TUNIS — As the country that kicked off the Arab Spring prepares for its first free election this month, Tunisia’s transitional prime minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, has some advice for his counterparts in Egypt, Libya or other former Arab autocracies dealing with impatient public demands unleashed by the revolutions.

“When someone is hungry asking for food, you only give him what he needs,” Mr. Essebsi said, describing his go-slow approach to meeting protesters’ demands for jobs and freedoms. “You don’t give him more, or else he might die, so we offer a step-by-step approach.”

Mr. Essebsi, 84, was picked as prime minister in February because during a long career as an official of the Tunisian dictatorship he built a record of trying to change the system from within. But as interim leader he found himself obliged to deal with continuous eruptions of protests demanding jobs, wages and immediate retribution against members of the former ruling elite.

He said he often let the protesters express themselves — but sometimes found the need to crack down.

Mr. Essebsi said it was a choice between yielding to chaos, or loosening the grip gradually, defending his occasional reliance on riot police and tear gas to keep order. His approach has won him broad support but also led a few activists to compare him to the ousted dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

“Sometimes the proponents of freedom have demands that go beyond logic,” he said, “and it is more difficult to protect freedom from the proponents of freedom themselves than from the enemies.”

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It’s Nobel Day, which means that, around the world, curiosity-seekers such as myself will be glued to their computers at 1 p.m. CET.

With “Arab Spring” chatter in the air, it becomes perhaps more likely but certainly less pleasant to think about an Arab or Arabic-writing author taking the literary prize of prizes. It’s both fortunate and unfortunate that we can’t return to 1988, when Naguib Mahfouz was chosen from an Arab shortlist of Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Tayeb Salih, and Adonis—to worldwide surprise.

If the Nobel Prize committee wanted to surprise us now, they certainly couldn’t choose Adonis, who has topped the gossip charts for weeks now. Even readers who’ve never glanced at one of his poems know his name and basic biography.

Other Arab names are circulating: Zakaria Tamer, Assia Djebar, Ibrahim al-Koni, Elias Khoury, Samih al-Qasim, Hanan al-Shaykh, Leila Aboulela, Alaa al-Aswany, Tahar Ben Jelloun. (No Bensalem Himmich? And why no Sonallah Ibrahim? Am I the only Sonallah Ibrahim partisan here?) But Adonis remains the top of the charts, by virtue of—well, by virtue of, politics aside, deserving the thing.

I still don’t really think he’ll get it, although there’s no pinning down the politics of The Committee. But just in case, I enjoyed re-reading Samuel Shimon’s “autobiographical novel” An Iraqi in Paris, for the parts where the titular Iraqi works for a famous Arab poet who he pseudonymizes as “Adams.”

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