Five years have passed since Tunisian President Kais Saied consolidated sweeping executive authority and dismantled the country’s post-Arab Spring democratic framework, but supporters of Tunisia’s largest Islamist movement, Ennahda, say the group is not finished — it is gearing up to rebuild and reemerge from the toughest crackdown in its modern history.
For many of the movement’s younger activists, the half-decade of targeted repression that followed Saied’s 2021 power grab is not the final chapter of Ennahda, but just the latest episode in a 40-year history defined by imprisonment, exile and systematic political persecution. Far from breaking the movement, they argue, the crackdown has pushed Ennahda to confront its past strategic mistakes, renew its internal leadership and lay the groundwork for a political future beyond Saied’s authoritarian rule.
“The idea that Ennahda has been defeated and that Tunisians no longer want Islamic parties is simply not true,” said 23-year-old Ahmed, a resident of Ettadhamen, a working-class Tunis suburb with deep historical roots of support for Islamist political movements. “More and more young people want a movement that is rooted in Islam, a movement that speaks to our identity and will stand up for Muslims being oppressed across the world. We are witnessing a resurgence and we will rise again.”
Ahmed’s public optimism stands in sharp contrast to the stark reality of Ennahda’s current position. Since Saied suspended Tunisia’s elected parliament on July 25, 2021, Ennahda’s iconic leader Rached Ghannouchi and dozens of senior opposition figures have been imprisoned, while much of the movement’s top leadership has faced prosecution or forced exile. Once the dominant political force in Tunisia’s decade-long democratic transition, Ennahda is weaker today than at any point since the overthrow of former authoritarian ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. Yet even amid this unprecedented pressure, few within the movement accept that its political journey is over.
Founded in the early 1980s, Ennahda first emerged as Tunisia’s leading Islamist opposition movement under Ben Ali’s repressive regime, with thousands of its members imprisoned, tortured or forced into exile. When the 2011 Arab Spring uprising toppled Ben Ali’s 23-year authoritarian rule, the movement reentered public political life and won the country’s first democratic elections, positioning itself as a global model of what its leaders called “Muslim democracy.”
Unlike many Islamist groups across the Middle East and North Africa, Ennahda long argued that Islam and democratic governance were complementary, not incompatible. Over decades of political evolution, the movement shifted away from framing itself as a strictly Islamist party toward what Ghannouchi described as a party of “Muslim democrats,” formally committed to political pluralism, constitutional rule and peaceful transfers of power. At its landmark 2016 national congress, Ennahda formally separated its political and religious activities, ruling out the use of mosques as platforms for partisan campaigning.
Rather than advocating for the full implementation of Islamic sharia law as state law, Ennahda framed religion as a source of moral guidance for Tunisian society, while upholding democratic institutions, competitive multi-party elections and an independent judiciary as the legitimate foundation of governance. The movement’s official manifesto enshrined commitments to civil liberties, equal citizenship and political pluralism, positions that set it apart from many more hardline Islamist parties across the region. This gradual, moderate evolution won cautious backing from Western governments, which saw Tunisia as the only lasting success story of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Following Ennahda’s 2011 election victory, the U.S. State Department said it looked forward to working with the newly elected government to build a “democratic future,” while the UK Foreign Office welcomed the country’s free and fair polls and pledged long-term support for the democratic transition.
For Ennahda’s founding leadership, Tunisia represented a rare chance to prove that political Islam and inclusive democratic governance could coexist. But that vision was quickly tested by the harsh realities of governing. Though Ennahda never held power alone, governing instead in successive coalitions with secular political partners, Tunisia’s economy stagnated, youth unemployment remained persistently high, and successive governments failed to deliver the widespread economic improvements many Tunisians expected after the 2011 revolution. Over time, Ennahda became the public face of popular frustration with the slow pace of change during the democratic transition, creating a political opening that Saied exploited to cast himself as an outsider who would sweep away the corrupt old political class.
Saied’s July 2021 power grab reshaped Tunisia’s entire political landscape almost overnight. Ennahda supporters widely agree the movement’s biggest failures were not ideological, but strategic. They argue that years of prioritizing consensus-building with secular rivals and attempting to reassure domestic and international critics ultimately left the democratic system Ennahda helped build after 2011 vulnerable to authoritarian rollback. A key example of this miscalculation came during the 2019 presidential runoff: after Ennahda’s own candidate was eliminated in the first round, the movement refused to back polarizing media magnate Nabil Karoui and instead threw its support behind Saied. At the time, many party leaders viewed Saied as the safer, more neutral option, dismissing Karoui as a controversial figure too closely tied to the old Ben Ali-era political establishment.
