TUNIS – Nearly 12 years ago, Tunisians were fed up with corruption, repression and lack of opportunity. overthrow a dictator, chanting for bread, freedom and dignity. Those chants soon reverberated across the Middle East in a string of Arab Spring uprisings, stoking hopes that democracy could blossom in Tunisia and beyond.
Six years later, the freely elected government of Tunisia granted pardon to corrupt former officials who looted the country before the 2011 revolution. To those who fought for changeas well as those who have never demanded justice for the crimes of the old regime, the 2017 amnesty come like a slap.
“I felt like, how can you expect me to look my mother-in-law in the eye?” Sayida Ounissi, a former minister of one of Tunisia’s post-revolutionary governments, whose father-in-law was tortured under the ousted dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
“Do you really forgive people without trial?” she said, recalling the pardon. “Their victims are still around.”
Like uprisings withered over the past decade and autocratic leaders across the region have regained their power, Tunisia remains the Arab Spring’s greatest hope of democratic change – that’s it for now.
Disillusioned with the failure of their elected political leaders to make good on the promises of the revolution, Tunisia overwhelming vote for an inexperienced outsider for the presidency in 2019. Two years later, in 2021, that president, Kais Saiedset aside Congress and most other checks of his power over set up a one person rule.
Last month, he consolidated his power in a new Constitution passed by a national referendum. More than a decade after Tunisia abandoned its dictatorship, the only surviving democracy has emerged from the dead Arab Spring.
Though swift, Mr. Saied’s destruction of Tunisia’s hard-won democratic achievements took years. In interviews with veterans of this democracy-building experiment, they pointed to a series of mistakes that erased Tunisians’ faith in the system.
Democratically elected leaders have been unable to correct the old regime’s wrongs or achieve economic progress, leaving Tunisia even more corrupt, higher unemployment, increased poverty and debt piled up more than a decade after the revolution. The country has had 10 prime ministers in 10 years, a constant drumbeat of instability that hinders progress. And it never bridges deep secular-religious fault lines.
“The majority of the public still supports the revolution,” said Abdellatif Mekki, a former health minister. “But they moved from one political party to another, or to someone like Saied, looking for someone who could achieve the goal of the revolution.”
When ousted dictator Ben Ali fled the country amid massive protests in January 2011, euphoria reigned. But economists at the time offered a cautionary note: the country’s finances needed close attention.
Protesters have demanded action on socioeconomic inequality and high unemployment, especially among young people who make up almost a third of the population. But with the focus on building a new political system, those demands have largely been ignored.
Rejecting the ruthless oppression of six decades ago, Tunisians in 2011 elect a transition council dominated by the moderate Muslim party Ennahda, the party was brutally suppressed and massacred under the old regimes.
The main component of this party were the conservative, poor, rural Tunisians who first initiated the uprising. For the moment, at least, Ennahda seemed to be on the side of the revolution itself.
But as the country begins writing a new constitution over the next two years, debates over how Islam should highlight long-standing divisions in society. Under Ennahda, secular Tunisians fear, freedoms such as drinking and women’s rights – one of the most powerful in the Arab world – could be lost.
“There will be more focus more quickly” on economic overhauls, said Monica Marks, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at New York University, Abu Dhabi, who lived in post-revolution Tunisia. politics without the growing brutality against Ennahda.
Instead, those priorities receded from concerns that Ennahda, despite its preponderance of moderation, would transform the country into something more like a theocracy than a liberal democracy. due, secular.
Most of Tunisia’s post-revolutionary leaders barely even realized that they needed an economic plan.
Their solution to unemployment and raising household budgets was quick, if short-sighted: hiring hundreds of thousands of civil servants, raising wages for the government, and borrowing foreign debt to cover it all. .
That proved a costly mistake, causing inflation as money poured in and burdening the country with its growing national debt. The government has become the country’s largest employer, spending half of its annual budget on public payrolls.
“It’s a race between parties to buy support and vote,” said economist Ezzeddine Saidane. Then, when the need to cut wages became apparent, “politicians lacked the political courage to fire thousands at once,” he said.
At that time, the country had more pressing problems.
In the years following the revolution, young Tunisians began flocking to join the Islamic State, which had seized much of Iraq and Syria. In 2013, two prominent secular politicians were assassinated.
