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From the beginning of the Arabian feud, officials in Tunis stressed their preference for not picking sides while also offering to help with diplomatic efforts aimed at resolving the crisis.

Qatar gave Tunisia critical financial support in 2012 that helped the government in Tunis maintain domestic stability amid a sensitive period of time following the Jasmine Revolution. While under growing International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressure after President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s fall, Tunisia received USD 500 million from the Qatari National Bank

Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Arab Spring protests that shook Tunisia in 2010/2011 secured some greater soft-power influence for Qatar among Tunisian revolutionaries

Those leading Ennahda had ties to Doha dating back to the 1990s when Qatar was beginning its escape from the Saudi-led, counter-revolutionary order of the Arabian Peninsula

Certain segments of the population saw Doha’s agenda as geared toward supporting political Islam, not democratic revolutions in the Arab region. Such perceptions of Doha pushing Tunisia under the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence created problems for Qatar among many Tunisians who oppose Islamism.

After Nidaa Tounes took power in 2015, the UAE’s Foreign Minister Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan paid his first visit to Tunisia since 2011. While in Tunis, he met with then-President Beji Caid Essebsi, who founded Nidaa Tounes, and he invited him to the Emirates. Essebsi also paid Egypt’s president a visit in October 2015 and invited Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to Tunis. According to Emirati calculations, these developments were supposed to weaken Doha-Tunis relations. By opening up more channels of communication with Ennahda’s domestic opponents, Abu Dhabi wanted to bring Tunisia’s regional foreign policy into closer alignment with the Emirates, and further away from the Qatari-Turkish axis.

Just as the Qataris helped Tunisia maintain its stability during the aftermath of its 2010/2011 revolution, the Tunisians paid them back in terms of assistance in the domain of food security after the Saudi- and Emirati-imposed siege began.

Qatar is the top Arab investor in Tunisia

From 2011 to 2019, Doha’s exports to Tunisia doubled six times while Tunisian exports to Qatar doubled ten times. Qatar and Tunisia’s growing relationship has manifested in the signing of 80 agreements across a range of areas

leaders in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh have seen the Jasmine Revolution as a threat to their model of “authoritarian stability” which entails support for Arab dictators such as Ben Ali. Both the Saudi and Emirati governments have major concerns about any country in the Maghreb holding free elections that open up the possibility of Islamists being empowered to govern. Furthermore, the growth of Qatari influence in Tunisia following Ben Ali’s fall has irked both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh

Emirati press often reports on the politics of post-Arab Spring Tunisia in ways that depict the country as having fallen under too much influence of Islamists, who are by definition “terrorists” as Abu Dhabi sees it

One of the reasons why the UAE has more influence in Tunisia than the Saudis pertains to the Emiratis’ culture and ethos of trade and commerce which Tunisian businessmen easily understand and appreciate.

To this point, the majority of Tunisians are indifferent to the ideological underpinnings of the Gulf feud and simply want as much investment from as many Gulf and non-Gulf states as possible. The percentage of Tunisians who are staunchly ‘pro-Qatar’ or ‘pro-UAE’ is below 50, yet their percentage is increasing which underscores how the GCC crisis’ impact on Tunisia has been polarizing

Many of these citizens who staunchly welcomed the Jasmine Revolution see Abu Dhabi as a counter-revolutionary force seeking to topple Tunisia’s democratic government. A common narrative is that the Emiratis would like to do to Tunisia what they did to Egypt in 2013 in terms of bankrolling a coup d’état to reverse an Arab Spring revolution.

The UAE’s hand in Tunisia is certainly weaker than it is in Egypt or Libya. Tunisia lacks a military or “Deep State” that the Emiratis would be able to coordinate with to stage a popular coup d’état in which the putschists could enjoy a degree of legitimacy among Tunisians comparable to what the Egyptian junta enjoyed among ordinary Egyptians in 2013

Ennahda was more humble, moderate, and modest during its time at the helm compared to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). As a result, Ennahda left Tunisians, including those who oppose political Islam, with less reason to favor a coup d’état to end the Islamist party’s role in the country system of governance.

