After surpassing 90 percent approval in the first round of the presidential elections on October 6, incumbent Tunisian leader Kais Saied faces his new term in a political, social, and economic climate vastly different from that of 2019. We discussed this shift with writer and essayist Hatem Nafty, whose latest work, Notre ami Kaïs Saïed. Essai sur la démocrature tunisienne (Our Friend Kais Saied: An Essay on the Tunisian Dictatorship), was presented in late September.
Azzurra Meringolo interviews Stan Collender, Al Jazeera America spokesperson25 January 2013
Time Warner Cable pulled the plug on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore’s Current TV just hours after news of the cable channel’s sale to Al-Jazeera became official. After the Arab, English and Balkan channels, Al-Jazeera, which is also preparing to launch a Turkish-language channel, took a major leap into the US cable market on 2 January 2012, acquiring Current TV and announcing plans for a US based news network to be called Al-Jazeera America. Terms were undisclosed, but analysts told the deal could be worth an estimated 500 million dollars. The new channel will be headquartered in New York, but in addition to this existing bureau, others will be opened in Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.
On Tuesday 22 January 2013 Israelis have gone to the polls to elect a new parliament (Knesset) and government. No one is expecting big surprises and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current Prime Minister from the right-wing Likud party, is widely believed to retain his post. He is expected to form a governing coalition with a grouping of nationalist, religious and orthodox parties much in the same fashion as he did following the 2009 vote. The election campaign, inaugurated on the heels of a bloody eight day escalation of violence against Hamas in mid-November 2012, has not been witness to significant excitements, and other than Israel’s continued shift to the right, little new can be extrapolated from the run up to the vote.
Father Paolo Dall'Oglio talks to Antonella Vicini9 January 2013
Father Paolo Dall’Oglio has lived in Syria for over thirty years and is certainly an expert on the Syrian situations with all its lights and shadows. The founder of the Deir Mar Musa monastic community, in the desert north of Damascus, Father Paolo has always been committed to interreligious dialogue with the Muslim world and until last June, when he was sent away by the regime, he personally reported the tragedies he saw every day. Reset-DoC has interviewed him.
A growing chorus of Israeli, Palestinian and international voices are questioning whether a two-state framework for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still applicable given the current realities on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Nineteen years since the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993 and notwithstanding a massive international effort towards the creation of an independent Palestinian state, a lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still a distant and by no means guaranteed outcome. The two-state framework, based on a partition of the land and the creation of a yet-to-be defined Palestinian state living side by side with Israel is by far the most accepted outcome for the conflict. It is endorsed by the great majority of domestic and international players and according to opinion polls still enjoys a sizable majority among the respective Israeli and Palestinian communities.
Azzura Meringolo, an interview with Nazeeha Saeed3 May 2012
While Bahrain’s government concentrated last weekend exclusively on organizing the Formula 1 GP, those who for over a year have been the victims of a repression shrouded in silence, took advantage of this event to attract the world’s attention to their cause. The winds of the Arab Spring had reached Manama on February 4th 2011, when protesters decided to take to the streets demanding political reform and the departure of the Al-Khalifas, the Sunni royal family that rules the country where there is a Shiite majority. The harshest repression began on March 14th when the government allowed troops into the country sent by the Cooperation Council for the Arab States in the Gulf. One thousand soldiers sent by Saudi King Abdallah arrived in Bahrain with a specific mandate; stop the protests and save King Hamad.
