I carry no brief for Tunisian politics. The little that I have learnt from Tunisian friends has left me confused about what to think about that country’s political landscape and shenanigans. What I know is that Tunisia is a small country with a population of 10.5 million people. It has a bicameral parliament consisting of the Chamber of Counsellors with 126 seats and the Chamber of Deputies with 214 seats.
The country’s president is elected by a popular vote to serve a 5 year term. In the Chamber of Counsellors, 85 members are elected by an Electoral College to serve 6 year terms and 41 members are appointed by the president to serve 6 year terms. In Zimbabwe, a similar system exists where the president appoints some senators who sit in the senate together with some chiefs elected by their colleagues and some popularly elected representatives.
 In Tunisia’s Chamber of Deputies, 161 members are elected in multi-member constituencies to serve fiveyear terms and 37 members are elected through a closed list proportional representation system to serve 5 year terms. There are 25 multi-member constituencies. Voters can vote for lists of candidates. The list with a plurality of votes wins all seats in the constituency.
In the proportional tier, there is one national constituency. It is quite clearly a system designed to reflect the consensus opinion of voters in the country’s elections. In the most recent elections, incumbent, President Abidine Ben Ali won by a decisive margin of more than 86 percent. There were four candidates in the presidential election.
These were the incumbent, Ben Ali, Ahmed Ibrahim Mohammed Boucha and Ahmed Inoubi. Yet, although there were no allegations of vote-rigging by President Ali’s opponents, his victory was roundly trashed in the West, where the media and politicians have taken it upon themselves to be the arbiters of which elections are free and fair around the world. Considering how much prosperity and political stability Ben Ali has brought to Tunisia, it was not surprising that so many voters opted for him. In 2008, when many other countries in the world were sliding into recession, Tunisia had a growth rate of more than 10 percent compared to neighbouring Morocco’s 1.2 percent and France’s 0.5 percent.
But to Western and pro- Western domestic critics, this is never enough. They have charged that despite the highly valued political stability that Ali’s government has made possible, the authorities’ continued refusal to countenance “dissent” remains a blot on the country’s overall political landscape and climate. Of course, this is usually a euphemism for tolerating decadent Western cultures and ideas, legalizing pornography and other vicefilled activities.
The truth about elections is that they often reflect which party has a large groundswell of grassroots support, or which party has enough money and resources to make the voters believe that it should be the party of government. Under this paradigm elections can be rigged through other means. The way the West has poured money for the MDC’s election campaigns in Zimbabwe in the last ten years was a form of rigging. Beaming anti-Zanu PF propaganda through short wave radio to rural voters who did not receive the signal of the country’s own national broadcaster, was a form of rigging.
In the months leading to the American presidential election of 2000, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush ordered the removal of tens of thousands of voters from the state’s electoral roll on the grounds that they were felons and, therefore, not entitled to vote. At first it was about 57,000 voters, but the company that did it for them, called ChoicePoint, later said the figure was 94,000. ChoicePoint is a database company with prominent Republicans on its board and payroll.
Choice- Point was sued by the NAACP to turn over the information it had compiled. It later turned out that 94,000 people had been knocked off the rolls. When one considers how close this election was then one can see that this was a very high number. This would have been legal if these people were guilty of crimes. It later turned out on close inspection that at least 97 percent of the people on the list were innocent. The list was aimed at Democrats and, as it turned out, about half of those on the list were African Americans and other minorities. In fact one out of every eight black voters was denied the vote. This was a disgusting figure considering America’s racial past, and especially its past regarding voting. In the end, 90 percent of the “convicted felons” who were forbidden to vote turned out to be innocent of any crime, except perhaps Voting While Black. This, in the very citadel of “the free world,” was a form of rigging. Over half the innocent voters on the list were black, and had they been allowed to exercise their voting rights, Bush would have lost to Gore in Florida. Bush was ultimately elected President of the United States, not by the American people, but by one vote, when the Supreme Court voted by 5 to 4 in favour of preventing a recount of votes in Florida that might have returned Al Gore as president. With the upsurge of Pan Africanism in Africa, of nationalism in the former Soviet Union, of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, of the radicalization of the indigenous populations of Latin America and of a fundamental shift in the world’s trade relations in the 21st century, how can there be any doubt at all in anyone’s mind that the West’s world-wide influence is in terminal decline? For the rest of the world, it is pay back time and the chickens are coming home to roost. The days of trying to install puppet regimes and client states in strategic regions around the world are over. The savvy around the world now know that globalisation is the clever and new subtle form of neocolonisation. Its strength so far has been that the subjects of the new neocolonisation have willingly gone along with their dispossession, labouring under the illusion that one day it will bring them economic prosperity. By the time they wake up, it is too late. Meanwhile the glib economists who will have delivered them into bondage will be living well from the consultancy fees they make by selling out the poor to the highest bidder.