TUNIS — The last time Tunisia plunged into political crisis — unraveling its fledgling democracy amid political deadlock, assassinations and mass unrest — it fell to the country’s traditional guards to find a way forward.
A heavyweight coalition of unions, lawyers and human rights activists intervened to preserve the constitutional system, earning them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. The Nobel Committee credited the National Dialogue Quartet, as the groups were called, with protecting the achievements of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution, which defeated the country’s longtime dictator and fueled the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East.
For ten years, Tunisia was the success story that much of the rest of the world wanted. While other Arab uprisings withered into civil wars, coups or crackdowns, democracy in Tunisia – a wedge of 12 million people moving towards Italy from the North African Mediterranean coast – survived the political crisis of 2013-2014 and continued to make progress.
But a new constitution and several free and fair elections have failed to deliver the bread, jobs and dignity the Tunisians have been crying out for, and the country is now headed for disaster, its economy undermined by mismanagement, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
On July 25, the president, Kais Saied, fired his prime minister and suspended parliament, and has since consolidated the one-man rule. He has set aside Tunisia’s constitution, legislature and independence of the judiciary and electoral system. Still, the groups that led the country out of the last major political crisis have done nothing but sound a few muffled warnings.
In July, many Tunisians said: ‘There can be no dictatorship here. Civil society is too vibrant,” said Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at New York University in Abu Dhabi, who specializes in Tunisia. “But it went so fast,” she added.
“It is not that Tunisian democracy is under threat. Tunisian democracy has been shot in the head,” she said. “So why aren’t they doing anything now?”
Part of the answer lies in the toxic reputation the country’s fledgling democracy has earned among many Tunisians — not just those who don’t judge their lives better than they did before the revolution, but also activists, journalists and other members of civil society who flourished after the uprising.
MPs and political parties that offered few answers to Tunisia’s problems were seen as corrupt and ineffective, as was Ennahda, the Islamist party that dominated the legislature in the post-revolution era. Judges, though supposedly independent, seemed accountable to the politicians who nominated them.
The media, while free, was largely owned by businessmen associated with the regime of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator who was ousted in 2011. While a handful of oligarchs continued to control much of the economy, corruption and bureaucracy hindered the livelihoods of other Tunisians.
“It wasn’t like we were living in some sort of democratic paradise,” said Thameur Mekki, the editor of Nawaat, an online hub for dissidents under the old regime that grew into a respected independent media outlet after 2011.
After the seizure of power by Mr. Saied on July 25, spontaneous celebrations lit up the capital, Tunis, in both affluent suburbs and poor neighborhoods.
Tunisians of different backgrounds saw a potential savior.
Rights activists tried to work with the president on reforms. Lawyers saw him as a leader with the audacity to put the judiciary in order. Entrepreneurs calculated that he had the political capital to restructure the economy.
But by September 22, when Mr. Saied began to rule by decree, those hopes quickly evaporated.
“Nobody wants to go back to July 24th,” said Mr. Mekki, “and nobody wants to go back to July 26th, after all that Kais Saied has done.”
In his campaign to reshape Tunisia’s political system, Mr Saied has dismantled key post-revolutionary institutions. After the elected parliament rejected his actions in a rogue virtual session last month, he simply dissolved it.
Ahead of a planned referendum in July, when Mr Saied will seek approval to rewrite the 2014 constitution and strengthen the presidency, he announced last month that he would replace most members of the independent electoral authority with his own appointees.
This week, he threatened to dissolve the political parties altogether, receiving some of the sharpest reprimands yet from civilian watchdogs and the opposition.
Amid all this political turmoil, the government is increasingly unable to pay government salaries. Negotiations over an International Monetary Fund bailout, which would be little more than a stopgap solution, have stalled. Shortages of commodities like flour, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine — a country that supplies Tunisia with much of its wheat — is pushing prices beyond many can afford.
At the bakeries, prices are rising, baguettes are getting shorter and there are long lines every day. The government recently announced it would raise fuel prices for the third time this year.
“People are getting sick of the collapse of the country. We eat half as much bread now,” said Naziha Krir, 44, a housekeeper who said late last month that she paid just double for three loaves of bread at a bakery in Tunis.
“The country has gotten worse and worse” under Mr Saied, she added.
Polls show the president has bleeding support, though he remains by far Tunisia’s most trusted leader. This winter was the first in years that mass protests did not convulse the country.
Tunisians waver between what they see as two evils.
“Who can we hold liable?” said Nawres Zoghbu Douzi, 25, a rights activist. “There is no real government, no parliament. Who can you turn to now?”
Tunisians generally cite only one benefit of the revolution: freedom of expression. But that too is now under threat.
The country is still a long way from the dictatorship years, when people were afraid to talk about politics even with friends and when a government office dictated the storylines of journalists. But opposition voices have all but disappeared from state television. And Tunisian journalists are censoring themselves as Saied attacks the news media in speeches, said Fahem Boukadous, executive director of the journalists’ union.
The government is increasingly turning to military courts to prosecute lawmakers and others for criticizing the president, and has launched about twice as many prosecutions since July 25 as in the entire previous decade, according to an analysis by Ms. Douzi’s organization. .
“In reality, there is no freedom of expression,” said Mohamed Ali Bouchiba, 45, a lawyer who defends people on trial in military courts over anti-Saied Facebook posts.
Judges also fall back under the presidency as Mr Saied replaces the members of the previously independent Judicial Oversight Body with his own appointees.
Many Tunisians said they expect the deadlock to be broken by the UGTT, the legendary general union that led Tunisia to independence from France in 1956 and spearheaded the Nobel Prize-winning dialogue that perpetuated the constitutional system. held during the political crisis of 2013-2014.
With more than a million members, the union could single-handedly paralyze the country with strikes.
But analysts and activists say public opinion has prevented the UGTT and other leading civil society groups from opposing Saied more vigorously.
The union was hesitant to confront a popular president and initially hoped to influence its negotiations with the IMF, which is likely to oblige Tunisia to freeze public wages and take other measures that hurt union members.
Although UGTT has tightened up on the president, it maintains what Sami Aouadi, the chief economist, called “a position of critical support.”
Mr Aouadi said that the UGTT had decided to encourage Mr Saied to hold talks to resolve the political crisis. But the dialogue it has in mind seems far from the all-encompassing discussions of 2013: Mr Aouadi Ennahda should be barred, echoing a general refrain that blames the Islamist party largely for destroying the economy through corruption and mismanagement.
Other opposition leaders say ignoring the country’s largest political party would deprive Tunisia of its key Islamist constituency.
Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, a secular opposition leader, wants to build a coalition against Saied.
“I’m trying to get along with Ennahda because we need to look forward, not backward,” he said.
Ultimately, he said, Tunisians should probably accept Ennahda’s participation in a political resolution.
When an economic disaster looms, he predicted, “People won’t have much of a choice.”