Ennahda, who ultimately refused to mention Islamic law in the new Constitution, advocated a peaceful, nonviolent form of Islam. However, Tunisia’s growing sense that radical Islam is rampant, combined with the old regime’s decades-long defamation of Ennahda, casts doubt on the party.
In August 2013, tens of thousands of protesters called for the overthrow of Ennahda. The threat of violence looms.
The crisis ended after the leader of Ennahda, Rachid Ghannouchi, and a leader of the secular opposition and former Ben Ali regime official, Béji Caïd Essebsi, met in Paris to resolve their disagreements. . After engaging in a national political dialogue, Ennahda ceded power, paving the way for the drafting of a new Constitution and adopted in January 2014.
The world hails Tunisia as a shining example of peace through consensus, and the two politicians are real politicians. Quartet of trade unions and civil society groups oversee national dialogue 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Winner.
In December 2014, Mr. Essebsi sweep to the presidency. His secular party, Nidaa Tounes, won the most seats in parliament after undertaking a radical anti-Ennahda campaign.
But Tunisia’s electoral system, designed to prevent Ennahda from gaining too much power, limited any party’s ability to win a majority even after winning the election. Nidaa Tounes needed an alliance partner – and Mr. Essebsi, saying it would stabilize the country, chose Ennahda.
His party members were appalled; 32 lawmakers later resigned.
“Tunisia is heading towards collapse, like the rest of the region,” Ghannouchi said in an interview. “Consensus saved Tunisia for five years.”
But the wobbly foundations of the coalition dominated for the next five years, with neither side willing to make unpopular political or economic changes that could threaten consensus.
“What is happening now is the result of all of that,” said Mondher Bel Haj, co-founder of Nidaa Tounes, who resigned over the decision. “Because of the union, the people of Tunisia no longer trust elections. And we were not able to make the necessary reforms.”
The difficult coalition could not agree on members of the constitutional court, a Supreme Court-like body that may have declared Mr Saied’s 2021 expulsion of power unconstitutional. It was never formed.
And at the same time, the economic impacts pile up.
Turning to the International Monetary Fund for help, prime ministers successively proposed repeated neoliberal remedies: Cut the public wage bill, reduce subsidies and sell or overhauling failing state-owned companies.
That has a domino effect, says Sharan Grewal, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Tunisia.
“The people of Tunisia blame the poor economy on political parties and the political system,” he said.
Perhaps no moment has left Tunisians more frustrated than when the National Assembly approved an amnesty for former officials accused of corruption – the only legislation Essebsi proposed during his five years as president.
It shows that Nidaa Tounes is “not interested in democratic or economic reform,” said Amine Ghali, director of the Tunis-based Al-Kawakibi Center for Democratic Transformation.
Ennahda, once considered a fighter for the revolution, lent his vote to pass the law.
“I congratulate you on the return of the dictatorial state and reconciliation with the corrupt,” said opposition lawmaker Ahmed Seddik when the amnesty was passed by Parliament in 2017. “Tunisians will not forgive you.”
They never did, for that and more.
Come the 2019 election, known as Mr. Essebsi died in office, The people of Tunisia have become even more frustrated with democracy. Rejecting a field of prominent politicians, voters were amazed by Mr. Saied, an austere constitutional law professor with a reputation for advocating for the poor and underrepresented.
In that year’s parliamentary election, Ennahda finished first, but resentment toward secular and religious fundamentalists destabilized the far-left and far-right parties. For the next year and a half, Congress was mired in dysfunction.
Clearly disgusted, Tunisians hurled insults at lawmakers in the streets and on Facebook.
The economy was affected by the disaster. The disparities between regions are becoming more and more obvious. Youth unemployment on the rise. The purchasing power of Tunisians decreased by about 40% and the dinar, lost 60% of its value between 2010 and 2022.
Public debt is now five times what it was in 2010. The government is unable to pay wages or deliver grain shipments on time, let alone invest in infrastructure that can boost economic growth.
In July 2021, as Covid continued to plague the economy, Mr. Saied fired his prime minister and suspended Parliament. Tunisians poured into the streets, cheering, and Ennahda offices across the country caught fire.
Moncef Marzouki, the first president of post-revolutionary Tunisia, said: “Kais Saied is now using the hatred of a large part of the population against the political class, especially Ennahda, to say: ‘ I am the savior.
“For the average Tunisian, they lose faith in everything.”