UAE seems more set on preventing Tunisia from being pushed into the Qatari-Turkish axis’s orbit, particularly with respect to the conflict in Libya. Ironically, as Hamdi posits, Tunisia’s non-aligned politics vis-à-vis Libya’s civil war, which the UAE seems to accept, “is in line with Tunisian public opinion which predominantly [favors Tunisian] neutrality and a political solution and view Turkey’s military intervention with much suspicion.”

there are signs that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are frustrated with Tunisia’s view of the UN-recognized GNA as legitimate and Tunis’s opposition to foreign (including Emirati, Egyptian, and Russian) intervention in the conflict

Among secular Tunisians from elite backgrounds, there is a common narrative that Doha has been sponsoring terrorism and radicalism in their country. This message is in lock-step alignment with Abu Dhabi’s narratives about Qatar being a dangerous power in the Arab region. In fact, some opponents of Ennahda have even accused the party of covering for Qatar’s alleged role as a driver of terrorism in post-Ben Ali Tunisia and wished that Tunis would have supported the blockade of Doha in 2017

that Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda reached a political compromise has helped Tunisia achieve significant political stability and peace despite all the chaos in the region. Experts agree that this landmark “secularist-Islamist rapprochement” could have been severely undermined by Tunis picking sides in the GCC dispute

the state’s failure to fulfil the promise of democracy for the people: good governance, peace, prosperity, and no corruption

In the decade since Tunisia’s 2011 democratic revolution, nine successive governments have failed to fix the serious economic problems that beset the country of 11 million. A September 2020 poll for the International Republican Institute, made for dismal reading, with 87% of Tunisians saying their country was headed in the wrong direction. Since 2011, the Tunisian dinar’s value has halved; unemployment currently hovers around the 18% mark nationally, but has been as high as 32% in some parts of the country and corruption is considered endemic by Tunisians. Public debt has more than doubled from 39% of GDP in 2010, and with the government forced to shell out large sums to service its debt, there is some concern that Tunisia will go the way of Lebanon and default.

pollster Arab Barometer’s 2019 country report on Tunisia found that confidence in democratic institutions had “fallen dramatically” and Tunisians were “far less likely to trust the government or parliament than at the time of the revolution”. In fact, more than half (51%) of the Tunisians surveyed said democracy is “indecisive”, 42% said it “leads to instability” and 39% blamed it for “weak economic outcomes”.

Following the constitutional referendum on July 25, Tunisia approved the new constitution, replacing what was considered one of the most progressive in the Arab world. The new document is missing many of the articles that had guaranteed the protection of rights and freedoms. It eliminates several constitutional commissions created under the 2014 constitution, such as the Human Rights Commission, which investigated human rights violations, and the Independent High Commission for Audiovisual Communication, the country’s media regulatory body.

“The 2014 constitution protected the freedom of the press, publication, and expression. However, the new constitution does not mention anything on the independence of the judicial system, which is one of the few things that could guarantee fair trials when violations against journalists or the press occur,” Mohamed Yassine Jelassi, president of the SNJT, told CPJ in a meeting. “And now, with the lack of independent constitutional bodies, we are going to start dealing again with a Ministry of Communications that takes its orders straight from authorities.”

Jelassi told CPJ that the new constitution further diminishes the protection of journalists and the freedom of publication by using vague language that could lead to the conviction of journalists on charges unrelated to journalism. Under the 2014 constitution, authorities were prohibited from interfering with any journalistic content, since it would violate the freedom of publication. By contrast, the new constitution protects the freedom of publication only if it does not harm “national security,” “public morals,” or “public health,” which are all defined by the law.

while Al-Jazeera has all its paperwork, licenses, and taxes in order, the office remains closed. As of early September, police were still heavily present in front of the bureau’s building

“Most private [and non-profit] news organizations are partially funded by foreign groups or governments,” said Khadhraoui. “Without these funds, it will be impossible to pay staff salaries, and therefore there won’t be any independent press sector in Tunisia.”

Talks on the IMF 48-month arrangement have been in limbo after Saied rejected terms including cutting subsidies and reducing the public wage bill, saying the "diktats" laid down by the international lender were unacceptable.

has to pay back a 500 million euro bond maturing in October and an 850 million euro note due in February

"rising reserves and marginal fiscal consolidation have granted Tunisia some additional runway" thanks to a pickup in tourism

Tunisia also received $500 million of fresh funding from Saudi Arabia in July. A $1 billion European Union pledge of support is, however, conditional on Tunisia receiving an IMF programme.

