I. T. KOFANOV Candidate of Economic Sciences Institute of Africa, Russian Academy of Sciences Keywords: Tunisia, "Arab spring", democracy, Ennahda, terrorism Of particular interest is Tunisia, the only country where the" Arab Spring " ends with the transition to democratic forms of government. At the same time, it is important to note that the process is far from over, and a rollback to authoritarianism is still possible. The variety of political regimes in the modern theory of the state is reduced to two main types: democratic and anti-democratic (totalitarian). The issues of their formation and transition from one form to another have always attracted close attention of specialists. The revealed general patterns do not exclude the peculiarities of their manifestation in each individual country. Back in the first half of the 19th century, the French political figure and historian A. de Tocqueville, in his treatise "Democracy in America", noted that it is not necessary "to consider all democratic peoples as copies created in the image and likeness of the American people, and we will try, in the end, to discern the features of their own national features"1. The Tunisian experience is important because it can provide an answer, at least partially, to the question that most political scientists and practicing politicians are interested in and clearly formulated by the American political scientist and sociologist S. Huntington: "Is there a fundamentally irreversible, long-term, global trend towards the spread of democratic political systems around the world, as Tocqueville believed and James Bryce. Or, political democracy is a form of manifestation limited, with few exceptions, to a minority of rich and / or Western societies. Or perhaps, for a significant number of countries, political democracy is a temporary phenomenon, periodically alternating with various forms of authoritarian rule " 2? TRANSITION PERIOD: FLUCTUATIONS IN THE SCALE The transition period that began ... Read more