The idea is to have the Tunisian youth act as delegates in a model of the Parliament, as is the case with the European Youth Parliament and other parliamentary youth representations. I had the chance to participate in the event after I got accepted among sixty young Tunisians. This article is my personal evaluation of the event as a whole, beyond the outward show of harmony.
From July 25th onwards, socio-political forces have been seeking to transform Tunisia from a post-revolutionary to a “re-revolutionary” country. Complications have risen as “terrorist operations” seem to multiply, not by coincidence. It would be presumptuous to force a final analysis on the situation, since a lot of details remain mysterious; however, let us try to look at the “story” from different angles and perspectives.
A post-revolutionary context is supposed to be one of “pluralism” where different political, intellectual, and social tendencies co-exist and compete at the same time. However, in Tunisia, we seem to confuse “pluralism” with “bipolarism”.
More than two years after the “revolution”, this very elite is still lagging behind; complaining about the absence of an “intellectual revolution” while no revolution whatsoever has yet occurred in our intellectuals’ minds.
A would-be political alliance between the Popular Front and the Union for Tunisia is looming ahead, emblematized in a significantly-symbolic “encounter” between representatives of each party. The Popular Front, uniting the elusive Left, and the Union for Tunisia, monopolized by a dubious party whose conservative tendencies are economically obvious
Weld El 15, the young rapper, was sentenced to two years of prison for singing “policemen are dogs” (البوليسية كلاب) and convicted for public indecency and cop contempt. Is it that I do not understand the law? Or is it that these laws defy those of logic?
Back in the days of “Big Brother” and the “Thought Police”, the Tunisian people could not discern what was precisely wrong with politics, society, and economy. All the political, social, and economic ills were subsumed under one major ill: that of “oppression”. Now that Oppression, emblematized in Ben Ali’s figure, is toppled, the once unnoticeable problems are surfacing.
Ansar Al-Sharia Congress: When Political Immaturity Confronts Governmental Clumsiness. The government refused to allow Ansar Al-Sharia to hold their third Congress and Kairouan has become a pseudo-military base ever since.
Two years after the Tunisian Revolution, political parties in Tunisia are still living in political prehistory. It is true that the revolution took our rusty politicians by surprise. They were either in jail, or abroad, or in some fancy Tunisian suburb leading a status quo existence.
Our activists have somehow committed “Feminist plagiarism”, borrowing a foreign concept heedless of its source and unfaithful of its uses, without revision or modification. In this de-volutionary process, our Feminists transfigured revolutionary thought into “mammary thought” and transformed social justice marches into “bourgeois catwalks”.
In our Tunisian post-revolution context, it has become quite the trend to display signs –or symptoms- of being “revolutionary”. The word has grown into an umbrella epithet for those who are “fashionable”, “educated” and “sophisticated”. It has become synonymous with “taste”, “culture”, and the elusive notion of Leftism that has developed in a generally politically-illiterate country; the all-at-once neoliberal-communist-socialist-nationalist-anarchist ideologically elusive Leftism.