The World Bank recently cut its Tunisian economic growth forecast to 1.2% from 2.3% for 2023 citing "very uncertain prospects" over debt financing and difficult conditions following a three-year drought that has pushed the government to raise tap water prices and threatened food security.

Tunisia can nevertheless count on support from some other nations under pressure thanks to its geopolitical and geographic importance, according to analysts.Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni maintains a close relationship with Tunisia. Record numbers of migrants setting off from the country have landed on Italy's far southern island of Lampedusa."Meloni is a staunch supporter of Tunisia because of the migration issue and that gives them more space to delay things,"

the economic and social discontent expressed by the desperate demise of Bouazizi and Yahyaoui has only intensified

The character and political role of the Tunisian and Egyptian armies is also a factor

the successful installation of a (highly problematic, to be sure) procedural democracy in Tunisia, in contrast to the establishment of an authoritarian praetorian regime far more vicious than that of Mubarak in Egypt, made it necessary to argue that class and political economy alone do not determine outcomes

In 2010 the national unemployment rate was under thirteen percent. By 2015 the figure rose to 15.3 percent. Unemployment rates in the center-west and southern regions of the country (including Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid) are typically nearly double the national average. In 2015 the OECD estimated national youth unemployment (ages fifteen to twenty-four) at nearly forty percent.

The government understands the problem, but has no solution. On 20 January the cabinet announced that 5,000 unemployed in Kasserine would be hired for new public sector jobs. Another 1,400 were to be hired through an existing employment program. However, on 22 January, Finance Minister Slim Chaker revoked the promise of 5,000 new jobs in Kasserine, claiming that the previous announcement was due to a “communication error.”

“There will be another revolution if the social and economic circumstances do not change,” said President Béji Caïd Essebsi on the fifth anniversary of Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Nidaa Tounes, a big-tent coalition of secularists ranging from former communists to former Ben Ali supporters has split. Over two dozen of its deputies have left, and it is no longer the largest party in the parliament. The terrorist attacks have reduced tourism to a catastrophically low level. The economy is not expected to grow at all in 2016. None of its traditional elite political forces—secular or Islamist—imagine an economic program substantially different than the one Tunisia has pursued since the mid-1980s.

On 19 January, faced with a UGTT threat to call a general strike, the employers’ association (UTICA) agreed to increase wages for about 1.5 million private sector workers. But for the unemployed, the streets are their only recourse.

he condemned the Sousse massacre and a terrorist attack in March, 2015, at Tunisia’s national museum, the Bardo, where three gunmen killed two dozen people. The victims were innocents, he said. Kamal still entertained a fantasy of joining a reformed police force. His knowledge of Islam was crude, and his allegiance to isis seemed confused and provisional—an expression of rage, not of ideology. But in Douar Hicher anger was often enough to send young people off to fight

“Maybe it’s the Tunisian nature—we like risk,” a former jihadi told me. A million Tunisians live and work in Europe. “A lot of drug dealers are Tunisian; many smugglers of goods between Turkey and Greece are Tunisian; a lot of human traffickers in Belgrade are Tunisian. Online hackers—be careful of the Tunisians, there’s a whole network of them.”

“The radical narrative tells you that whatever you’ve learned about Islam is wrong, you have to discard it—we have the new stuff. The old, traditional, moderate Islam doesn’t offer you the adventure of the isis narrative. It doesn’t offer you the temptation to enjoy, maybe, your inner savagery. isis offers a false heaven for sick minds.”

Democracy didn’t turn Tunisian youths into jihadis, but it gave them the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive. New liberties clashed with the old habits of a police state—young Tunisians were suddenly permitted to join civic and political groups, but the cops harassed them for expressing dissent. Educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones, because the economy creates so few professional jobs. A third of recent college graduates can’t find work. Frustration led young people to take to the streets in 2011; a similar desperate impulse is now driving other young people toward jihad.

the factors that drive young men and women to adopt Salafi jihadism are diverse and hard to parse: militants reach an overwhelmingly reductive idea by complex and twisted paths. A son of Riyadh grows up hearing Salafi preaching in a state-sanctioned mosque and goes to Syria with the financial aid of a Saudi businessman. A young Sunni in Falluja joins his neighbors in fighting American occupation and “Persian”—Shiite—domination. A Muslim teen-ager in a Paris banlieue finds an antidote to her sense of exclusion and spiritual emptiness in a jihadi online community. Part of the success of isis consists in its ability to attract a wide array of people and make them all look, sound, and think alike.

