On Sunday Tunisia’s secular Nidaa Tounes party defeated the Islamist Ennahda party in the country’s first full parliamentary election since the 2010-2011 revolution that launched the Arab Spring.
“It's been a good news story in a world of bad news in the Middle East,” say Joshua Landis, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
The Nidas Tounes party will have to form a coalition government as they only won 85 out of the 273 seats, Landis says. But the most important victory is the country’s peaceful transition of power.
“The Ennahda party immediately recognized their loss and stepped aside,” Landis says. “This is politics as usual. It has really not been a story in the news, and that's the really good part – that this looks like healthy politics.”
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