Although official results have not yet been released, Tunisia’s Islamist Ennahda party announced on Monday that its workers had tallied the poll results after Sunday’s vote and that Ennahda had obtained first place in the election. The news is a clear indication of what the results of the wave of uprisings will be throughout the Middle East.

The Islamist party Ennahda, meaning “awakening,” was founded in 1981 by Tunisia’s Rached Ghannouchi. When Tunisia’s recently toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali first came into power in 1987, Ennahda was tolerated but denied legal registration as a political party. In 1989, after an Islamist-backed coalition won 17 percent of the vote, Ben Ali banned the Islamist movement altogether. In the following years, some 30,000 sympathizers and activists were arrested and many, including Ghannouchi, went into exile.

On January 30 of this year, two weeks after Ben Ali was toppled, Ghannouchi returned to his homeland after 22 years and was warmly welcomed by hundreds of thousands of Tunisians. The removal of the ban on Ennahda had been among the demands made by the protesters who ousted Ben Ali.

Only one month after Ghannouchi’s triumphant return, Tunisia’s interim government granted Ennahda legitimacy, and now the outfit has won the majority of the vote in Tunisia’s first democratic election.

The purpose of the vote was to elect an assembly that will draft a new constitution for Tunisia and appoint a new interim president and government to rule the nation until another set of elections is held next year or in early 2013. Although a system of checks and balances will force Ennahda to seek alliances with secularist parties, its influence will be the dominant force in Tunisian politics.

“This is an historic moment. This result shows very clearly that the Tunisian people is a people attached to its Islamic identity,” one voter told Reuters after Ennahda proclaimed its victory.

The Broader Picture

Tunisia became the birthplace of the “Arab Spring” after one of its citizens set himself on fire late last year in protest of government repression and widespread poverty. His suicide spawned a wave of protests that eventually spilled over Tunisia’s borders and inspired revolts that toppled entrenched leaders in Egypt and Libya and also threw Syria and Yemen into tailspins.

These uprisings have drastically altered the political landscape of the Middle East. Pundits have been all over the map in speculations of how the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the region will conclude. They have forecast every possibility from Western-style democracies to military states. Biblical prophecies, however, reveal that the region will become home to a radical Islamist power bloc led by the Republic of Iran.

Alongside Sunday’s announcement from Libya’s transitional leader that his country’s new constitution will be founded on Islamic sharia law, Ennahda’s victory in Tunisia the same day makes frightfully clear that much of the Middle East is racing rapidly toward alignment with radical Islam and Iran.

The dramatic changes sweeping through the Middle East portend some grim times ahead. But the Prophet Daniel made clear that these sobering events are leading to the return of Jesus Christ to spearhead a global revolution that will fill the whole Earth with peace and prosperity. That is the breathtaking conclusion of the longest single prophecy in the Bible! To understand more, read Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s landmark article “Libya and Ethiopia Reveal Iran’s Military Strategy.”