Abstract
Following the 2011 overthrow of Ben Ali, highly publicized conflicts involving the role of Islam in public life seemed to dominate the Tunisian landscape and threatened to disrupt the democratic transition. Politically, the government faced the challenge of an increased public presence of religious groups and discourses that had previously been banned, particularly from salafis. Legally, a number of blasphemy cases made their way through the courts. As a result of these tensions, the press coverage leading up to the 2014 Tunisian presidential and parliamentary elections, framed the elections as competition between Islamists and secularists. While this oversimplified binary has been rightful challenged, the discourse on Islam and Islamism during the 2014 elections warrants further examination, particularly following the coup and ban on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
This paper, through participant observation and analysis of party documents and events, examines how a variety of political actors utilized Islam and (anti-) Islamist discourses during the 2014 campaigns. It finds that there was an inversion in how “secular” and “Islamist” labels mapped onto the actual discourse in the elections between Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes, the purported “Islamist” and “secular” parties, with the later making concerted efforts to highlight its religious credentials during the electoral campaigns and the former deemphasizing its Islamist character when compared to the 2011 elections. It argues that these two shifts had the effect of the two largest political parties in Tunisia converging upon a discourse in which they both sought to portray themselves as Islamic without necessarily being Islamist. I argue that this shift in rhetoric points to the normalization of religious discourse in Tunisia and a refocusing on other central issues, including the economy and security.
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