Page 168 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media and Civil Society 153

began to plummet, and his party suffered “stinging defeats” in the June 2016 state
elections, losing six of the nine state governorships it had held some for decades.
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The results were particularly significant in Mexico City, where the insurgent Morena
party, led by reformist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, led in the balloting for the
capital’s constituent assembly. In response to a mass citizens’ campaign, in 2017
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President Peña Nieto established a body akin to Indonesia’s KPK, the National Anti-
corruption System, and enshrined it in the constitution—a development observers
called “a watershed moment.” When the president tried to hobble the anticorrup-
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tion drive by appointing his party’s campaign lawyer as attorney general, a media
exposé of the nominee’s use of a fake address to avoid taxes on his Ferrari blocked
the move. In 2018, after months of continued protests over corruption, Peña Nieto’s
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party suffered a stunning defeat in the July presidential elections, bringing the opposi-
tion leader López Obrador to power.
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The most promising democratic transition of the Arab Spring, that of Tunisia,
also shows the potential power of media-driven scandal, set in motion by a fusion of
civic-minded journalism and partisan maneuvering, to fend off authoritarian reversal.
Throughout its first half century as an independent state, Tunisia had an entrenched
authoritarian apparatus, headed in 1957–87 by Habib Bourgiba and then, after a palace
coup in 1987, by his prime minister, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who took office promis-
ing democratic reforms. By 1994, however, this would-be reformer’s rule had become
marked by judicial corruption, torture, repression, and terror campaigns. By establish-
ing an overseas newspaper and a presence in the French mainstream media, exiled
oppositionists cultivated democratic values and circulated exposés of the regime’s
spreading corruption. In the aftermath of the 2011 uprising that toppled Ben Ali,
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the new government embarked on reforms that included laws protecting freedom of
speech and freedom of association. The democracy movement’s success in establish-
ing robust protections for the latter reflects serious attempts at reform after Ben Ali’s
harsh repression of unions and other civil society organizations.
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In the wave of change that accompanied this dictator’s downfall, media law reform
led to a decree containing eighty articles pertaining to freedom of speech and informa-
tion that seemed to offer new protections for the media. But as in Indonesia, failure
to eliminate older, contradictory articles in the penal code enabled the use of criminal
libel laws to silence journalists and curb a watchdog media. Nevertheless, Tunisia’s
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ranking on the World Press Freedom Index climbed by thirty places in 2015–16 to
rank at 96 out of 180 countries. When scandals have broken, moreover, they have
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followed a similar trajectory to that seen in Indonesia and other comparable cases,
serving to break up collusive pacts that can lead to reversal.
The most dramatic of these scandals began in December 2012, when the freelance
journalist Olfa Riahi posted documents on her blog implicating the minister of foreign
affairs from the Islamist Ennahda Party in embezzlement and an extramarital affair.
The documents contained receipts showing the minister’s use of both state coffers
and a Chinese government slush fund to rent the Sheraton Hotel for his personal use.
Although she obtained the documents from a partisan-motivated insider leak, Riahi
spent six weeks verifying their contents by tracking the data back to original sources
in China. While Salafist extremists sent her death threats and prosecutors filed crimi-
nal charges, observers debated whether the scandal signaled the “rise of investigative
journalism” in Tunisia or was merely an example of political attack.
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The resonance of this “Sheratongate” scandal was heightened as Tunisia plunged
into a serious political crisis marked by the assassinations of two liberal leaders