Tunisia has emerged as the one success story of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. While Libya, Yemen, and Syria have descended into civil war, and Egypt into military dictatorship, Tunisia has instead transitioned to and thus far maintained its democracy. Its transition has benefited from several structural advantages, including a homogenous population, a politically weak military, a strong civil society, and a relative balance of power between Islamists and secularists. Yet Tunisia’s transition is still fragile. In recent years, the Tunisian public has become disillusioned with democracy for its failure to improve the economy. Meanwhile, governing elites have pursued a series of problematic laws and measures indicative of democratic backsliding.

The weekend after I purchased a new Honda sedan, I hired a small construction crew. They arrived at my apartment, in Cairo, early on a Friday morning. The foreman told me that it was important to work quickly, because the police weren’t likely to be active before Friday prayers.

With my wife, Leslie, and our twin daughters, I lived on the ground floor of an old Art Deco residence that I called the spiderweb building. It was impossible to enter or leave the place without passing a series of decorative wrought-iron webs. A six-foot-high webbed gate stood at the building’s main entrance, and then, inside the lobby, an old-fashioned elevator was encased in a web-shaped cage. The front door to our apartment was marked by little black spiderwebs. At the back of the apartment, another door led to a small garden with a webbed fence. This fence ended in a pair of spiderweb gates that were large enough to admit a car.

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