Bringing the state back in: Ruling parties and regime collapse during the Arab Uprisings

Abstract

Scholars have mostly investigated the fall of dictatorships during the Arab Uprisings through the lens of contentious politics, uncovering new information about the protest dynamics and how they spread both within countries and throughout the wider region. However, the longer structural vulnerabilities within regimes have received little attention; yet such factors internal to states and their regimes proved paramount to the social revolutions investigated by Theda Skocpol. Focusing on the case of Tunisia, the author shows how the economic downturn and a succession crisis contributed to the decay of the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali regime starting in the 2000s. Importantly, they heightened internecine conflicts within the regime and, in particular, within the longtime ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally. It is through this backdrop that the events of the 2010–2011 Tunisian revolution must be understood: far from supporting the regime in times of crisis, members of Ben Ali’s ruling party engaged in contentious activities against him, thus crucially weakening the regime from within.

Introduction

Why did long-standing authoritarian regimes collapse so quickly during the Arab Uprisings? The literature has focused on mass mobilisation, civil society, and the political opposition as reasons behind the sudden destabilisation and fall of regimes (Diamond and Plattner, 2014; Hale, 2013; Ketchley, 2017; Steinert-Threlkeld, 2017; Tripp, 2013; Wolf, 2017). However, as Theda Skocpol (1979: 17) established over 40 years ago in her seminal States and Social Revolutions, sites of revolutionary upheaval are home to ‘multiple conflicts’ in which ‘differently situated and motivated groups’ participate. Skocpol (2023) reminds us that during ‘revolutionary episodes . . . top-down and bottom-up factors, state-centric and class-structural factors . . . all converge to shape process and outcome’. Although they were not social revolutions (Kalyvas, 2023), the pro-democracy Arab Uprisings saw the eruption of various conflicts, including among state actors. With so much emphasis on the anti-regime protests, little attention has been paid to scrutinising dynamics within the states during the upheaval.

Scholars who have brought state actors into focus have typically investigated the military, but other than in Egypt, the army did not play central roles in the 2011–2012 authoritarian breakdowns in the region. Some have mistakenly claimed that in Tunisia, the military sided with the political opposition (Allal and Cooper, 2012: 57; Brooks, 2013: 207; Brownlee et al., 2015: 38; Gause, 2011: 84; Svolik, 2012: 199), a misconception revealing the dearth of detailed studies of internal regime trends during the uprising. ¹ Importantly, the role of ruling parties has received almost no scholarly attention, even though, with the exception of Libya, all of the overthrown rulers had prominent ruling parties. According to the literature, these parties should have acted as stabilising forces. This article makes a first step towards addressing this gap in the literature by shedding light on the internal dynamics in Tunisia’s ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), at the time of the Arab Uprisings. ²

The structure of the article is as follows. The next section theorises the conditions under which ruling parties may in fact destabilise regimes from within, possibly contributing to their breakdown. I argue that party followers may turn into contentious actors if the legitimacy and authority of their leader have come under threat. Using a process-oriented approach, I demonstrate that internal frictions in the RCD burst out into the open during the Tunisian Uprising. Specifically, the party became divided into three camps, two of which engaged in contentious actions as soon as the protests erupted. When figures of the third faction – the most loyal one – followed suit, the whole regime disintegrated. I conclude that internecine party crises are central to understanding the trajectory and, indeed, the outcome of the Arab Uprisings.

The contentious potential of ruling parties

Ruling parties in the Arab Uprisings have received little detailed study. ³ Scholars tend to view them as a force for stability, paying little attention to parties’ potentially causal role in the demise of regimes. They hold that ruling parties have a number of functions that strengthen regimes over time, including acting as instruments of co-optation, coercion, and control (Brownlee, 2007; Gandhi, 2008; Gandhi and Przeworski, 2007; Geddes, 1999; Geddes et al., 2018; Magaloni, 2006; Svolik, 2012). Milan Svolik (2012: 163) suggests that ‘authoritarian parties are best thought of as incentive structures that encourage sunk political investments’; that is, their members have an interest in perpetuating the party and the regime, from which they reap important perks and benefits. Revolutions and contentious politics are typically cast as events against regime actors, including those from ruling parties, who defend the status quo (Geddes et al., 2018; Giugni et al., 1999; McAdam, 1999 [1982]).

