The Tunisian president, Moncef Marzouki, admits his is an impossible job. Photograph: Martial Trezzini/AP
Moncef Marzouki strode into the room that former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had used for an office, and sank with distaste into the sofa under the flag. Ben Ali had Marzouki arrested and exiled for 16 years, and the human rights activist turned interim president was not going to look comfortable in this gilded cage. Besides, faux Louis XIV with blue and gold tassles?
Ben Ali's palace may lack the taste of the one Emperor Hadrian built up the hill, but it is on a lavish scale. Marzouki refuses to live here. He is still, he says, the same man who worked as a doctor in deprived suburbs of Paris for 20 years.
Time is short. The transitional coalition government has until next April to succeed, before it returns to the country for a fresh mandate. It is determined not to stay beyond its welcome. In that time, the troika – comprising the Islamist Ennahda party, Marzouki's leftist Congress for the Republic and the centrist Ettakatol – promises to create 800,000 jobs, turn around an economy pillaged by the departed dictator and produce a constitution that will last.
In the face of a steady barrage of strikes, withering daily fire from the media – not least state-owned TV – and fresh clashes on Tuesday with Salafists in Tunis, the palace's new tenant admits his is an impossible job. "I keep telling the people, you can't expect to eat the fruits of the tree. You have to plant it and wait. They say OK, we understand, but we want them now," he said.
The armoured trucks and razor wire around Tunis's souk, the seat of the protests against the old regime, have not disappeared. The plat du jour on today's menu of crises is Muammar Gaddafi's former prime minister Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi: the Tunisian prime minister, Hamadi Jebali, an Islamist, wants to extradite him to Libya, but the president refuses. The prime minister says we don't need your signature; the president says yes, you do.
"Issues of human rights are extremely important to me, and I am not going to sign when this guy could be submitted to torture or to the death penalty," Marzouki said. The Islamists retort: how can Tunisia ask Saudi Arabia to hand back Ben Ali and his wife when Tunisia refuses to hand over Mahmoudi to Libya?
There are other issues. "They are too liberal for me in the American sense of the word and I am too socialist for them in the French sense of the word," the president said. But after six months the three parties have become firm believers in each other. And each has started to argue the other's case. The result is that Marzouki, an exile infused with the French understanding of laïcité, or secularism, now argues that the west is reading Tunisia's Islamists all wrong.
"When people tell me that we are going back to some new Islamic dictatorship, they don't understand the fact that Islam is not the main force; the main force is democracy. We secularists did not become Islamists, the Islamists became democrats, and this is why I think the Arab spring is the triumph of democracy and not Islamism," he said.
"Islam is just trying to use democracy but in fact when you use democracy, I would not say you become a slave of it, but you become part of it. So this must be understood by the west. Even if we have elections and Ennahda prevails, it does not mean that the Islamist mood is prevailing. It means that the Islamist movement has been co-opted by democracy."
The other secularist party, Ettakatol, makes a similar point. Its spokesman, Mohamed Bennour, said: "We are in a coalition, not a union. This is the first time this has happened in Arab history. We said we would enter this coalition 10 days before the election took place and we are sticking to our word. We are not doing it for ourselves. We are doing it to build a democracy that will last."
It is a strange political experiment. Each partner has had to compromise. For Islamists it was the use of the word sharia in the preamble to the new constitution. "I thought that we would lose a lot of time discussing whether the kind of state would be secular or religious and sharia, but fortunately Ennahda was wise enough to say: OK, we are going to use secular vocabulary instead," Marzouki said. "Now we are discussing what kind of political system – would it be parliamentary or presidential – and I think we are reaching a kind of consensus about it, half presidential, and half parliamentary."
The good news of political dialogue in Tunis has yet to percolate to the likes of Bechir Dridi, a law graduate who has been out of work for four years. In Béja, an hour's drive from Tunis, the wheat fields are full to bursting but the bumper cropis of little use to the town's college graduates.
"The head may have changed, but the body is still the same. In a town like this the administration is packed full of Ben Ali's placemen, who parcel out the jobs to each other's children. There are no posts. You can apply as often as you want but the door is closed. If anything, it's worse than before," Dridi said.
The pace of change is grindingly slow. The ministry of justice has kicked out 82 judges for incompetence or corruption and put 100 more under investigation. No judge is being told any more which way their decision should go. But all the records and the paperwork are stuck in the old logjam. It will take time for the new broom to reach Béja.
The private sector is weak, and no one trusts firms to last, so all the jobs are in the state sector. Modest signs of success are just starting to show: growth and investment began to return in the last quarter. The price of fruit and vegetables in the markets dropped back after a year of soaring inflation, because Tunis clamped down on the contrabandcrossing the porous borders with Libya and Algeria.
Opinion polls all point to a bigger and wider coalition next April. Before then, in October, the first jobs may appear. But Tunisia's newborn democrats must still prove they can deliver.
It is a hard, crisis-strewn slog. And Ben Ali's hired hands, like his furniture, are still around. The new government is determined to ensure they do not return to prominence.
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