TUNIS — Maya Jribi, the first female leader of a political party in Tunisia and a tenacious supporter of democracy under the country’s dictators well before the Arab Spring, died on May 19 at her home in a suburb of Tunis. She was 58.

The cause was colon cancer, her sister Najla Jribi said.

Ms. Jribi was an opposition figure during the long autocratic regimes of both Habib Bourguiba and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was overthrown in early 2011 in an upheaval that began the wave of uprisings across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring.

That same year, after the revolution, she was sent to parliament in the nation’s first democratic election, which brought to power the once-suppressed Islamist party, Ennahda. There she became a strong secular voice, leading protests against efforts to enshrine Islamic law in the new constitution and took part in the parliamentary debate that led to its adoption in 2014.

The efforts of secular voices were fairly successful: The constitution guarantees freedom of religion and draws a line between politics and civil society.