And yet large-scale revolutionary upheaval has occurred in countries with prominent ruling parties: The Arab Uprisings and the collapse of the Soviet Union are among the most prominent examples. ⁴ With a focus on the supposedly stabilising role of ruling parties, scholars have bestowed little attention on the questions of when ruling parties cease to contribute to regime longevity and with what effect. One exception is Benjamin Smith (2005), who demonstrated that the life span of authoritarian regimes with ruling parties varies greatly, which he explains as being indexed by the parties’ strength or weakness relative to the political opposition. ⁵ However, the contentious potential of party activists themselves, including their possibly causal effect on regime and party collapse, has been largely overlooked.

Those scholars trying to explain cases in which party members turn against their own powerbrokers typically do so through the prism of ‘defection’, but do not investigate this phenomenon in greater detail (Beissinger, 2002: 97; Karklins and Petersen, 1993: 589; Levitsky and Way, 2010: 65; Pfaff, 2006: 180). Through such a lens, we see that members leave behind their party activism and identity to join the political opposition. What this literature overlooks is that party activists may also turn against their leaders in the name of their party and destabilise authoritarian regimes from within. They do not necessarily defect to challenge their powerbrokers; in fact, defection only constitutes one of several possible contentious actions they may pursue.

I argue that party followers may turn into contentious actors if the legitimacy and authority of their central leader – the party incumbent, who is typically the dictator – have come under threat. Contentious actors advocate for change that their leader opposes or that does not serve his interest. As such, there is nothing automatically stabilising or self-reinforcing about ruling parties. Regime collapse can be driven by internal dynamics, external processes, or both. Party followers may challenge their leader for a variety of reasons, such as when they stop reaping benefits from the regime, oppose the incumbent’s political prerogatives, or are excluded from policymaking. However, they tend to favour conservative change, such as internal reforms or a leadership change, over revolutionary transformations, although some may also pursue the latter agenda.

Notably, most of the time, contentious actors – be they internal or external – do nothing about their discontent. As Paul Pierson (2015: 126) reminds us, ‘choosing not to act may be completely reasonable if defeat seems likely’. The more asymmetric the balance of power between the incumbent and his adversaries, the less likely it is they will challenge him. As a result, authoritarian rulers may seem to draw considerable support even in the face of growing internecine opposition. Moreover, internal discontent may result in authoritarian reinforcement, especially in the short term, as rulers seek to shield themselves from any challengers, particularly those from their own ranks. However, internal discontent makes regime breakdown more likely. Any wider political crisis, including mass protests, risks exposing the incumbent as a straw man who has lost the support of his own constituency. In times of political upheaval, the internal opportunity structure changes in that the incumbent is more vulnerable, making any internecine contention less risky and hence more likely, especially if many people pursue it. Contentious party members may even decide to publicly challenge a ruler, sometimes trying to depose him, possibly in collaboration with anti-regime activists. In what follows, I show that this is exactly what happened in Tunisia during the uprising.

The RCD in the Arab Uprising

In Tunisia, long-standing frictions in the ruling RCD party burst out into the open during the Arab Uprisings and contributed to regime collapse. A successor party to the neo-Destour (‘Constitution’) independence movement, the RCD emerged in 1989, 2 years after the assumption of the presidency by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was deposed in January 2011. Ben Ali did not have a background in the Destour and drew heavily on the RCD to establish a followership, especially in his early years in power, though he also relied on the security forces to fortify his rule. Notably, the RCD failed to mobilise for Ben Ali during the uprising. The few pro-regime rallies that the RCD Secretary General Mohamed Ghariani tried to organise drew a very limited number of members; some rallies quickly dispersed when faced with the much more numerous anti-regime demonstrations. ⁶ The last RCD rally, planned for 14 January 2011, had to be cancelled because of security concerns. ⁷ Crucially, the RCD’s failure to countermobilise for the regime wasn’t only due to the force of the anti-regime protests. Indeed, far from supporting the regime in times of crisis, wide sections in the RCD turned into contentious actors, a tendency that has not been investigated so far.