Souli wasn’t sure what should be done with returned jihadis, but, like nearly everyone I met, he spoke of the need for a program of rehabilitation for those who come back. No such program exists

In its eagerness to modernize, the Ben Ali regime encouraged widespread access to satellite television and the Internet. The sermons of Islamist firebrands from the Gulf, such as the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, entered the homes of Tunisians who felt smothered by official secularism. Oussama Romdhani, who was a senior official under Ben Ali—he was referred to as the “propaganda minister”—told me, “Radicals were able to use these tools of communication to recruit and disseminate the narrative, and they did it quite efficiently.”

“I never thought I would repeat the same demands as five years ago. The old regime has robbed our dreams.”

Why can’t the police do their job and stop the terrorists but let the smugglers go with a bribe?

revolution opened up a space that Salafis rushed to fill. There were a lot more of them than anyone had realized—eventually, tens of thousands. In February, 2011, Tunisia’s interim government declared an amnesty and freed thousands of prisoners, including many jihadis. Among them was Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, the co-founder of the Tunisian Combat Group. Within two months, he had started Ansar al-Sharia.

Walid was vague about his reasons for returning to Tunisia. He mentioned a traumatic incident in which he had seen scores of comrades mowed down by regime soldiers outside Aleppo. He also pointed to the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in April, 2013, which soon engaged in bitter infighting with the Nusra Front. Walid spoke of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, with the personal hatred that Trotskyists once expressed for Stalin. He accused isis of destroying the Syrian resistance and helping the Assad regime. He believed that isis was created by Western powers to undermine Al Qaeda and other true jihadi groups.

these aged men from the two Tunisias—Essebsi a haughty remnant of the Francophile élite, Ghannouchi the son of a devout farmer from the provinces—began a series of largely secret conversations, and set Tunisia on a new path. In January, 2014, Ennahdha voluntarily handed over the government to a regime of technocrats. Ghannouchi had put his party’s long-term interests ahead of immediate power. A peaceful compromise like this had never happened in the region. Both old men had to talk their followers back from the brink of confrontation, and some Ennahdha activists regarded Ghannouchi’s strategy as a betrayal.

To many Tunisians, Nidaa Tounes feels like the return of the old regime: some of the same politicians, the same business cronies, the same police practices. The Interior Ministry is a hideous seven-story concrete structure that squats in the middle of downtown Tunis, its roof bristling with antennas and satellite dishes, coils of barbed wire barring access from the street. The ministry employs eighty thousand people. There is much talk of reforming Tunisia’s security sector, with the help of Western money and training. (The U.S., seeing a glimmer of hope in a dark region, recently doubled its aid to Tunisia.) But the old habits of a police state persist—during my time in Tunis, I was watched at my hotel, and my interpreter was interrogated on the street.

The inhabitants of Kasserine, however neglected by the state, were passionate advocates for their own rights. They had played a central role in the overthrow of the dictatorship, staging some of the earliest protests after Bouazizi’s self-immolation. In every coffee shop, I was told, half the conversations were about politics. Although Kasserine is a recruiting area for jihadis, Tunisia’s wealthy areas are so remote that the town felt less alienated than Douar Hicher and Ben Gardane.

“You feel no interest from the post-revolutionary governments in us here. People feel that the coastal areas, with twenty per cent of the people, are still getting eighty per cent of the wealth. That brings a lot of psychological pressure, to feel that you’re left alone, that there’s no horizon, no hope.”

