For much of its post-colonial history, Tunisia earned the reputation of being one of the most secular, liberal, and 'French' of the North African countries. Yet Tunisia burnished its Arab identity vis-a-vis its own citizens and in the Arab-Muslim world with its principled stance on one prominent issue: the question of Palestine. This, despite the fact that it also housed a sizable indigenous Jewish population. The paper examines Tunisia's entanglement in the Palestine question, both at popular and official levels, with select examples from as early as the pronouncement of the Balfour Declaration, to the post-revolutionary constitution of 2014. Before the establishment of the PLO headquarters in Tunisia (1982-1993), several popular leaders took an active stance in defense of Palestinian rights before the declaration of the state of Israel and in the aftermath of that country's many wars. Tunisia became the backdrop for several targeted assassinations at critical junctures in the history of the struggle for Palestine. Official speeches, state documents, analysis of events, popular monuments, principled stances in diplomatic venues, and newspaper articles indicate that support for the Palestinian cause was and remains a way for the ‘Westernized’ ex-French colony to solidify its ties to the Middle East and to its Arab-Muslim identity.

What structures intolerance among social and political elites in Tunisia? This question is compelling in its own right, as evident from the numerous studies that compare mass and elite level political tolerance (primarily in America and other English-speaking settings). Yet, it is all the more pressing to gauge this norm in the Tunisian context for at least two reasons. First, Tunisia’s nascent democracy remains vulnerable to authoritarian backsliding and, historically, political entrepreneurs will often scapegoat disliked political groups to facilitate a consolidation of autocratic power. Second, my earlier findings from an original mass-level survey in Tunisia indicate that the populace is willing to extend tolerance toward entities they dislike so long as these groups engage in formal politics; yet these attitudes are rather malleable and, as a result, susceptible to elite messaging. In this paper, I present findings from an original elite survey in Tunisia (n=250) fielded in the weeks leading up to the country’s most recent round of elections in fall 2019. I demonstrate that tolerance is exceptionally high among civil society personnel and political party members, although there are notable divergences from this general pattern in terms of elite type and target group. Beyond these descriptive findings, I outline the key determinants of tolerance among this sample, noting the deviations from the mass-level model and discuss the implications of these results for both short-term fluctuations in Tunisian democracy and the study of political tolerance in non-Western settings.

Following the 2011 regime change in Tunisia, a considerable number of international democracy promoters have entered the country, wielding their influence into the national social and political affairs. The involvement of democracy promoters in the Tunisia transition has spurred a debate over the ability of these actors to enhance the democratization process. While extensive attention was given to the EU democracy promotion in Tunisia (Mouhib 2014, Dandashly 2018), some scholars have also explored the INGOs’ role in the Tunisian transition to democracy, underlining the favourable conditions that allowed INGOs to cooperate with the Tunisia’s transitional elites (Kornwall 2017, Marzo 2019) Yet, no one has focused on the evolution of INGOs assistance within the Tunisian democratizing. Using the Tunisian case, this paper argues that in the first years of the democratic transition (2011-2014) the Tunisian political and civil actors accepted INGOs assistance for three main reasons. First, Tunisian transitional elites welcomed foreign assistance as they lacked expertise on how to manage the challenges arising from the transition, including holding free and fair elections and the elaboration of a new Constitution. Second, political parties strategically opened doors to interaction with Western INGOs as they had interest to show a liberal profile to Western state partners and to the international media. Third, and most importantly, all political parties perceived that the constitution-making process would have enshrined a fundamental, yet very general, text that would not have had an impact on sensitive political issues, and thus would not undermined the relations with their political base. The article demonstrates that since the adoption of the 2014 constitution, political parties are showing less enthusiast about the INGOs pressure for policy implementation and legislative reforms, especially when this pressure touches upon sensitive political issues. The article shows that since 2015, political parties are progressively at odds with INGOs to meddling into national political affairs because the legislative reform process involves competing political priorities, therefore encapsulating the political battle to maintain core values and sociocultural norms that help to secure the political base. Relying on extensive fieldwork in Tunisia, this study suggests national narrative vis-à-vis INGOs work has transformed from benign and legitimate to partisan and illegitimate because INGOs have “invaded” the political battleground wherein political parties are competing for their own survival.