Tunis: At Tunis airport arrivals terminal last month, hundreds of Tunisians gathered waving flags to greet a special guest -- not a sports legend or popstar, but a former minister from ousted President Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali’s government.

Three years after Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” forced the autocrat out and set the North African country on path to democracy, Bin Ali regime old guard are not only making a comeback but are poised again to win elected posts.

Prominent among candidates for the legislature and for the presidency are former officials and cabinet ministers from the Bin Ali regime, who are pitting themselves against the Islamist party that governed after Tunisia’s first free election.

After the 2011 revolution, Bin Ali fled to Saudi Arabia and most of his aides and ministers disappeared, were imprisoned and prevented from participating in the first elections won by the moderate Islamist party Al Nahda.

The return of the so-called “Remnants” to the political scene has opened up debate over the legacy of the 2011 revolution that helped inspire the “Arab Spring” uprisings in Libya, Egypt and Syria and eventually led Tunisia to become a model for democratic change.

“All we want is to build Tunisia without exclusion, it must be a new phase in which everyone contributes in building the country,” Bin Ali’s former transport minister Abdul Rahim Zouari told Reuters. “I hope to go beyond this debate because Tunisia needs all its men and women.” Zouari, who is running for the presidential elections for the Constitutional Movement party, is just one of several former Bin Ali cabinet members running in that ballot.

Former regime officials will also be a strong presence in the parliamentary elections and analysts expect them to have ample chance in the elections in regional cities and towns where they still retain their influence.

Political compromise between Islamists and secular rivals has more than once pulled Tunisia back from the brink of political crisis, and helped keep it from the type of polarised chaos now engulfing neighbouring Libya.

In Tunisia’s 2011 election, a temporary law prevented all officials of former regime from participating. But now they can participate in elections after Al Nahda agreed with secular opponents to reject the new draft law to ban Bin Ali officials.

Most analysts widely expect Al Nahda, one of the country’s most organised political movements, and its secular rival Nida Tounes, will turn out the election winners.

But the Bin Ali old guard will also book their place, hoping to promote the skills and technocrat knowledge they say they gained in government as a way to help Tunisia with the sluggish economy and militant threats it now faces.

Like many other former Bin Ali officials and regular Tunisians, those ministers would have been members of the autocrat’s now-banned Constitutional Democratic Rally party.

“People have to compare to what it was before the revolution and what those people are now,” Kamel Morjan, a former foreign minister. “It is normal that there will be some candidates from the party composed of millions of Tunisians for years.” Beji Caid Essebsi -- the head of Nida Tounes and a former president of Bin Ali’s parliament in 1991 -- has become a leading presidential candidate after becoming a rallying figure for secular opposition during last year’s crisis.

Mondher Znaidi, a former Bin Ali health minister, who was welcomed as a hero at the airport in Tunis last month has also announced also his intention to run in presidential elections.

Al Nahda has said the party will not field a presidential candidate, instead focusing on the parliamentary vote which may give them more sway in influencing the selection of the more powerful prime minister’s post.

With Tunisia facing a tough combination of Islamist militant violence, a stagnant economy and worries over high costs and unemployment, old regime officials like Znaidi are taking the chance to tout their achievements in economics and security.

But the return of the officials who once worked side by side with Bin Ali is a hard sell for the younger Tunisians who took to the streets to rid their country of what they saw as a generation of politicians led by a corrupt oligarchy.

Even if old regime officials have a right to participate in the election, for some their return is a setback for an uprising that inspired Egyptians, Syrians and Libyans to follow them.

“After that we are seeing, what is next?” asked politician Omar Shabou. “All we need now is for Bin Ali himself to come back and ask for forgiveness.”