Tunisia, which overthrew its long-time dictator Ben Ali during the Arab Spring, was afterwards long regarded as a “beacon of democracy”. That time is now over: President Kais Saied, who was elected in 2019, has gradually hollowed out democratic institutions and consolidated his autocracy. How did it come to this?
Emergence into Democracy
When the young street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid on 17 December 2010 in an act of protest against police harassment, his actions unleashed massive political upheaval. Within a few weeks, what had been one of the most stable regimes in the region had fallen.
The uprising targeted more than just the dictatorship — it addressed widespread social injustice in the country as well. Rising unemployment, poverty that was especially rampant in the country’s interior, and a blatant concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of the elites — and particularly in the president’s milieu — brought the population to the boiling point. When Ben Ali fled the country on 14 January 2011 after 23 years of rule, many hoped that the revolution would lead to democracy and social justice.
And indeed, the revolution was quite successful at first. The new constitution was considered the most progressive in the Arab world, and the parliamentary elections that were held in 2014 after its adoption were free and fair. Tunisia also made great strides in terms of freedom of speech and association as well as freedom of the press, acceptance of oppositional parties, and the establishment of numerous civil society organizations. Broad popular participation in the political process was also impressively demonstrated by the so-called “national quartet”, made up of the General Trade Union, the Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts, the Human Rights League, and the Order of Lawyers. This quartet’s social influence was crucial for the transition to parliamentary democracy.
The Unfinished Revolution
Yet the revolution remained incomplete in terms of its social accomplishments. Sociologist Mouldi Guessoumi, whose study “Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Society” offers the best investigation into contemporary Tunisian society, claimed that the fundamental error in the transformation process was in the fatal assumption that economic development would follow automatically from democratic reform. However, that was by no means the case. In fact, the opposite was true.
In practical terms, that means that, despite the civil liberties that had been won, hardly anything about people’s material living conditions changed — at least not for the better. Instead, high inflation rates, rising cost of living, and the crisis in important industrial sectors — including tourism — made unemployment, poverty, and the lack of prospects worse. As early as January 2016, the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights warned of a “social tsunami”.
While political and economic power remained concentrated in the coastal strips around Tunis, Sfax, and Sousse, other regions continued to suffer from poverty and the neglect of the state. The numerous social protests that took place in these locations garnered only scant notice in the capital.
The country’s youth were among those most impacted by economic misery; the country’s skyrocketing unemployment rates affected many young, often well-educated Tunisians. They were the first social class to become disillusioned.
On top of that, the fight against corruption — one of the revolution’s main demands — failed. Half-hearted attempts to hold people from Ben Ali’s milieu accountable ultimately succeeded only in reorganizing networks of corruption. The elites continued to divide the country’s wealth among themselves.
Saied made promises to many different sectors of society.
As a result, the unresolved problems led to a massive loss of confidence in the political system and its actors.
After 2011, the moderate Islamist party Ennahda enjoyed a fair amount of popularity in Tunisia, not least of all due to its conservative Islamic vision of social justice. But given that the party has committed itself to economic liberalism, there is not much left of its social policies.
The secular party Nidaa Tounes, which became the largest parliamentary faction in 2014, invoked Tunisia’s “golden age” in the years following its independence from France in 1956, when the state invested in education, health, and infrastructure, and when social mobility was still possible. But in practical terms, this party’s governance also did little to address many citizens’ social impoverishment.
Tragically, the Tunisian left was unable to exploit the rivalry between the two major parties through concrete, tangible plans. While it managed to establish a popular front in the form of a coalition of left-wing parties and organizations, winning 15 seats in the 2014 parliamentary elections, it was still overly concerned with its ideological opposition to political Islam and its internal conflicts. As a result, it failed to formulate a political alternative.
The self-destruction of parties across the spectrum meant that political criticism increasingly came from outside of an institutional framework. However, unions, the media, and civil society organizations still expressed a great deal of frustration with the status quo.
The Rise of Kais Saied
When new elections were called after the death of President Beji Caid Essebsi in the summer of 2019, the institutional framework had therefore already been compromised. The ultra-conservative Kais Saied was a political outsider who was not a member of any party. Prior to his candidacy, his public profile was limited to his work as a lecturer in constitutional law, but criticism of the constitution and state institutions as well as advocating for the death penalty and polemics against civil society fell on sympathetic ears among a disillusioned electorate.
As a presidential candidate, Saied openly stated that he had no intention of reforming the existing institutions, but rather wanted to replace them with entirely new structures. For many people, this radical proposal raised the hope of taking back what they saw as a “hijacked revolution”.
Saied made promises to many different sectors of society. To those on the left he promised things like social justice and wealth redistribution, while religious conservatives were offered reforms regarding gender (in)equality or national identity. This allowed Saied to mobilize widely diverse segments of the population.
Above all, however, Saied quite deliberately mobilized the people who saw themselves as the victims of the revolution: the young and the protest movements. Early on, he secured the support of the movement of young Tunisians, which, like Saied, had a stated desire to replace the political system. For them, Saied was the revolution’s last hope. The fact that 90 percent of voters between the ages of 18–25 voted for Saied in the second round of the presidential election shows how successful that mobilization was.
Europe was quick to welcome Saied’s dictatorship, because it sensed an opportunity to use the Tunisian president to fend off migration to Europe.
The protest movements established in the years after the revolution were the second group successfully corralled by Saied. They were primarily concerned with a more equitable distribution of financial resources between regions, and most participants also voted for Saied.
The third group that supported Saied’s candidacy was the Dignity Coalition, a party that grew out of the League for the Protection of the Revolution (which was banned by the court due to its radicalization) and agreed with Saied’s desire to establish a state based on Sharia.
Saied’s broad support shows that the stage had already been set for his rise. He went on to win the run-off vote in October 2019.
The Coup
By contrast, the 2019 parliamentary election resulted in an extremely fragmented legislature whose ability to act was continually undermined by persistent conflict and blockades — a situation that played into Saied’s hands.
After nationwide protests against the government, the president invoked emergency powers under Article 80 of the Tunisian Constitution on 25 July 2021. This was initially well received by society at large, while the parties, unions, and civil society institutions were caught completely off guard and became increasingly divided over how to respond.
That was when Saied began his march through the institutions. Two months after the coup, he effectively suspended the constitution, dissolved the parliament, and had politicians from every camp arrested or otherwise legally persecuted. He also brought the media and the judiciary under his control. The president then had his far-reaching authority codified in a new constitution, which was adopted through a referendum in July 2022.
In light of the social and political misery Tunisia finds itself immersed in today, it is no surprise that widespread resistance to Saied’s establishment of a dictatorship failed to materialize. The combination of parliamentary democracy and economic liberalism had proven extremely tenuous in a country characterized by widespread poverty. Moreover, the climate of fear that the Saied regime created has silenced most critical voices. Even close allies are not safe from the president’s wrath, as his frequent reshuffling of political posts shows.
Complicating matters, Europe was quick to welcome Saied’s dictatorship, because it sensed an opportunity to use the Tunisian president to fend off migration to Europe. This amounted to a deal based on money in exchange for promises to stem migration.
For his supporters, the coup marked a long-awaited course correction for a revolution that had deviated from the right path. For his critics, Saied spelled the end of the revolution and democracy. Yet the real challenge for Kais Saied is just beginning. In the future, the president will certainly be assessed according to whether he is able to solve long-term problems and, above all, get the Tunisian economy moving again. There are significant doubts that he will succeed in this regard.
Translated by Joe Keady and Hunter Bolin for Gegensatz Translation Collective.