Jasmine! How sweet the smell of hope and celebration of this exquisite, fresh, dainty, white national flower! The Jasmine Revolution also started full of fresh hope in Tunisia, from around 17 December 2010 to 14 January 2011, when President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali fled the country. It took a mere 29 days for people power to topple a rule that had lasted around twenty-three years (phase 1). The revolution is still ‘dainty’, still transitioning with efforts to democratise, resulting so far in the legalisation of banned political parties, including the Islamist Party, Hizb al-Nahda (Ennahda), in the election of the Constituent Assembly on 23 November 2011, in projections for parliamentary and presidential elections for the end of 2013, and in direct people power still being active, all in an attempt to realise the aims of the protesters (phase 2).

This Tunisian uprising was the first in the Arab Middle East in the twentyfirst century against an authoritarian regime, cascading and spreading regionwide in what became known as the ‘Arab Spring’. But have the goals of the Tunisian Arab Spring been realised so far?

Phase 1: The Jasmine Revolution erupts and Ben Ali flees

Why did the Jasmine Revolution erupt and why did Ben Ali flee? Ben Ali's old diversionary methods of co-optation, repression and the promising of political liberalisation, that had served him so well for around twenty-three years (albeit showing underlying fissures and cracks of late), proved to be no longer effective at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, when he was confronted with the determined demands of the majority of the Tunisian people.

The contributing and underlying reason was an emerging hierarchical dissonance in values between the priorities of the ruler and those of the majority of Tunisians that persisted, was not bridged, and ultimately undermined Ben Ali's regime. The President emphasised stability and did not resort to religion, unlike in the past, when he had used this soft power successfully (Pendulum Model) when confronted with the earlier crisis of legitimacy resulting from his staging of a bloodless coup d’état in 1987 against the then ageing first Tunisian President, Habib Bourguiba.