Will revolution return to Tunisia? The young democracy is floundering

Karim Benabdallah looks tired. The 48-year-old activist and blogger has been actively engaged in Tunisian politics for more than 20 years. Yet as he gazes up at a carob tree, at the Belvedere Park in the hills above Tunis, his eyes seem weary. “We’re in a place established by those who once occupied us,” he says. “And we’re occupied by the ghosts of our past and present.”

Founded by the French, at the end of the 19th century, Belvedere Park feels like an appropriate spot to reflect on how much changes here — and how little. In 2009, after all, long-term dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ran for his fifth term as president. A year later, he was gone, ousted in the Arab Spring’s first successful revolution. 

Yet soon enough, another despot would come and take his place. Today, Kais Saied is running for his second term as president, one of only two approved candidates. As in 2009, the results are largely a foregone conclusion, with Tunisians expected to vote for a man who’s tightened his grip on their lives. Between political clampdowns and the suppression of criticism, no wonder many Tunisians fear a repeat of Ben Ali’s iron rule. 

Not that the situation is completely hopeless. For as the Saied regime goes through the motions of democracy, and the economy wheezes on, Tunisians young and old fight to save something of their country’s Arab Spring, even if it may not be enough to banish the winter they now find themselves in. 

Contemporary Tunisian politics can really be traced back to 14 July 2011. That Friday, Ben Ali dissolved his government and declared a state of emergency. A few hours later, he fled to Saudi Arabia, and the Tunisian people rejoiced. “We all bet our lives on 14 January!” is how Benabdallah puts it, recalling the massive street protests that forced Ben Ali into exile. 

Yet just like other risings in Syria and Egypt, these happy memories would be crushed. For Benabdallah, the root of Tunisia’s problems can be summarised in a single word: Ennahda. A moderate Islamist movement, it dominated Tunisian politics in the years after 2011, and was a leading party in every post-revolutionary government until 2019. But though its name means “renaissance” in Arabic, Benabdallah says Ennahda ruled “without a vision” for Tunisia’s future. 

That, Benabdallah continues, paved the way for Kais Saied’s landslide victory in the 2019 poll. “Ennahda produced the environment we’re in nowadays”, Benabdallah explains, arguing that while the Islamists claimed to be building Tunisian democracy, they in practice privileged short-term stability over proper reform in areas such as social justice and graft. Certainly, Saied’s remarkable rise reflects widespread disillusionment with the post-2011 political order, not least around the bread-and-butter economic issues that caused the revolution to start with.

But if Saied promised an anti-corruption drive before he entered office, under his rule the authorities have carried out waves of arrests, aimed at everyone from opposition groups to journalists. 

Even so, the President still benefits from public discontent with the political elite, widely perceived as corrupt and incompetent. Saied’s own background surely helps here. A former law professor, some Tunisians continue to see him as a man of integrity, even as others continue to admire his supposed status as a political outsider. “Tunisians were fed up with parties,” concedes Najla Kodia, a member of the socialist Al Qotb party. “Saied seized the opportunity to initiate his putsch, and now he doesn’t want to give up his power.”

This context has become especially urgent over recent years. In the summer of 2021, amid a deepening economic crisis, Saied suspended parliament and took executive control of the country. A year later, he pushed through a new constitution granting himself almost unlimited power to rule by decree. Over just three years, then, he’s built a new hyper-presidential system and dismantled the liberal institutions established back in 2011.

The dire state of Tunisian democracy is clear everywhere you look. Freedom of expression, for instance, has shrunk. Promulgated in January 2019, Decree 54 allows the state to curtail independent voices under the cover of combating cybercrime. More than 70 political activists, lawyers, journalists and human-rights defenders have been arrested or prosecuted this way since the end of 2022. 

As the election approaches, meanwhile, repression has become even more shameless. The media is gagged and judicial independence attacked, even as politicians are detained or prosecuted. Consider the case of Ayachi Zammel, a presidential candidate who nonetheless just received a hefty jail term for allegedly falsifying voter endorsements. That’s before you consider those 14 presidential contenders disqualified from running by Tunisia’s electoral commission, a body whose members are now nominated directly by President Saied.

In another unprecedented step, and just two weeks before Sunday’s presidential vote, Kais Saied even ordered parliament to amend the electoral law and strip the administrative court of its oversight authority. The tweak, which was adopted by the legislature last Friday, directly threatens the role of the judiciary in maintaining the integrity of an election process. 

If Saied had managed to improve Tunisia’s ailing economy, this looming dictatorship might have mattered less. As it is, the erstwhile academic has struggled to improve on Ennahda’s record. “The ruling elite in all these years has been responsible for not changing the economic model as it should have done”, explains Nafaa Laribi, a human rights lawyer, with Saied and his fellow politicians all failing to open Tunisia’s creaking state-run economy to private investment.  