The President’s Letter
This text, in the form of a letter, was sent to Reset by President Giorgio Napolitano whom we had asked to contribute to a special section marking the fiftieth anniversary of Luigi Einaudi’s death on October 29, 1961. The special section dedicated to this founder of the Republic appeared in Reset no. 127 and included articles by Enzo Di Nuoscio, Paolo Heritier, Paolo Silvestri, Corrado Ocone, Flavio Felice, and excerpts from Einaudi’s correspondence with Luigi Albertini. After I met with Napolitano early last September, the pressure of events forced him to postpone writing until recently. Although much has changed since last October, recalling what Einaudi can teach us remains important above and beyond an anniversary. Einaudi was president of the Bank of Italy from 1945 to 1948 and president of the Republic from 1948 to 1955, but his legacy also includes his writing, his work as economic columnist for Il Corriere della sera until 1925, and his teaching at the Bocconi University where Carlo Rosselli was his assistant.The heart of the matter that we wanted Napolitano to take on is the crisis of Italian politics and the reasons why the values espoused by a father of the Republic as important as Einaudi are no longer evident in the Italian ruling class except in a very few cases. This was also an occasion to reflect on Italian reformism (a tradition that our President represents in all respects) and on lost opportunities across the entire political spectrum.Napolitano’s letter takes full advantage of this occasion and offers many useful suggestions about work—both inquiry and action—that we must continue. We thank him for this.In a letter to the President sent after our conversation last September, I quoted the work of the recently deceased historian Tony Judt. The President refers to this quotation in his text, so I’ll repeat it here: “During the long century of constitutional liberalism…Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen. Whatever their political affinities, Leon Blum and Winston Churchill, Luigi Einaudi and Willy Brandt, David Lloyd George and Franklin Roosevelt represented a political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities. It is an open question as to whether it was the circumstances that produced the politicians, or the culture of the age that led men of this caliber to enter politics. Today, neither incentive is at work. Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies” (Ill Fares the Land, Penguin Press, 2010, pp. 164-165). In the same letter, I mentioned that reading the Einaudi-Albertini correspondence (published by the Corriere della Sera Foundation and excerpted in Reset) reveals the magnitude of the work undertaken by earlier statesmen with such great scientific, political, and moral rigor on a daily basis. “This strengthens my conviction,” I wrote, “that the gap Judt speaks about is quite dramatic.” I asked the President to reflect on the issues raised by Tony Judt’s “open question.”
Giancarlo Bosetti, Editor of Reset-DoC
Elections in Iran have always had a contradictory meaning. On one hand, they have always been less than free and fair, even when the polls were basically correct, (meaning not materially rigged), because of the vetting of candidates by the Guardian Council. On the other, they have been a flexible mechanism measuring the relative strength of the different components of the regime. Not a democracy, certainly, but a sort of pluralistic oligarchy.
Two months have elapsed since the Moroccan premature parliamentary elections of November 25th gave an unprecedented victory to the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD). The latter won 25% of the seats of the 295 seats of the Moroccan parliament. A victory that many observers of the Moroccan and Maghrebi affairs considered historic, given the unprecedented transparency, and quasi-total impartiality of the “Mother of Ministries”—the nickname of the Interior Ministry during the reign of Driss Basri because of its octopus-like shape and involvement in every aspect of the Moroccans’ life—who supervised these elections. Despite some activists’ lamentation of the negative impartiality of the authorities, none cast any serious doubt on the honesty of their results. This article endeavors to answer some of the pressing questions about the Moroccan political paysage in order discuss the internal circumstances and political calculations that forced the Makhzen—the street name of the whole regime—to cohabit with the victory of PJD despite the relentless war the same regime is waging against the Sufi Justice and Charity Brotherhood. We will also try to see the ability of a PJD-led coalition to effectuate the political change desired by the majority of citizens in the country. [1]
The political landscape of the Arab world has been dramatically transformed by the events of 2011. After decades of sterile politics and engrained authoritarianism Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria have embarked on a courageous journey aimed at fostering inclusive societies based on the rule of law and accountable governance. While we are only at the beginnings of what will be a long and arduous process, it is hard to believe that things will ever go back to the way they were. From Morocco to Bahrain the Arab public is on the march, and representation through elections is what they demand.
The revolutionary atmosphere is everywhere in Tunisia. According to some, the real revolution has only just begun, and in the widespread chaos, there are many who have clear ideas both about the future and about Tunisia’s identity. It is sufficient to glance at Facebook, where on many ‘walls’ one can read messages such as: “We are Muslims not Islamists.” “We are moderates and not extremists.” “We dream of democracy.”
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