Initial unofficial results emerging Monday from Tunisia's Oct. 23 parliamentary elections show the country's Islamist party, Ennahda, set to emerge as the winner. Reacting to preliminary tallies, the Progressive Democratic Party, Tunisia's leading secularist party, conceded defeat in a statement to Reuters. A senior Ennahda leader told reporters that his group is ready to form a coalition government with two secularist groups: Congress for the Republic and Ettakatol. Even now, it is far from clear that Ennahda will be empowered by electoral victory. Ennahda's electoral victory is significant because it means an Islamist party will have won the first elections held in the aftermath of the Arab unrest that started in this small North African state a little less than a year ago. In fact, this marks the first time that an Islamist party has ever come this close to coming to power democratically. Islamists have swept the polls in a number of places within the region in the recent past, but through elections held in circumstances plainly different than what we see now — and their election fell well short of empowering Islamists in the aftermath of the polls. Algeria's Front Islamique du Salut won by a landslide in the first round of the 1990-91 parliamentary elections, which were annulled by the military establishment in order to block an Islamist victory. In late 2002, Turkey's Justice & Development Party (AKP) won a more than two-thirds majority in parliamentary elections — but the AKP's room for action remained highly circumscribed by the secularist military establishment, and the AKP is not really an Islamist movement. It is rather a conservative centrist party, a successor to several Islamist parties. In 2004, the pro-Iranian Shia Islamist coalition, Iraqi National Alliance, won the first elections of the post-Baathist era, but Iraq has yet to display the characteristics of a traditionally defined state. Two years later, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas overwhelmingly won the 2006 polls to elect the Palestinian Legislative Council — a process that led to an intra-Palestinian civil war fought to control lands that do not constitute a country. That same year, in Bahrain's parliamentary elections, the Shia Islamist Al Wefaq movement won 17 of the 40 seats, while two other Sunni Islamist groups collected another 15, but a Sunni monarchy continues to dominate the Shia-majority island nation. Each of these events preceded the recent unrest in Arab countries, and their impact was limited. Even now, it is far from clear that Ennahda will be empowered by electoral victory, especially since the emerging legislature will only be a constituent assembly with a one-year mandate. Yet the electoral victory undeniably takes place in a context in which the grip of secular security states is loosening. For this reason, the rise of Islamist forces is seen as a core threat to the regional political order. Ennahda, led by its founder Rachid al-Ghannouchi, is one of the few liberal Islamist forces in the Arab and Islamic world. Ennahda's views are far more moderate than those held by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and are close to Turkey's AKP. From the point of view of the West and of secular Muslims, however, Ennahda and other like-minded Islamists have yet to demonstrate their commitment to democratic processes — something that can only happen over time and after successive elections. For now, however, it is not clear that Tunisia's elections will lead to the emergence of a democratic polity, given that they are not the outcome of a regime change. Rather, elections were held under the auspices of the same security state over which ousted Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali presided. From a wider strategic and geopolitical point of view, Tunisia is a small country. What happens in Tunisia does not impact the region nearly so much as what happens in, for example, Egypt, where the emergence in coming elections of the Muslim Brotherhood — or of an alliance of disparate Islamist forces — as the largest bloc in parliament would have serious regional implications. In other words, the electoral rise of an Islamist force in Tunisia could lead to a controlled experiment in Islam and in democracy. That said, it is appropriate to consider that Tunisia was the country where the Arab unrest began and spread to the rest of the Arab world.