Coutinho, José João PereiraGatta, Maria Raquel Jesse da Costa2020-02-062020-02-062020-01-272019http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/29458The Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010 rapidly swept through the Middle East and Northern African (MENA) region, with the main requests by protesters being the improvement of standards of living and political change; key to the latter were demands for the ousting of corrupt and autocratic leaders and the transitions to more open and democratic regimes. Many observers were quick to label this stream of protests and demands for change as the ‘Fourth Wave of Democratization’ (an allusion to Samuel Huntington’s work The Third Wave). This idea was short-lived and by 2012 the spring had thawed into a winter, with a wave of violence and general instability sweeping through most of the countries and leading to widespread regional political, social and economic volatility. Few countries proved to be successful in implementing some degree of change, amongst these were Egypt and Tunisia. Nevertheless and while in both countries the first-ever free elections were held in 2011, by 2014 the aftermath of the revolution had proven very different. While Tunisia successfully passed a new ‘democratic’ Constitution, Egypt’s first democratically elected government was ousted in a military coup. The ultimate purpose of this thesis is to, departing from democratization theories and passing through a background analysis of the pre-Arab Spring realities and a comparison of the unfolding of events in the two countries, analyse why the results became so dissimilar. In the Conclusion, we maintain that it was Tunisia’s ‘forward-looking’ attitude, openness to dialogue and attempt at consensus by the different ‘stakeholders’, in contrast to the absence of these realities and to the overpowering role of the army in all phases of the process in Egypt, which ultimately dictated the arguable success of the former’s and failure of the latter’s transition to Democracy.engmaster thesis202400638