As Algeria and Tunisia gear up for the next national elections in April and December 2019, the two elections have one striking commonality: the incumbent leaders, Presidents Beji Caid Essebsi and Abdelaziz Bouteflika, are not only roughly three times older than the median age in their countries (28 and 31) but they are also ailing and perceived as out of touch with the challenging realities their societies face. Since the 2011 popular upheaval, the new party system in Tunisia experienced damaging structural fragmentation, and the leading parties, Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda, faced internal divisions and dissent which now threaten fragile political gains and stability. In Algeria, more serious long-term fragmentation has been ailing the opposition while the pro-establishment, status-quo parties, the FLN and RND, have consolidated their power and expect to gain from maintaining President Bouteflika in office for a 5th term. This paper will comparatively examine the Algerian and Tunisian political context, dynamics and challenges with a special focus on the characteristics of the top leadership, including the generational cleavage, and the party systems and electoral processes and their repeat failure to yield meaningful change for the long term, i.e., inclusion, political civility, institutional restructuring, and ideological adaptation. This is a serious condition since both countries are in the throes of a potentially destabilizing economic crisis, security concerns, and political animus. The dependent variable here is political gerontocracy in Algeria and Tunisia, while the independent variables include, for now, the party systems and the electoral systems that affect them. The paper will look into the role played by the nature and characteristics of the party systems and the electoral rules that maintain in power an aging leadership that has little in common with the bulk of the youthful and dynamic society—both party and election system can be dependent variables since they are shaped by incumbents’ preferences and manipulations. The paper will be informed by several works on relevant topics, including Bogdanor and Butler, eds., Democracy and Elections; Taagepera and Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems; and Lust, Ed., “Democratization by Elections?” It hopes to benefit from the ongoing Governance and Elections in the Middle East Project (GEMEP) and will use information from dozens of interviews conducted this winter in Algeria, fieldwork which will resume next summer in both countries.

While the world praises the building of a democratic oasis in a chaotic region, educated youth continue to flee the country in search of job opportunities and dignity. Among the few returning are fighters from Syria and Iraq who also found themselves jobless and abandoned by (ISIS) leadership. Returning Tunisian youth and the majority who never left find themselves embroiled in a stalled transition without transitional injustice. Those on the frontlines are increasingly desperate, having struggled peacefully via social movements, protests, sit-ins, and strikes. Following the 2013 transitional justice law, Tunisians submitted more than 60,000 complaints of torture, assassination, and human rights abuses to the Truth and Dignity Commission (French acronym: IVD). The IVD investigated, hosting over 17,000 audition sessions. In 2016, public hearings were broadcast live and attended by activists and politicians, along with youth wounded and family members of those killed during the revolution. No representative of the president or his party or parliamentary allies attended. President Essebsi and other public authorities abstained from attending and deliberately sabotaged the IVD by passing an administrative reconciliation act (formerly known as economic reconciliation), issuing pardons to former President Ben Ali and to emprisoned Nidaa Tounes members, denigrating IVD chairwoman Bensedrine, announcing in October 2018 a suspension of all legislative activities until the IVD was dissolved, and failing to allow the formation of a constitutional court, which could have struck down the law. Based on over three thousand interviews, conversations, and exchanges with victims, protagonists and regular citizens in their native dialect since 2013, in Tunisia and abroad, this paper offers an important contribution to theories of democratic transition. Traditional transitional parameters—such as wealth, social inequality, culture, social capital, scrambled constituencies, education levels, urbanization, natural resources (or lack thereof), foreign intervention, elections, political parties, democracy promotion, and peace theory—have proven woefully unsatisfactory. Disappointing democracy development has had less to do with various structures, policies and rational elite choices and more to do with elite machinations and bad policy decisions (such as the elimination of the IVD) in combination with ever-turbulent popular responses organized along the same structures that produced the revolution. Youth disillusionment continues to erode both political party and regime power, while leaders of the most powerful parties seem willing to trade justice for illusory power in both elections and governance, creating the conditions for efforts to reset the transition.

The protest modalities of the Jasmine Revolution--a democratic transition often mis-characterized as an uprising or upheaval--are rooted in both Tunisian and Algerian social, economic and political contestation and context of the 1980s, 90s, and 00s. Over four hundred self-immolations, protest tactics, slogans, graffiti, rap lyrics, and other manifestations of oppositional ideas are deeply intertwined across the Tuniso-Algerian border, and much more prevalent in Algeria, and the Tunisia-specific framing of the events, such as in Masri's recent "Tunisian Anomaly," or Arab-wide accounts, dozens of books and hundreds of articles about which have been published, entirely miss the deep cross-pollination of protest modalities in the Tunisian and Algerian cross-border interior and where millions of border crossings occur each year. Based on interviews with over 2700 primarily young Algerians and Tunisians from both countries over several years, nearly entirely in French and Arabic, and an extensive analysis of the protests themselves including protest paraphernalia and production, this paper examines the cross-border continuities and discontinuities of protest and contestation. The paper challenges prevailing theories of protest, including social movement theory, rational choice theory, resource mobilization theory, and political opportunity theory--along with the overemphasis on leaders and frames rooted in various social constructivist theories--and re-roots collective social protest in re-theorized culture, emotionality, organic and symbiotic protest, and a better conception of layered local agency. In addition, I look at why most Tunisians and Algerians outside of the intelligentsia view their collective experiences as part of an "Arab spring," an Arab spring of which the goals the populations still espouse in the latest extensive polling data in both countries. Part of the methodology drawn from social history is to ground protest narratives in specific historical contestations which re-articulated become part of collective local and regional memory and by extension ongoing protest vocabulary, beyond the (sometimes imagined) strategic re-framings of purported local movement leaders. These protest narratives often challenge and combine existing ideologies of protest, both ideological and identity-based, creating much of the inclusive Arab spring ethos we are familiar with but have not sufficiently examined its local origins, including adoption of feminist, Islamist, and socialist themes, just to name three of the inputs, into the new theory of action. This hybridity, increasingly dismissed in the academy as misleading or fetishized, is useful as an articulation about what is wrong with the boxes and borders placed around social protest to fit particular analytical approaches.