This article is part of the Special Issue “Parliaments in the Middle East and North Africa: A Struggle for Relevance.” Tunisia’s parliament has undergone a remarkable internal transformation process since 2011, from a formerly mostly irrelevant institution to an influential locus of policy-making. This successful progress notwithstanding, the parliament’s transformation to a democratic assembly has not been fully concluded yet. A main challenge is that the legislature still shows a number of characteristics of an “authoritarian parliament”: besides a lack of staff and financial resources, the continuous dominance of personal kinship over institutionalized power structures remains particularly problematic.

While private networks of individual decision-makers were perceived as crucial for Tunisia’s stability during the turbulent post-revolution years, they concomitantly contain the risk for a resurrection of former authoritarian structures. The article thus traces the Tunisian parliament’s major transformation steps from a former irrelevant legislature to a consolidated, influential assembly, and points out the still existing challenges.

本文是特刊“中东和北非的议会：相关性的斗争”的一部分。自 2011 年以来，突尼斯议会经历了显着的内部转型过程，从一个以前几乎不相关的机构变成了一个有影响力的决策场所。尽管取得了这一成功进展，但议会向民主议会的转变尚未完全结束。一个主要的挑战是，立法机构仍然表现出“威权议会”的一些特征：除了缺乏人员和财政资源外，个人亲属关系对制度化权力结构的持续支配仍然特别成问题。

虽然个人决策者的私人网络在动荡的后革命年代被认为对突尼斯的稳定至关重要，但它们同时包含了前威权结构复活的风险。因此，本文追溯了突尼斯议会从前一个无关紧要的立法机构到一个统一的、有影响力的议会的重大转型步骤，并指出了仍然存在的挑战。