In practice, these problems are clear across a range of metrics. For one thing, inflation remains high. For another, unemployment hovers at 15%. Growth, for its part, is stagnant, even as foreign debt hovered at about 90% of GDP in 2022. Food prices, already squeezed by the war in Ukraine, rose by almost 12% last year, while basic goods such as flour remain in short supply too. All told, half of public sector spending is now spent on the public payroll — leaving precious little for health, infrastructure and social services. No wonder Tunisia’s credit rating has slumped, making access to international markets even harder.

Squeezed between economic turmoil and a rising police state, what remains of Tunisia’s civil society has rallied. As politicians and activists caught wind of the amendment to the electoral law, the newly formed Tunisian Network for Rights and Freedoms staged a protest on 22 September, the sequel to another one the previous week. I watched as hundreds marched down Habib Bourguiba Avenue in central Tunis, chanting and shouting as they went. 

But here too, history lies heavy. Beyond the usual anti-government banners, after all, the protesters equally tried to place their unhappiness within the broader revolutionary tradition, hardly surprising when Habib Bourguiba Avenue once served as the focal point of the 2011 protests. “The people want the fall of the regime!” protesters sang, evoking a cry made famous in Cairo and Damascus during those heady spring days in 2011. 

Kodia, for her part, makes a similar link between the past and the present. “This amendment is another attempt to remove an institution that has dared to challenge the authority,” she says of the new electoral law, raising her voice as the crowd cheers around her. “And these elections are a façade — Kais Saied will take power by force once more.” 

Beyond Leftists like Kodia, friends and relatives of political detainees attended the rally too. One journalist held a photo of Mourad Zeghidi, a legendary reporter arrested in May on vague speech charges. Nearby, I met Souhaieb Ferchichi, a campaigner for the I-Watch rights group, who dismissed a government that “scapegoats” food speculators and black migrants for its own failings. 

Ferchichi is clearly determined to keep fighting, something he shares with younger Tunisians too. “Kais Saied thinks he sits on a throne and wants to stay there for his life,” says a student called Ines, who attended the demonstration with a friend. “We want to encourage more people to stop falling into fear, and open their eyes to this situation.”

Clearly, then, not every Tunisian is resigned to Saied’s rule. But can chanting and marching hope to displace him? Aymen Zaghdoudi is sceptical. “Tunisia,” suggests the academic and human rights expert, “is on the brink of going back to the pre-2011 era.” Quite aside from the ominous similarities between Saied and Ben Ali, Zaghdoudi points out that the opposition is just too “scattered” to be effective. Benabdallah agrees. “The mobilisation is there,” he says, “but it’s a scattered minority of people coming from very different camps.” A fair point: between Islamists and secularists, socialists and liberals, Tunisian politics is riven by factionalism.

Beyond these ideological cleavages, other observers point to the relative weakness of the country’s civil society, yet another consequence of Tunisia’s past. “The democratic transition was left unfinished because it didn’t succeed in creating solid political and independent institutions that would resist any kind of drift”, says Romdhane Ben Amor of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, noting that terrorist attacks and political assassinations stymied mature institutions alongside roiling economic turmoil. 

Yet if Zaghdoudi says the result of today’s election is “likely known” in advance, he does retain some optimism. With the official opposition split, he nonetheless believes the Tunisian Network for Rights and Freedoms has the potential to unite civil society, not merely in its hatred of the president but also in formulating a broader vision for Tunisia’s cultural and economic future. 

Change is surely needed. Tunisia, after all, is floundering. On a downtown street in Tunis, I watched unemployed young men sitting outside cafes, smoking and scrolling through their phones. Informal vendors were there too, waiting for buyers, as stinking bags of rubbish dotted the pavements. In two supermarkets I visited, supplies of sugar, semolina and coffee were all dwindling on the shelves. Milk and rice were nowhere to be found. 

For those with long enough memories, these conditions feel eerily similar to those in 2010, just before Tunisia was enveloped by revolution alongside the rest of the Arab world. To put it differently, then, and even if he does romp to victory tomorrow, President Saied should surely be careful. As Ferchichi warns: “We once revolted against a dictator. We’re ready to do it again today, tomorrow, in the years to come.” 

Not that Belvedere Park felt particularly revolutionary when I visited. At one point in our conversation, Benabdallah and I pass a pond, a place he remembers as a child. Back then, it teemed with ducks and fish. Now, though, the basin sits empty — and Benabdallah can’t help but joke. “Even they have had enough.”