Besma Khalfaoui, widow of opposition leader Chokri Belaïd, joins Tunisians on 17 March marking 40 days since his death. Photograph: Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty
From the first eruption of the Arab revolutions in Tunisia, it was clear that powerful forces would do everything possible to make sure they were brought to heel, or failed. Those included domestic interests which had lost out from the overthrow of the old regimes, Gulf states that feared the contagion would spread to their shores and western powers that had lost strategic clients – and didn't like the idea of losing any more.
So after Tunisia and Egypt had fallen in quick succession, later uprisings were hijacked, as in Libya, or crushed, as in Bahrain, while sectarian toxins were pumped throughout the region, escalating the bloodshed in Syria in particular, and cash was poured into destabilising or co-opting the post-revolutionary states.
It seemed only Tunisia was small and homogenous enough to be spared a full-scale counter-revolutionary onslaught, its newly elected Islamist leaders pluralist enough to lead a successful democratisation and offer a progressive model for the rest of the region.
That was until the assassination of the leftist leader Chokri Belaïd in February brought to a head a rising tide of conflict between secular groups and Islamists (punctuated with a few violent incidents involving extreme Salafists). Whoever ordered the killing, which provoked large-scale protests, riots and demands for the dissolution of parliament and the overthrow of the government, was clearly out to destabilise the country.
Two months on, and Tunis has just hosted tens of thousands of international activists for the World Social Forum, first launched in Brazil 12 years ago to challenge corporate globalisation, with the aim of supporting radical change in North Africa and across the world.
For all the reports of insecurity, they found a city now strikingly calm and unthreatening, with Salafist fundamentalists thin on the ground andvibrant networks of social movements, trade unionism and protest campaigns. But the crisis of unemployment and poverty that sparked the Tunisian uprising is now worse than in 2010, and corruption in the police and bureaucracy remains dire.
Meanwhile, politics has become increasingly polarised around a dysfunctional standoff over religion and secularism: between the centrist Islamist Ennahda party – which was the main target for violent repression under Ben Ali's dictatorship and won the 2011 elections – and opposition parties, both right and left, which accuse Ennahda of seeking to introduce a theocratic state by the back door.
If it's a fight about the protection of women's and civil rights, that's essential. But what makes the conflict often seem contrived is that Ennahda has long been committed to coalition with secular parties and women's rights (the Ennahda deputy speaker of parliament, Meherzia Labidi, describes herself as a feminist, for instance), rejected attempts to introduce sharia and a reference to the "complementary" roles of men and women into the constitution, and insists there is no conflict between Islam and secularism.
Kacem Ataya, from the influential UGTT trade union organisation, blames the Islamists for the schism and says social pressure has been the key to the defence of civic rights. Mustapha Ben Jafar, secular speaker of the constitutional assembly, thinks the opposition's determination to go into "campaign mode" as soon as they were defeated is the source of the polarisation.
Either way, there's a danger that, as in Egypt (where the divisions are deeper), politics gets diverted into US-style culture wars about religion and identity – at the expense of the battle for social and economic justice and national sovereignty. It's a conflict that suits forces that backed the old regimes (in Tunisia grouped around the main opposition party, "Call of Tunis") and leads to paradoxical alliances. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, dictatorships with an Islamic veneer, support elements of the liberal and secular opposition in Egypt and Tunisia because they fear what the example of democratic Islamist governments might mean for the future of their own regimes.
But it doesn't suit the majority of Egyptians or Tunisians. It was, after all, the impact of Europe's crisis on a Tunisian economy stripped naked by the dictatorship's neoliberal reforms that triggered the revolution – and its central demands for dignity, jobs and economic justice.
Two years on, the government has started to reverse the explosive rise in unemployment – officially now about 17% – and shift spending to the poorer regions. But it has yet to break with the IMF-endorsed policies inherited from the former regime. Ennahda leaders talk about a "social economy" somewhere between free-market capitalism and socialism, but details are sketchy and pressure is now growing to cut food and fuel subsidies and resume privatisation.
That clearly won't meet the aspirations of the disinherited youth who spearheaded Tunisia's or Egypt's revolutions. In current circumstances that needs a move in the direction taken by progressive governments in Latin America, such as Ecuador's, which have already turned their back on a failed economic model, expanded the tax base, slashed poverty, renegotiated multinational contracts and used publicly-owned banks and enterprises to drive the development of the economy.
Instead, the European Union is demanding that Tunisia liberalise its banking system – the very process of financial deregulation that led to the crash of 2008 – while new IMF and European loans risk locking Tunisia and Egypt into policies that will make recovery more difficult.
Tunisia's government is nevertheless trying to diversify trade and investment away from dependence on crisis-blighted Europe and the dominant former colonial power of France. As the new prime minister Ali Laarayedh puts it: "revolutions strengthen national independence". In January, officials confirm, the Tunisian government refused France overflight rights for its UAE-financed military intervention in Mali – certainly not something the former dictator would have done.
How far the Arab revolutions will go – and whether they deliver to their people or lapse back into western clientalism – evidently isn't settled. It will depend on social pressure at home, but also whether they reach the western-backed autocracies now trying to control the process. But one thing is clear: the further democratisation spreads, the greater the chance the Arabs can take control of their own future.