Alencar A (2025)
Publication Type: Journal article, Review article
Publication year: 2025
DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2025.2524853
After twenty years practically absent from the country’s political landscape, the Tunisian Islamist movement Ennahda made a dramatic come back in the country’s 2011 political opening. Contrary to initial apprehension, the party’s experience in power was marked by a relatively liberal stance to compromise on issues that have been historical pillars of Islamist movements and commitment to conciliation with secular groups. Against this backdrop, this article examines the puzzle: what drove Ennahda to move away from classical Political Islam? The work’s contribution to the literature is to demonstrate that the answer lies on the party’s internal mechanisms of ideological change. As the literature predicts, entering electoral politics constrained Ennahda to respond strategically to structural opportunities and obstacles, but it was the ideological dimension (endogenous factors) that ultimately defined the extent of its strategic flexibility. Essentially, its internal democratic structure, which allowed periodic debates where the group’s boundaries of justifiable action were redrafted under the influence of a charismatic leader, allowed for previously unimaginable compromises, steering the party towards moderation. This research was based on process-tracing readings and the content analysis of party documents and interviews personally conducted with 60 Ennahda members in Tunisia.
APA:
Alencar, A. (2025). Not Islamists, Muslim democrats: Tunisian Ennahda’s path of ideological moderation (2011–2018). Democratization. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2025.2524853
MLA:
Alencar, Aline. "Not Islamists, Muslim democrats: Tunisian Ennahda’s path of ideological moderation (2011–2018)." Democratization (2025).
BibTeX: Download