkey’s democracy?” asked a contact in Ennah-
da. “Typical.” I heard variations of this reaction from many members of
Ennahda, and from the AKP. In a Huffington Post op-ed, Ghannouchi’s
daughter Soumaya reprised this critique of Western hypocrisy: “The
message sent to the people of the region is loud and clear: either a made
to fit democracy tailored to our [Western] needs and likes, or a dictator,
odious though he may be.”19
Following the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, both the AKP and
Ennahda railed against Western politicians’ criticisms of Erdo¢gan’s
postcoup purge, which by October 2016 had suspended or fired approxi-
mately seventy thousand public employees. Ennahda members, typical-
ly unfamiliar with the intricacies of Turkish politics and often hearing
just the AKP’s side of the story, instinctively felt that they had seen
this movie before: A democratically elected Islamist party, faced with
the threat of its undemocratic ouster, has its mistakes dissected with a
fine-tooth comb while the transgressions of the coup-makers are largely
overlooked, or even actively endorsed, by the West. Ennahda felt it had
itself lived a version of that story in 1989, as had Algeria’s Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS) in the early 1990s, Gaza’s Hamas in 2006, and
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in 2013.
Watching the Turkish coup attempt play out reinforced Ennahda’s
feelings of solidarity with the AKP and stunted the possibility that some
nahdawis might learn cautionary lessons from the AKP’s mistakes. It
also reinforced Ennahda’s conviction that the AKP faced challenges
(coup threats, hypocritical Western powers) that Arab Islamist parties
shared. AKP’s strong resistance to the coup attempt—aided by ordi-
114 Journal of Democracy

nary men and women who stood down army tanks and by pro-Erdo¢gan
protesters who waved Rabaa signs at subsequent rallies—reinforced in
Ennahda’s eyes perceptions of Erdo¢gan as a courageous democrat rather
than an autocratic bully.
Third, Ennahda’s kinship with the AKP is also based on a strong
sense that the two parties are, broadly speaking, fighting for the same
team: Muslim democrats capable of delivering smart governance and
democratic development. Each party keenly feels that it is more in tune
with national opinion (the “will of the people,” or “the people’s voice,”
as the AKP often says) than its rival parties, whose lack of grassroots or-
ganization and dismissal of Islamic values often make them seem absent
and aloof. This perception engenders a strong sense that the AKP must
be right, even if nahdawis are not familiar with the nuances of Turkish
politics or the basis of critics’ accusations. Finally, Ennahda’s uncriti-
cal support for Turkey’s AKP also may reflect strategic concerns. In a
region where Islamists have few friends, and in a context where West-
ern democracies still seem prone to accept Gulf-supported critiques of
Islamist parties, Ennahda would have good reason to cultivate a friend
and strategic partner in Turkey.
So far Ennahda has demonstrated, much as the AKP did in its early
years, that a party with Islamist roots can steward democratic devel-
opment. One major reason why Ennahda has managed to navigate the
choppy waters of Tunisia’s transition so effectively has been its abil-
ity to learn not only from European experiences of democratic transi-
tion and consolidation, but also from the setbacks of Islamist parties
elsewhere in Arab lands. Yet Ennahda could also learn some important
lessons by critically examining why Turkey’s AKP, despite its earlier
democratic achievements, has recently turned in a more authoritarian
direction.

NOTES

The author would like to thank Marc Lynch, Alfred Stepan, and Jeremy Menchik, for
providing feedback that helped develop the ideas in this article.

1. For a discussion of democratic loyalty and disloyalty, see Juan J. Linz and Alfred
Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996).

2. Stathis Kalyvas, “Commitment Problems in Emerging Democracies: the Case of

Religious Parties,” Comparative Politics 32 (July 2000): 379-98.

3. For more on Ennahda’s constitutional drafting process, see Monica Marks, “Con-
vince, Coerce, or Compromise? Ennahda’s Approach to Tunisia’s Constitution.” Brook-
ings Institution, 10 February 2014, www.brookings.edu/research/convince-coerce-or-
compromise-ennahdas-approach-to-tunisias-constitution.

4. Abdou Filali-Ansary, “Tunisia: Ennahda’s New Course,” Journal of Democracy

27 (October 2016): 99–109. Monica Marks, “What Did Tunisia’s Nobel Laureates Actu-
Monica Marks 115

ally Achieve?” Washington Post, Monkey Cage blog, 27 October 2015, www.washington-
post.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/10/27/what-did-tunisias-nobel-laureates-actually-
achieve.

5. Interviews with Ennahda members in Tunisia (2011–16) and AKP members in Tur-
key (2012; 2016).

6. Monica Marks, “Tunisia’s Ennahda: Rethinking Islamism in the Context of ISIS and
the Egyptian Coup.” Brookings Institution’s Rethinking Political Islam Series; publication
forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2016.

7. Interview with Yesmin Masmoudi, 7 August 2011.

8. Interview with Rachid al-Ghannouchi, 22 August 2011.

9. Nancy Bermeo, “Democracy and the Lessons of Dictatorship,” Comparative Poli-

tics 24 (April 1992): 283.

10. Ahmet Kuru, “Turkey’s Failed Policy Toward the Arab Spring: Three Levels of
Analysis,” Mediterranean Quarterly 26 (September 2015): 94-116.

11. Monica Marks, “Did Egypt’s Coup Teach Ennahda to Cede Power?” Project on
Middle East Political Science, June 2016, http://pomeps.org/2016/07/22/did-egypts-coup-
teach-ennahda-to-cede-power.

12. “AK Party Emergency Convention Elects Binali Yildirim as New Party Chair-
man,” Daily Sabah, 22 May 2016.

13. Interview with Meryem Goka, 6 June 2016.

14. Author interview, AKP parliamentarian who asked to remain anonymous, 14 May
2016.

15. Author interview, AKP leader who asked to remain anonymous, June 2016.

16. Author interview, member of Ennahda’s Shura Council who asked to remain anon-
ymous, 20 May 2016.

17. See the five definitions identified by Daniel Philpott, “Has the Study of Global
Politics Found Religion?” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (June 2009): 183–202.

18. Soumaya Ghannouchi, “Erdogan, Sisi, and Western Hypocrisy,” Huffington Post,
5 November 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/soumaya-ghannoushi/erdogan-sisi-and-west-
ern-hypocrisy_b_8476834.html.

19. Ghannouchi, “Erdogan, Sisi, and Western Hypocrisy.”