Beji Caid Essebsi (President of Tunisia; founder of Nidaa Tounes) — National Women's Day speech, 13 Aug 2018 (per Al Bayan): proposing gender-equal inheritance as law — a historic break with Islamic-law inheritance — while pairing it with a pragmatic opt-out (testators may keep Sharia shares), embodying his secular, consensus-democracy model.

نقترح أن تصبح المساواة في الميراث بين الرجل والمرأة قانونا لكن بما أن رئيس الدولة رئيس الجميع ومن واجبه التجميع أكثر من التفرقة نقترح أن المورث الذي يريد تطبيق القواعد الشرعية في ورثته له ذلك

[Source is Arabic (Al Bayan, UAE — reporting his speech); confirmed verbatim against the fetched page.] English: "We propose that equality in inheritance between man and woman become law — but since the head of state is the president of everyone, and his duty is to unite more than to divide, we propose that a testator who wishes to apply the Sharia rules to his estate may do so." CONTEXT: Declared position of Beji Caid Essebsi (1926–2019) — President of Tunisia 2014–2019, the country's first freely elected president after the 2011 revolution and founder of the secular Nidaa Tounes party. From his landmark speech on National Women's Day (13 August 2018) at Carthage Palace, proposing GENDER-EQUAL INHERITANCE — a historic break with the Islamic-law rule giving women half a man's share, a step no Arab head of state had legislated. Characteristically he paired the reform with a pragmatic OPT-OUT (a testator may choose Sharia shares) — embodying his "consensus" (tawafuq) model of Tunisian democracy, in which his secularists governed alongside the Islamist Ennahda. He also championed Tunisia as a CIVIL STATE ("dawla madaniyya") that "derives its reference from the constitution, not religion," and advanced individual liberties (the same commission's report had urged decriminalizing homosexuality and abolishing the death penalty, sparking mass protests). This is the Tunisian SECULAR-MODERNIST / CONSENSUS-DEMOCRACY pole — the Bourguibist civil-state tradition updated for the post-revolution era, and the counterpart that made Tunisia the Arab Spring's lone (if fragile) democratic success before Kais Saied's 2021 power grab. [Axes: religion-state (civil state; secular law over religious inheritance law; individual liberties), women's rights / gender (equal inheritance — landmark), democracy (consensus / tawafuq; pluralism), regime-stance.]