Contentious actors, strategies, and outcomes

When demonstrations erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, the RCD became divided into three camps. The first consisted of grassroots followers and card-carrying members who overwhelmingly came to support the protests. Their rationales for doing so were similar to those of the political opposition. Many testified that they faced socioeconomic hardship and were struggling to make ends meet; some had experienced police violence firsthand, despite their party affiliation. However, these contentious party followers had varied political loyalties and objectives. Some continued to embrace the RCD and advocated for internal political reform, as opposed to revolution. Others were mere card-carrying members in that they belonged to the RCD on paper but no longer identified with it – possibly, they never had. One RCD grassroots protester who sought only internal regime change – specifically, a leadership reshuffle – explained that followers like him ‘no longer wanted that [Ben Ali] stayed in power, because the years before the revolution [they] had faced real economic problems’. ⁸ As the protest movement gained in vigour, even some followers who identified as ‘RCDists’ came to embrace more revolutionary objectives, sometimes including democratic politics. Protesters’ demands, in fact, frequently evolve during times of vast upheaval (Barrie, 2018; Giugni et al., 1999; Lawson, 2019).

The second category of contentious RCD actors was an older generation of local and regional representatives who had been marginalised in the 2000s; they included figures renowned for participating in the struggle for independence. These officials testified that they supported the protest movement because they believed it would pressure Ben Ali into improving their economic and political standing in the party. They were dismayed that in the previous decade, Ben Ali had promoted his family members and their associates to leading positions in the state and the party, especially as these relatives had no background in the party but came to reap perks and privileges. ⁹ In the years immediately before the Arab Uprisings, this trend was reinforced by an impending succession crisis. Ben Ali was getting old – he was 74 when the protests erupted – and sought to groom through the ruling party a successor from his own family, a process through which he sidelined prominent RCD officials (Wolf, 2018). In 2008, Ben Ali promoted a brother- and a son-in-law, Belhassen Trabelsi and Sakher el-Materi to the RCD Central Committee. In these posts, they wielded vast influence over internal party affairs. The RCD came to resemble a ‘family party’, in the words of one official. ¹⁰ Those who did not have any connections to the presidential family were marginalised.

In contrast to the RCD grassroots, local and mid-level officials chose not to participate directly in the mass demonstrations. Instead, they testified that they engaged in what they called ‘silent resistance’; that is, they withdrew from any pro-regime activities to signal to the leadership in Tunis that they demanded political change as well. ¹¹ While some may have retreated out of fear of the protests, many were respectable figures in their communities. In fact, the anger of the protest movement was mainly directed towards the central political leadership, as well as regional representatives with ties to the presidential family.

Passive forms of contention are often overlooked in studies of revolutionary episodes, which typically focus on the more active and visible manifestations (Allal, 2012; Barrie, 2018; Beissinger, 2002; Giugni et al., 1999; Lawson, 2019). However, passive contention can critically shape the trajectory and outcome of mass revolts. Passive resistance exposes internal regime frictions and may thereby further invigorate protest movements. As Mancur Olsen (1990) established, the power of dictators depends on the perception that they are invincible. ‘If the cadre observe a moment of vacillation, an incident of impotence, a division of leadership, or even the collapse of analogous regimes, all the power of an imposing regime can vanish in the night air’ (Olsen, 1990: 16–17). The role of mid-level and local regime officials is particularly important in times of political crisis because they are the mediators between the party elite and the grassroots. They have significant agency and followers of their own, and they can mobilise their supporters for or against an incumbent. In Tunisia, marginalised RCD officials frequently incited their grassroots followers to take to the streets and pressure Ben Ali to respond to their demands for internal regime change, a tendency the party’s then-Secretary General has confirmed. ¹²

By contrast, members of the third group – RCD senior officials in Tunis – initially did not embark on any contentious activity at all. Many were Ben Ali’s trusted loyalists; he handpicked them for his own benefit. They frequently also entertained close ties to his relatives, especially those who had become major economic and political stakeholders. Most of the elite figures had every interest in supporting the regime in times of crisis. In fact, their entire career, and sometimes even their personal freedom, depended on it. Moreover, internecine contention at the senior level is riskier, as these officials are in the spotlight and hence more exposed than others. As long as elite figures believe that their leader is likely to remain in power, they are unlikely to challenge him, for fear of retaliation, even if they oppose his rule.

