Growing Pains
On 15 September, 26 candidates faced off in Tunisia’s presidential election, the second since the 23-year-long dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in the first protests of the 2011 Arab Spring. In the runoff, held on 13 October, the independent candidate Kais Saied, a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Tunis who was a political outsider when he declared his candidacy, defeated Nabil Karoui, a media baron who owns the television channel Nessma but has never held political office, in a landslide. Other countries in North Africa and West Asia have seen popular uprisings against authoritarian governments in 2011 not having success in the long run. Tunisia, on the other hand, has been able to hold on to its hard-won democracy, albeit with transitional challenges in a pluralistic society.
One critical institution that has
