Egypt is facing the most challenging times in its post-revolutionary history, following this week’s military ouster of president Mohamed Mursi.
However, the country is not in completely unexplored terrain.
Another North African country, Algeria, offers some lessons. Meanwhile Egypt’s neighbour - Tunisia, where the Arab Spring movement started in 2011 - might be able to draw some lessons from Egypt about its own experience with Islamist rule.
Developments in Egypt have been heralded by the opposition in Tunisia as a sign of what could be in store for that country’s ruling Islamists if they play hardball on a new draft constitution and carry out threats to purge politics of people linked to the ousted secular regime.
Tunisia was the first Arab state to overthrow an autocratic leader in 2011. However, there has been a growing divide between the Islamists and a vocal secularist movement since.
Attempting to capitalise on the Egyptian momentum, a group of opposition activists this week announced the launch of a Tunisian version of Egypt’s Tamarod (Rebellion) movement, which was pivotal in focusing opposition to Mursi.
Some of the people who took part in the revolution to oust president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011 accuse the ruling moderately Islamist party Ennahda of trying to reverse basic freedoms and of failing to end an economic crisis.
But the lesser role of the military in Tunisia makes it unlikely leaders there will be ousted.
Also, Ennahda seems to have grasped that democracy is not a winner-takes-all game.
In diverse societies the victors had to learn to share power “or else face falling into conflict and chaos”, Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi said in a speech a month ago in Cairo.
Tunisia itself skirted chaos in February after leftist opposition politician Chokri Belaid, a fierce critic of Ennahda, was assassinated.
The killing triggered mass anti-government demonstrations, which forced Ennahda to share more power with independents.
Contrasting Egypt and Tunisia, French President Francois Hollande said on Thursday Tunisia was still “a reference” for the Arab world.
While Tunisia considers the Egyptian precedent, many in Egypt were considering an even more worrisome one: Algeria. In 1992, the Algerian army intervened to stop the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) from winning the country’s first multi-party general elections.
The military annulled the second round of the election and put in place its own administration.
The coup triggered a decade-long war between the state and Islamist factions, in which an estimated 150,000 people were killed. Many of the victims were villagers, who were found decapitated. Memories of the bloody Black Decade still haunt Algerians,
The latest Egyptian developments indicate that politics in Arab Spring countries is still evolving.