Amanda Sebestyen

Tunisia's first free elections will be held this Sunday 23 October. With more than 100 parties, there are feelings of great uncertainty as well as excitement.

Since the Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was ousted by mass unarmed demonstrations, successive waves of protest and self-organisation have dismantled many of the old structures of that dictatorship. Earlier this month the old regime showed that it could strike back.

We stopped seemingly in the middle of nowhere. High on a hill was a message in Arabic spelled out in white stones: ‘Welcome to Regueb, the land of free people'. Our busload of activists from the World Social Forum had reached the heartlands of Tunisia's democratic revolution.

An old woman in traditional country dress was sitting with her basket on the kerb of the grand Avenue Bourguiba in Tunis, offering me something I couldn't identify. It looked like a bunch of cotton buds, or maybe a rare form of miniature garlic.