In Tunisia, it was only when Ben Ali became visibly isolated that some senior officials began asking for political reforms. On 13 January, Kamel Morjane, the Minister of Defence and a distant cousin of Ben Ali, publicly demanded political change. Crucially, one day later, while Ben Ali was on his way to Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi – also a leading RCD figure – made the decision to evoke article 56 of the constitution and take power. Notably, this was at a time when Ben Ali still intended to return to Tunisia. ¹³ In the presence of the representatives of the Chamber of Deputies and of Advisers, Ghannouchi declared in a televised speech that ‘given [Ben Ali’s] inability to exercise his duties [he had] taken over the position of President of the Republic’. ¹⁴ This launched a wider constitutional process that removed Ben Ali from office and paved the way for a nascent democracy.

Conclusion

Far from being a stabilising force, the RCD contributed to the Ben Ali regime’s collapse in Tunisia. From the beginning, RCD grassroots and mid-level contention reinforced the strength of the protest movement and exposed Ben Ali’s vulnerability. Wide swathes of the ruling party thought his authority and legitimacy had come under threat, although most advocated only for internal regime change. Ghannouchi’s decision to take power occurred in an atmosphere of mounting uncertainty and panic in view of the president’s isolation. Although such cases of elite defection have received the most scholarly attention in the literature, in Tunisia, they occurred only as a result of wider internecine contention at the party grassroots and mid-level ranks, alongside the mass protests.

While historians and country specialists have the ‘propensity to undergeneralize by assuming that each case is exceptional and unique’ (Kreuzer, 2023), it is notable that contention in ruling parties was not confined to Tunisia during the Arab Uprisings. In fact, it erupted in several other countries, although these trends have been little investigated so far. Among other examples, Hani Awad (2018) found that in some Egyptian neighbourhoods, officials of the ruling National Democratic Party did not support the police during the unrest. He explained this through these officials’ marginalisation in the 2000s and their replacement by ‘amateurs with no history of public service’ (Awad, 2018: 209–10). The internal party reshuffling likely owed to President Hosni Mubarak’s efforts to prepare his son as a successor; in particular, he promoted him to leading party posts, alongside a new class of officials who supported him. In a similar vein in Yemen, the Arab Uprisings exposed major tensions in the ruling General People’s Congress (GPC). The GPC became divided into two camps, one supporting President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son, who he also had hoped would succeed him. The other faction opposed the family’s increasing political dominance (Root, 2013). These succession struggles and the resulting internal party conflicts are reminiscent of those in the RCD towards the end of Ben Ali’s rule.

In Syria – where the Arab Uprisings led to civil war instead of regime collapse – major frictions in the Baath party erupted. Indeed, a notable number of grassroots members and even some senior officials resigned their party membership; some openly supported the revolution (Lund, 2013), including popular Baath figure Prime Minister Riyad Hijab. ¹⁵ The case of Syria also highlights that internal party contention does not necessarily result in regime collapse, even during times of major crisis. Ruling parties constitute only one group that may influence the course and outcome of revolutionary episodes. Other groups – internal and external to the regime – also matter, including the military, civil society, and foreign powers.

This article has shown that the support of ruling parties, ostensibly loyal to their authoritarian regimes, cannot be taken for granted, especially in times of political crisis. The mobilisation potential of ruling parties, with their national networks, is particularly important in this regard. Ruling parties have the ability to nip anti-regime rallies in the bud, by either staging pro-regime protests or policing the opposition. However, if ruling party followers seek political change, they may decide to join protests and expose their incumbent as just a figurehead. Protesting ruling party followers may be left disappointed by the final outcome of the political turmoil, which is rarely what they envisioned. In Tunisia, many RCD followers were dismayed when the regime collapsed and the ruling party was dissolved and criminalised.

The case of the RCD illustrates that Skocpol’s observation that ‘revolutionaries [become] revolutionaries’ (Drochon, 2023) also holds for regime figures who decide to support the protesting camp. Future research may investigate when and why various regime actors back the opposition. The RCD further highlights the importance of scrutinising multiple, possibly contradictory dynamics that occur in states during revolutions, including contentious regime actors’ varied strategies and objectives. Investigating how different state actors interact with each other and with the political opposition, and with what effects, are further avenues for research. Scholars need to bring the state back into focus in studies of revolution, not just as a site of authoritarian resilience but of contention, and scrutinise the conditions under which some actors may sow the seeds for their own demise, intentionally or otherwise.