In a post entitled The carousel of November 7^th, written just a month before the riots began in December 2010, a Tunisian blogger and cartoonist, doubtless echoing the opinions of many of his compatriots, described Tunisia as “stuck in a time-warp”, with Ben Ali “controlling time” by obsessively pressing the rewind button so that “the wheel of time is blocked”. The uprising of December 2010, Ben Ali’s flight with his family in January 2011 suddenly cleared this blocked horizon, and the shock left some people reeling with vertigo. A vertigo caused by political time starting to flow again.
A few days before that blog was written, just before the 23^rd anniversary of the day Ben Ali  had taken power, November 7^th 1987, the General-President had shown no sign of being ready to pass it on to anyone. His predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, the first president of an independent Tunisia, had ruled for 30 years. For more than half a century since independence, the Republic of Tunisia had known only two leaders, with a transition that was called a “coup for medical reasons”. In the long dynasty of nineteen Husseinite beys who had ruled before Tunisia was proclaimed a Republic, only three had ruled as long, just one had done better.

      Although this last sentence may seem out of place, it has become accepted practice to associate the length of time a political leader remains in office with the type of regime he operates. In other words, a long rule is thought to be the reserve of monarchs and “providential men”, while an elected president has to bow to the swing of the political pendulum, a rule applied both to parties, and to individuals. However, for decades several Arab leaders seemed to be the exceptions to this rule. And it's probably no coincidence that reforming the Constitution, changing the electoral rules to ensure free elections were at the forefront of the political agenda in both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of the winter 2011. In underlining electoral reforms, they put the mechanisms for regulating political time back at the center of the political debate.