The old methods of surveillance are returning. In the center of Kasserine, I met an imam named Mahfoud Ben Deraa behind the counter of the hardware store he owns. He had just come back from afternoon prayers, but he was dressed like a man who sold paint. “I might get kicked out of the mosque, because last Friday’s sermon was something the government might not like,” the imam told me. He had preached that, since the government had closed mosques after terror attacks, “why, after an alcoholic killed two people, didn’t they close all the bars?” To some, this sounded like a call for Sharia, and after informers reported him to the police the governor’s office sent him a warning: “In the course of monitoring the religious activities and the religious institutions of the region, I hereby inform you that several violations have been reported.” The imam was ordered to open the mosque only during hours of prayer and to change the locks on the main doors to prevent unsupervised use. The warning seemed like overreach on the part of the state—the twitching of an old impulse from the Ben Ali years.

Around 2000, the Tunisian Combat Group, an Al Qaeda affiliate, emerged in Afghanistan, dedicating itself to the overthrow of the Tunisian government. One of its founders, Tarek Maaroufi, provided false passports to two Tunisians who, allegedly on instructions from Osama bin Laden, travelled to northern Afghanistan posing as television journalists and assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan mujahideen commander, on September 9, 2001. The Combat Group’s other leader, known as Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, was an Al Qaeda commander; when the Americans overthrew the Taliban, in late 2001, he escaped from Tora Bora with bin Laden, only to be arrested in Turkey, in 2003, and extradited to Tunisia. (Sentenced to forty-three years in prison, he seized the chance to radicalize his fellow-prisoners.)

According to the Tunisian Interior Ministry, a hundred thousand Tunisians—one per cent of the population—were arrested in the first half of 2015. Jihadi groups intend their atrocities to provoke an overreaction, and very few governments can resist falling into the trap.

New democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe and Asia have had to struggle with fragile institutions, corruption, and social inequity. Tunisia has all this, plus terrorism and a failed state next door.

Ahmed told himself, “If I pray and ask for divine intervention, maybe things will get better.” Praying did not lead him to the moderate democratic Islam of Ennahdha. His thoughts turned more and more extreme, and he became a Salafi. He quit smoking marijuana and grew his beard long and adopted the ankle-length robe called a qamis. He un-friended all his female friends on Facebook, stopped listening to music, and thought about jihad. On Internet forums, he met jihadis who had been in Iraq and gave him suggestions for reading. Ahmed downloaded a book with instructions for making bombs. In the period of lax security under Ennahdha, he fell in with a radical mosque in Tunis. He was corresponding with so many friends who’d gone to Syria that Facebook deactivated his account. Some of them became leaders in the Islamic State, and they wrote of making thirty-five thousand dollars a year and having a gorgeous European wife or two. Ahmed couldn’t get a girlfriend or buy a pack of cigarettes.

“Dude, don’t go!” Walid said when they met on the street. “It’s just a trap for young people to die.” To Walid, Ahmed was exactly the type of young person isis exploited—naïve, lost, looking for the shortest path to Heaven. Al Qaeda had comparatively higher standards: some of its recruits had to fill out lengthy application forms in which they were asked to name their favorite Islamic scholars. Walid could answer such questions, but they would stump Ahmed and most other Tunisian jihadis.

“We need to reform our country and learn how to make it civilized,” he said. “In Tunisia, when you finish your pack of cigarettes, you’ll throw it on the ground. What we need is an intellectual revolution, a revolution of minds, and that will take not one, not two, but three generations.”

on May 26 Tebboune stated from the Italian capital, Rome, that Tunisia is facing a political impasse and needs support in reinstating democracy

Tunisia has valid concerns about Algeria raising gas prices in light of the global energy crisis.

Algeria sells gas to Tunisia at preferential prices, and the latter earns a right of passage of 5.25% on the total of Algeria gas transported through Tunisian territory to Italy.

Algeria has expressed concerns over potential Tunisian normalization with Israel despite the fact that Saied had stated during his electoral campaign in 2019 that “normalization with Israel is tantamount to treason.”

Taboubi leads the UGTT, a historically strong and popular union in Tunisia with more than 1 million workers. In an explicit reference to Morocco's normalization with Israel, Taboubi said in his June statements that a campaign to push Arab normalization with Israel aims to pressure Algeria, which leads a campaign to boycott Tel Aviv in the North African region.

