(Tunis) By seizing power in Sudan, the generals have dealt a new blow to the democratic aspirations born of the Arab Spring, at a time when it is already vacillating in its Tunisian cradle.
For some, this coup is the last nail in the coffin of the Arab revolts which rocked the region from 2010. Others believe that they should not be buried too soon.
“We can speak of a failure of the Arab springs and revolutions because ultimately many authoritarian regimes have been reestablished or maintained, at the cost of blood and the destruction of a country like in Syria, of blind repression as in Egypt, stifled revolts like in Bahrain, a civil war coupled with a humanitarian catastrophe like in Yemen ”, estimates Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute of international and strategic relations in Paris (IRIS).
“In Algeria, the hirak is slipping, in Sudan and Tunisia, democratic gains are in danger. And I’m not talking about the Libyan and Iraqi chaos… ”he adds.
The first president of Tunisia after the Ben Ali dictatorship, who again became an opponent in exile when the current head of state Kais Saied assumed full powers in July, Moncef Marzouki in a way embodies the grandeur and decadence of the Arab Spring .
But he refuses to speak of a failure, or even of a setback, of the pro-democracy movement in the Arab world.
“Ten years is nothing”
“Ten years in the life of peoples is nothing. Revolutions, and history has shown it, always take a long time, ”he told AFP from Paris, where he had already lived in exile for ten years at the time of Ben Ali.
President Saied’s coup in the country erected as a symbol of the Arab Spring for having so far succeeded in its democratic transition while others like Syria sank into violence or experienced an authoritarian takeover like the Egypt, however, brought water to the mill of the supporters of the failure of the Arab revolts.
This analysis was reinforced by the military putsch in Sudan where the generals arrested on October 25 most of the civilian leaders with whom they had governed since the dismissal of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019 during the second wave of Arab revolts which took hold. also agitated Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon.
“Counter-revolutionaries”
Mr. Marzouki takes issue with it.
“We cannot speak of a failure or a trampling of the Arab Spring, because the factors that triggered it, which are social injustice and the desire for popular participation, have not disappeared, but on the contrary are aggravated, ”he said.
While they disagree on whether to act on the failure of the Arab Spring, experts and political actors seem to agree on the reasons that plagued it, evoking foreign interference, economic slump, the emergence of a political Islam that worries in the West and the 2015 migration crisis.
Mr. Marzouki thus denounces the role of “counter-revolutionary” regimes led according to him by “the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the current Egyptian regime” of Abdel Fattah al-Sissi.
“They are afraid of a democratic tide. They know that if Egypt, for example, had remained a democracy, it would have had an impact on the whole region, ”he says.
Mr. Marzouki, who had cohabited in power with the Islamist-inspired party Ennahdha judges that the formations resulting from political Islam “globally played a negative role” in the Arab Spring while defending their right to participate in the political game.
“Volcanoes”
“It must be recognized that in terms of the freedoms of many populations, they have not been able to demonstrate their management capacities,” says Mr. Boniface.
For Isabelle Werenfels, researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), the Arab Spring “was not a success, but it is not a total failure either”.
“For the Arab peoples, it changed the horizon of the possible,” she said. “It is difficult, especially in the case of Tunisia, to deprive people of freedom once they have tasted it.”
“Democratization cannot work completely without economic prosperity. The free vote does not make people live, ”she argues to explain the bumpy path of the democratic transition.
Another difficulty according to Mme Werenfels, pro-democracy movements can only count on timid support from Europeans who, scalded by the 2015 migration crisis from Syria “place more emphasis on stability and security than on democratization”.
Despite the pitfalls, Mr. Marzouki remains optimistic.
“I prefer the term ‘Arab volcanoes’ to the ‘Arab Spring’ and when a volcano erupts the first time, there will always be a second,” he says.