Tunisia is small and tidy, with a large, well-educated middle class amid its 10m-plus people and a long tradition of quiet politics. Egypt is big and messy, with a lot more people living in its capital, Cairo, alone than in the whole of Tunisia. Its few rich and its throngs of poor live in starkly different worlds, and endured a century of wars and shifting ideologies before the enforced 30-year slumber of Hosni Mubarak's rule. Yet the revolutions in each country, barely a month apart, followed notably similar patterns. The wobbly aftermaths of those convulsions also look much the same, as Tunisians and Egyptians grope their way into a more complex new world.
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