Although the opening of the land borders appears to be an indication of the beginning of the recovery of Tunisian-Algerian relations, other measures will need to be in place to guarantee this recovery

less success in cutting back the country’s entrenched crony capitalism

Joblessness among young people is at 30 percent.

The economy is languishing. The gap between rich and poor remains huge — as does the regional disparity between the relatively prosperous northeast and the rest of the country. The rise of Islamist extremist groups, and a series of devastating terrorist attacks, have sown fear and distrust. Small wonder that a recent study by one U.S. think tank concluded that Tunisia’s democratic transition is “stalling.”

most Tunisian businesspeople prefer to operate in the informal economy, which accounts for as much as half of all economic activity

the remarkable power of the country’s national trade union makes it nearly impossible to fire underperforming employees

ultraconservative Salafi groups, some of which — like the notorious Ansar al-Sharia — have forged ties with the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations

lack of substantive reform in the internal security apparatus is also proving corrosive

corruption. Sealing the borders is that much harder when terrorists can simply pay border guards to look the other way. Restoring the health of the economy will be difficult without combating bribery and cronyism (perhaps by enshrining protections for whistleblowers, an issue currently being hotly debated). Ominously enough, even though malfeasance has a long history in the country, those who monitor it say that it’s only been getting worse in the years since the revolution.

The repeal of the directive that banned Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men comes a month after Essebsi announced his intention to change laws about gender inequality in inheritance. This proposal was lauded as bringing about a necessary legislative reform, but also criticized as an attempt at revivifying the modernist-secularist divide in the country. But the Islamist party Ennahda didn’t take the bait. It refrained from publicly opposing the reform of inheritance law and the repeal of the 1973 marriage law. Whether or not the president’s objective in proposing these changes was to force Ennahda to take a stance against “progress” and gender equality, this strategy did not work. Ennahda has refrained from opposing any of these so-called modernist projects.

while it is true that the nexus of corrupt business elite, police and government media is winning back significant power, the vote of the amnesty law has also triggered a unique display of protest and resistance that was utterly unimaginable under Ben Ali

while the old regime tactics remain active in Tunisia, the collective public energy of the 2011 revolution is still alive

What is at stake is far more than a somewhat dysfunctional democracy in a nation of 12 million people on the periphery of the Arab world, some experts say. Tunisia’s democratic survival is a test for the whole Middle East—and, indeed, could help provide a long-term solution to the ongoing problem of Islamist terrorism. 

hortly before Saied’s takeover, the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation approved nearly $500 million in aid to strengthen Tunisia’s transportation, trade, and water sectors. Saied’s government is also seeking a three-year $4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, which answers to pressure from Washington and other major capitals. Washington has other leverage as well: In 2020, the United States signed on to a 10-year military cooperation program with Tunis, and the two sides regularly hold joint exercises. And in the last decade, Washington has invested more than $1 billion in the Tunisian military, according to U.S. Africa Command.

A report this month from Human Rights First indicated that the restoration of Arab dictatorships may be generating a new generation of terrorists; in Egypt, a harsh crackdown on democracy and human rights activists by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former general who seized power in 2014, has led to active recruitment by the Islamic State in Egypt’s prison system. 

the Arab tyrannies and monarchies have been urging Saied on toward more authoritarianism and lumping Ennahdha together with extremist Islamist groups

“It’s time to stop saying it’s early days [for this administration] because we’re six months in and there is no palpable new approach.” In February, the Biden administration approved a $197 million sale of missiles to Egypt days after the Egyptian government detained family members of a U.S.-based Egyptian American human rights activist.

The president is as much a practitioner of realpolitik as he is an advocate of democracy, and it’s clear his main interest is not in nurturing new democracies but in herding together the mature industrial democracies against major authoritarian threats such as China and Russia.

democracy has not been terribly rewarding so far for Tunisia. Saied’s power grab was actually popular among large masses who have complained of rampant corruption and are suffering terribly for basic needs.

Tunisia has had no support for its transition within the Middle East North Africa region and far too little support from other democracies in Europe and the United States

“I think we often forget that democratic revolutions are almost never successful on the first attempt,”

Tunisians have witnessed many Africans taking part in pro-Saied rallies in the past months.

