In her view, in Tunisia it was unemployment that ultimately brought people out to vote — one party promised 200,000 jobs, another 300,000. Ennahda promised 600,000. (According to the U.S. State Department, 700,000 Tunisians, or 19 percent of the working-age population, were unemployed in 2011.)

“If I didn’t have a job, I would have voted for them, too,” Ms. Yahyaoui said.

The vote for Ennahda was not a “return” to Islamism, she added, and the party is not radical. Ennahda’s party leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, has sought to reassure secularists, promising to strengthen women’s role in Tunisian politics and saying that the party would not ban alcohol, stop tourists from wearing bikinis or impose Islamic strictures on banking.

The party has also promised to protect the personal status code — one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in the Islamic world — which grants equal rights to women and men in divorce proceedings and bans polygamy.

But there are fears that the party has one brand of politics for the more affluent, educated and secular electorate, and keeps another, more radical version for poorer, more religious regions.

“They couldn’t have won now with a fundamentalist Islamist agenda, but maybe in 10 years,” Ms. Yahyaoui said. “For now they had to be reassuring.”

The one place she does not want them involved is schools. “They can have any other ministry in the government they want, I don’t care, just not education,” she said. That would give Ennhada too much potential to indoctrinate, she said.

Ms. Ben Jemaa harbors similar worries. “I’m afraid that in 20 years that Tunisians will demand that the right to abortion be repealed because they have been gradually indoctrinated to the idea,” she said.