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with virtually all of the major political actors who generated the revolution and who will contest the elections.
Tunisia’s interim government has announced that elections to a Constituent Assembly will be held on July 24, 2011, and, crucially, that as soon as the votes are counted, it will step down. As in the classic democratic transitions in Spain and India, the newly elected Constituent Assembly will immediately have the responsibility of forming the government.
The Constituent Assembly will be free to choose a presidential, semi- presidential, or parliamentary system. A consensus is emerging among political leaders to choose the same system as the ten post- communist countries that have been admitted to the European Union: parliamentarianism.
Finally, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who leads the largest Islamic- inspired political party, Al Nahda, went out of his way to tell me that he has signed an agreement with some secular parties that he will not try to change Tunisia’s women-friendly family code, the most liberal in the Arab world. While many party leaders do not fully trust Ghannouchi, they believe that in the new democratic environment, the political costs to Al Nahda would be too great for it to risk trying to impose Islamic rule. They also increasingly believe that the most democratically effective policy toward Al Nahda for secular parties is accommodation, not exclusion.
Democratization in Egypt in the long term is probable, but it does not share the more favorable conditions found in Tunisia. One of the biggest differences between the two countries is that every Egyptian president since 1952 has been a military officer. Eighteen generals lead the Post-Mubarak interim government, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). They unilaterally issue statements about what they see as the rules of the game for future elections. Key civil- society and political actors repeatedly told me that they had little
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