Tunisia has always formally rejected calls to host migrants and refugees on a permanent basis

Migrants in these overpopulated, mostly working-class neighbourhoods “now have a sort of autonomous, independent communities. They have their own laws,” Zarzis-based activist Jihad A. told The New Arab, adding “migrants have strained ties with local communities. Clashes, sometimes violent, have often taken place in the past year."

“Unemployed, uneducated, and rebellious Tunisian youth have constituted a big challenge to the regime, since the Ben Ali era”, believes T.J., a blogger and civil society activist. “To get rid of these young people, mainly in the poor southern towns of the country, Saied’s authorities are shutting their eyes to the massive daily migration journeys from the south-eastern coasts of Zarzis, Jerba and Sfax to Italy”

more Tunisians sail to Europe from Tunisia than Africans

On August 1st, Italy’s Interior ministry revealed that the biggest numbers of irregular migrants who arrived in Italy from January to July 2022 are Tunisians, which is more than Bangladeshis, Sub-Saharan Africans, Iranians and others.

in Tataouine, there’s a flourishing network of migration for Tunisians to western Europe, via Turkey and Serbia.

individuals and families fly regularly to Istanbul. There, a Tunisian official sells them the official security document, which states that a person is ‘clean’, and not prosecuted in any legal cases in Tunisia. That document, which is never delivered in Tunisia because it is supposed to contain “classified” information, is strictly required by Serbia to allow Tunisians in

Medenine and Tataouine, two key regions for fuel smuggling and human trafficking, have remained without senior officials for months after President Saied sacked their old governors.

“Mayors can play a major role in monitoring irregular migration and in the hosting of migrants”, explains Boubaker Souid, Mayor of Tataouine. “But they are now left without any prerogative and who knows how Saied’s regime will get rid of them”.   

“It seems that one of the tactics of the Tunisian authorities is to empty the country of young people, who have always been the main source of contest and revolt”, says M.B., a civil society activist from Medenine.

On February 24, 2022, Kais Saied announced that he wanted to ban foreign funding for associations. For him, associations applying for or receiving foreign funding are “suspicious activities”. Consequently, the civil society ceased to play its role in monitoring and reporting migration issues and in delivering credible information and data about it.

As the UK Government focuses its efforts on pushing through an immigration bill that it itself admits has only a 50% chance of meeting international legal thresholds, there are parallels between both sets of leaderships. Like Tunisia’s President, Rishi Sunak Government is attempting to use populist nationalism and the wilful demonising of migrants as cover for its own gross economic mismanagement and flailing popularity.

To date, none of these stories are troubling Tunisia’s mainstream media, which appears more focused on defending Tunisia’s national image and parroting the President’s attack lines than delivering facts to a public growing increasingly hostile to the unwarranted international condemnation it feels itself subject to.

the UK’s established media has spent the past week fixated on the employment terms of a BBC sports commentator than scrutinising a law that stands to make the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably worse.

Just as the UK media is yet to truly reckon with the financial impact of Brexit on the country’s poorest, so the Tunisian media is unwilling to fully address the consequences of the suspension of the World Bank partnership and the increasing uncertainty surrounding a sorely needed IMF bail-out. 

Having formerly served as minister of the interior himself, Ben Ali chose to build up the capabilities and resources of the Ministry of Interior once he became president, while geographically isolating the Tunisian Armed Forces.

some of the activities of the Tunisian Armed Forces at this time included: protecting public property, controlling looting, protecting people from police violence, manning checkpoints, monitoring public buildings, allowing the country’s university baccalaureate exams to continue on schedule, and even guaranteeing security during Tunisia’s historic 2011 elections by deploying 22,000 troops to polling and vote-counting centers. All the while, the military refrained from playing a visibly political role.

Unlike Egypt’s army, which has remained economically entrenched in the old regime, Tunisia’s army does not “receive any special compensation or material advantages for their service to the state,” according to the report. Compared to the Egyptian military, the Tunisian Armed Forces also spend noticeably less. The USIP publication reports that in 2009, the Tunisian military expenditures were 1.2 percent of the country’s GDP, compared to 3.3 percent in Egypt.

an institution that was established with the aim of defending borders and guaranteeing regional security has now been stretched thin with the additional task of maintaining internal order

emerging security threats, such as soldiers operating out of Chaambi Mountain along Tunisia’s border with Algeria, as well as weapons smuggled in from Libya. Such security threats led President Moncef Marzouki earlier this month to extend the state of emergency in Tunisia, marking the thirtieth consecutive month in which this declaration has been in effect.

