Politics
Tunisia is a constitutional republic, with a president serving as head of state, prime minister as head of government, a bicameral parliament and a court system influenced by French civil law. The new Constitution of Tunisia guarantees rights for women, and states that the President's religion "shall be Islam."
The number of legalized political parties in Tunisia has grown a lot since the revolution. There are now over 100 legal parties, including several that existed under the former regime. During the Ben Ali, only three functioned as independent opposition parties: the PDP, FDTL, and Tajdid. The Islamist opposition party Nahda was deemed a "terrorist organization" and outlawed by the Ben Ali government in 1991, but quickly reasserted its position as a major political player following the party’s legalization by the post-Ben Ali government. While some older parties are well-established and can draw on previous party structures, many of the 100-plus parties extant as of February 2012 are small.
Rare for the Arab world, women hold more than 20% of seats in both chambers of parliament.
On December 23, 2011, the Constituent Assembly confirmed a new cabinet for Tunisia composed of 41 ministers (29 full ministers, 15 deputy ministers.) Length and terms of office, the authority of the legislature, and separation of powers are subject to change under the new constitution currently in draft.
Trade unions are now in the process of reconstituting themselves to participate in the country’s new political and socio-economic debate. Following Ben Ali’s ouster, two new trade confederations, the Union of Tunisian Labor (UTT) and the General Confederation of Tunisian Labor (UCGT), emerged to challenge the status quo.
Read more about this topic: Tunisa
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)