Tunisia’s champion of rights and the political process
Maya Jribi, the first woman to lead a political party in Tunisia, died in the town of Rades on May 19 after three decades as a champion of civil society and political participation for women. She was 58.
The cause of Jribi’s death was not released but it had been reported that she was suffering from cancer, which forced her to quit as leader of the Republican Party last year.
Her funeral last Sunday in Ben Arous, south of the capital Tunis, attracted thousands. Tunisian president Beji Caid Essebsi praised her lifelong support for “democracy, justice and equality”.
Jribi became known internationally after the 2011 revolution that toppled long-time leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
A tireless supporter of women’s rights and democracy, she represented the kind of politician for which a new generation of Tunisian voters yearned – direct and relentless in pursuit of her values.
Jribi appeared to be a significant change from the faceless men making backroom deals that had characterised politics under Mr Ben Ali.
Rarely did Jribi seem to celebrate the fall of Mr Ben Ali. She worked with urgency, a feeling that this brief political moment could end rapidly if it were not properly cultivated.
Perhaps that was because the post-revolutionary period was only the second act in a long political career.
By the 1980s Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s revolutionary leader, had been in power for more than two decades and was almost 80 years old.
Tunisia was effectively a one-party state but in response to succession battles Bourguiba allowed new parties from 1981.
It was in this opening up of Tunisia’s politics that Jribi founded the Progressive Socialist Rally with Ahmed Nejib Chebbi in 1983 and began advocating for liberal values. It would be five years before the government legalised the party. For decades, it existed in a twilight zone of politics.
From 1989, the first election that Jribi’s party contested, until 2009, it rarely reached a single-digit share of the vote.
In 2006, she became head of the party, now renamed the Progressive Democratic Party, making her the country’s first woman political leader.
But the harassment never stopped and the following year Jribi became known internationally after she went on hunger strike to protest against a bid by the Ben Ali regime to marginalise political parties by moving her party’s base outside of the capital. The regime backed down. The 2011 revolution brought about a seismic shift in her fortunes. She became a national figure, becoming not just the face of the party but seen as part of Tunisia’s secular future by foreign media.
When I met Jribi in Tunisia after the revolution, she predicted that the Islamist party Ennahda would not dominate any democratic election – a major fear for secularists at the time. She was right.
The years after 2011 have shown Tunisian society is more sophisticated than such a binary fault line.
Issues that were expected to become fault lines after the revolution faded away, lost in the more vital details of creating a functioning economy.
That political sophistication was a double-edged sword and at the last elections in 2014, Jribi’s party collapsed to just her single parliamentary seat.
Yet her influence on Tunisia’s politics continued.
Above all, it was the process that mattered to her. Having lived through seismic shifts in Tunisian politics, she understood better than most that politics was about renewal.
It was the political system that had to survive. The day after Mr Ben Ali was toppled was the end of one long political fight, and the beginning of a new one. Others will now have to continue her work.