Tunisians Growing Impatient With Slow Pace Toward Multi-Party Rule : Democracy: President Ben Ali’s party dominates the nation’s legislature. Critics say he must take concrete action to revive the political process.

Just outside the medina, or old city, of the Tunisian capital, sits a large, modern, stark-white building that houses the ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally.

Known by its French acronym as the RCD, the political party of President Zine Abidine ben Ali dominates the country’s politics just as the party headquarters dominates its surroundings.

While Ben Ali insists that Tunisia is unalterably on the road to pluralistic democracy, the country’s National Assembly remains a one-party legislature, and--after municipal elections last June--all but a handful of local elected officials are RCD members as well.

The party’s continuing dominance is a source of growing frustration and impatience for those Tunisians who thought that, after Ben Ali took power in 1987, the country would evolve into a multiparty political system. Critics both within the RCD and outside it say that concrete reforms from the president are needed to revive the democratic process and head off potentially dangerous disillusionment among the populace.

As the president’s third anniversary in power approaches in November, and as neighboring Algeria heads toward multiparty and fully representative national elections early next year, some analysts here say there is a deepening risk that the public will perceive the reform process as stymied.

At the same time, criticism of the way the government has chosen to address the popularity of Islamic fundamentalists is mounting. Since fundamentalists swept local elections in Algeria in June, the Tunisian government has refused to authorize the Islamic movement’s political party and has shut down its newspaper.

Yet many observers here say dialogue with fundamentalist leaders and full legality for their An-Nahda Party is the only acceptably democratic approach--and perhaps the only approach able to pull the wind from An-Nahda’s sails.

“One feels an increasingly common sentiment that there is a sort of blockage, that a pluralist system is not being achieved as fast as was promised,” says Muhammad Sayah, a minister under former President Habib Bourguiba and a member of the RCD.

A number of laws passed since the end of Bourguiba’s 33-year reign have actually slowed reform, Sayah said, and encouraged an increasingly anti-reformist RCD. Partly to blame for the lack of change, he said, is a strengthening of the presidency to the detriment of the office of prime minister, certain aspects of electoral law that reinforce the RCD’s monopoly on elections, and a law on political parties.

But Sayah and others say meager public support for opposition parties and their leaders is another problem that is not the government’s fault. Ben Ali, they say, genuinely wants to encourage growth of a mature opposition. They point out, for example, that the president included several opposition leaders among the emissaries he sent to foreign capitals to explain Tunisia’s position on the Gulf crisis.

For Moncef ben M’Rad, founder of the weekly called Realites, the primary source of resistance to democratic reform is the “state apparatus,” including some of Ben Ali’s own ministers.

“Despite what I sincerely believe are the president’s good intentions, we are dismayed to see a number of his own men not follow his direction,” he says. “That continues right through to the regional and local level, where people are following first what is in their own interest.”

Ben M’Rad said he is confident that within the next two months Ben Ali will act to jump-start the democratic process--perhaps by bringing some opposition leaders into the government to give them experience, he says, or through legislation to open up television and other news media to the opposition.

Still, other analysts here say the government’s failure to recognize An-Nahda raises strong doubts about Ben Ali’s dedication to democracy. Unlike Algeria, where the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front enjoys full political recognition--and is the country’s largest party--Tunisia’s government continues to say “no” to legalizing An-Nahda as a party.

That did not stop the fundamentalists from running “independent” candidates and garnering about 14% in national elections in 1989 and up to 30% in local elections this year. Most observers consider the fundamentalists, led by Rashid Ghannouchi, to be the country’s major opposition group.

The government says its refusal to authorize An-Nahda is simple: Tunisia is a Muslim country, where the principles of Islam belong to everyone. Thus it is unthinkable to recognize a political party that would try to claim those principles for itself.

“Otherwise, it’s as good as saying that some Tunisians are more Muslim than others, simply because of the political party they support,” says Ali Chebbi, secretary of state for religious affairs. “That is unacceptable.”

Another reason for not recognizing a religion-based party, Chebbi said, is that Tunisia, even though officially a Muslim country, recognizes the freedom of religious practice.

“The state has no place interfering in the individual’s convictions,” he said. “But the state must intervene when a segment of the population attempts to impose their beliefs on others.”

Although this reasoning sounds democratic, many observers say it ignores the strength of the fundamentalists here and the pressing need to address that strength head-on.

For many Tunisians, legitimizing An-Nahda would be the best way to reduce the movement’s mystique and attraction.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to bringing them into the democratic process and keeping an eye on their role from within,” said Rashid Driss, former ambassador and now director of the Assn. of International Studies. “There is reason for prudence, since clearly some of (An-Nahda’s) supporters are only playing the democratic game. But too much prudence from what is still largely the only party with power can be just as negative.”