Ahmed Gaaloul, a senior Ennahda official, says the movement seriously underestimated both the determination of its domestic and regional opponents, and the willingness of Tunisia’s international partners to accept the dismantling of the country’s democratic institutions. “We believed that no one would dare overthrow a democratic system that Tunisians had sacrificed so much to build,” he said. “We misread the moment.” He added that while regional powers hostile to the Arab Spring had worked to undermine Tunisia’s democratic transition, both Europe and the U.S. failed to step in to defend the country’s democratic gains. “The fragmentation and weakness was mainly in Europe,” he said. “They did not defend our democracy.” Instead, Gaaloul argues, Western governments increasingly accepted the narrative that Tunisia’s democratic experiment had failed, while turning a blind eye to Saied’s authoritarian reversal. “The whole democracy that survived for 10 years after the revolution was being let down,” he said.
For many of Ennahda’s younger members, this experience has sparked a broad internal reassessment of the movement’s long-standing approach to power. The arrest of most of Ennahda’s senior leadership has accelerated internal debates over whether the consensus-focused politics that defined the post-2011 transition ultimately left the movement open to being dismantled. “Many of us respect what Ennahda achieved after the revolution, but we also think it compromised too much,” said Hatim, a 28-year-old engineer and Ennahda member. “We spent years trying to appease everyone at the expense of our own party. Now, the younger generation, including myself, want leaders who are confident enough to pursue their programme instead of always making concessions. We don’t want endless consensus if it means abandoning our Islamic values.”
This view is increasingly widespread among younger Ennahda activists, many of whom argue the movement spent decades expending enormous energy proving to secular and international critics that political Islam could coexist with democracy, only to watch those same democratic institutions dismantled by Saied. Former Ennahda MP Maher Madhioub says the past five years of repression have given the movement space to reflect on its past mistakes. “Ennahda was not born in a government or one of the state’s institutions, but out of the huge sacrifices of its members over more than four decades,” he said. “It was born as a civil, public and universal movement. It won some elections and lost others, but it has always stood with the Tunisian people’s aspirations for liberty, dignity and justice. Governing was always a means to an end, not an end in itself.”
If Tunisia eventually restores democratic politics, Madhioub says Ennahda will reemerge as a changed movement. “There is no doubt that it has learned a lot from what happened,” he said. “It will be more confident in itself, its choices and its competent members, and it will take all its responsibilities.”
Whether a democratic opening will come anytime soon remains deeply uncertain. Saied continues to enjoy strong backing from neighboring Algeria, whose President Abdelmadjid Tebboune recently described Tunisia’s security as inseparable from Algeria’s own, and pledged to defend Tunisia against “any threat.” The remarks, made just days after the fifth anniversary of Saied’s power grab, underscore continued regional support for the Tunisian president despite growing international criticism of his authoritarian rule.
Even so, Ennahda members hold little expectation of an imminent return to power. They say their current priority is preserving the movement’s grassroots organizational networks, supporting imprisoned members and their families, and preparing for the day when Tunisia’s political space eventually reopens. “We haven’t left the political scene and are still here,” said Mohamed, a 31-year-old small business owner. “But in the future we expect the movement to speak more forcefully about what is happening beyond our borders. Whether it’s Palestine, Sudan or other crises affecting Muslims, Ennahda should have a stronger voice and stand up for people facing oppression. We want a leadership that will challenge others that are harming Muslims. We will not accept silence for the sake of diplomacy.”
Despite five years of systematic repression, Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, argues Ennahda remains too deeply rooted in Tunisian civil society to disappear entirely. “Ennahda specifically, and moderate Islamist parties in general, are here to stay,” he said. “Any real democracy in Tunisia or in the Arab world cannot exclude such an important and critical part of society. I do think there will be a place for Ennahda in a new democratic Tunisia, just like there will be a place for all other Islamic and secular political movements.”
For Ennahda’s supporters, the movement’s future ultimately depends not on when it returns to government, but on whether Tunisia restores democratic rule. “People thought we had disappeared before,” Madhioub said. “If Ennahda wins the first democratic elections held after the end of this terrible coup, it will be because it learned from what happened.”