TUNIS, Tunisia — On a chilly January morning at his modest villa outside Tunis, Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's pro-Islamic Ennahda party, opened the conversation with an ode to women.

“I bet on women," he said in an exclusive interview with Al-Monitor. "I am surrounded by women. My wife decides everything.” Ghannouchi's wife is an English literature graduate, and the couple's four daughters were trained in turn as a lawyer, an astrophysicist, a sociologist and a journalist. Three of them hold doctoral degrees, and all were educated in the West. Flanked by a pair multilingual female associates, the 77-year-old Muslim intellectual shared a couch with this female reporter after firmly shaking her hand.

Secular critics would likely dismiss the scene as more “taqqiya,” or dissimulation aimed at disarming a Western audience. Militants among Ghannouchi’s pious base would argue the opposite, that eight years into Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, he has betrayed many of their ideals.

Either way, Ennahda remains Tunisia’s best organized and most popular force, and Ghannouchi is its uncontested leader. The question of how he chooses to deploy his power remains critical to the future of Tunisia’s wobbly democracy, the only one to have survived the Arab Spring. Parliamentary and presidential elections that are due to be held by the end of the year will be a major test.