“An army which serves under a democratic transition doesn’t have the same mission as an army that serves under a dictatorship,”

It is an anomaly of the Tunisian political scene that the UGTT’s anti-austerity position has little representation among elected politicians: the largest political groups (the Islamist Ennahda party and various offshoots of the secular-modernist Nidaa Tounes party) have backed the IMF agreement

unemployment and the proliferation of grey-sector jobs are linked to structural biases in the economy that systematically favour a small group of politically connected businesses. Measures that might address this problem include increasing access to credit for would-be entrepreneurs, changing regulations and practices within the public and banking sectors that are tilted to a narrow elite, and reducing corruption. According to Tunisians, corruption has not been reduced but only “democratised” since the revolution. Investment in infrastructure serving disadvantaged parts of the country could also help spur more inclusive growth

Since the revolution, the overarching priority of political life in Tunisia has been to seek enough stability to preserve and complete the political transition. Much has been achieved, though a few important steps (notably the establishment of a Constitutional Court) remain unfulfilled. But Tunisia has now reached a point where the greatest threat to stability is no longer political rivalries around religious identity but unmet social and economic aspirations. Until now, the country’s political parties have not organised themselves to offer distinctive and coherent visions of how Tunisia’s socio-economic development can be improved, and they are paying the price in public alienation from the entire political system

Whatever the exact nature and motivation behind Ben Ali’s relationship with AESAT and the AfDB, the perceived privilege of Sub-Saharans provoked anger among the wider populace, a frustration that is directly related to the recent spike in violence, experts say.“Before the revolution, Sub-Saharan Africans and foreigners in general were well protected by the government,” said Jonathan Bahago, president of Afrique Intelligence. "If you touched a Sub-Saharan, my goodness, what the police would do to you!”“But since the revolution,” he said, “there have been more attacks against Sub-Saharans, with people saying: ‘The one who was defending you before is gone’.”

Racism is still not criminalised in Tunisia. Though discrimination in general is illegal, perpetrators of ethnically motivated attacks, for example, cannot be charged with “racism” or “hate crimes”.

This absence of legal protection against racism is not unique to Tunisia, but remains an issue across much of the region. However, given Tunisia’s widely praised new constitution, activists say it is worth noting the ways in which legislation has not changed since the revolution.“These attacks happen all over the world. The problem here is the government’s non-recognition, the official denial,” said Toure, the programme officer at Maison du Droit et des Migrations. “In other countries, politicians and officials speak out. Why does this never happen in Tunisia?”

While reports of racism are widespread, many students said they still feel positively towards the country.

Broadcast regulator HAICA (the Independent High Authority of Audiovisual Communication) pulled the license of privately owned TV channel Nesma in July 2018, for pushing the political agenda of its owner Nabil Karoui, who planned to run for president. Police raided the station in April, but the channel is still on the air, only without a license

Money still talks loudly in Tunisia where unemployment is officially above 15 percent and many journalists are paid badly.

Reporters are hampered in their watchdog role by the government too, especially if they cover national security or police beats. In January last year, Interior Minister Lotfi Brahem admitted during a parliamentary hearing that Tunisian journalists were monitored and that he had even authorized the wiretapping of a French journalist covering unrest.

Tunisia has a world class right to information law on the books but Mekki said her attempts to get the Interior Ministry to disclose details of travel bans imposed on hundreds of young Tunisians have been stonewalled

a lack of transparency around media ownership, undisclosed campaign contributions to candidates and the use of public resources and public media by the current government to promote partisan agendas are challenges to independent media coverage.

"In Tunisia we have a unique situation where we have a weak government, weak political parties but strong civil society, which can work to guarantee the democratic transition overall and with that, press freedom gains,"

The shares of public in total employment across core Arab countries in Maghreb and Mashreq mostly lie between 20 and 40 percent, far above those in richer Latin America, where they range from 4 to 15 percent (OECD 2014, 61), sub-Saharan Africa, where they range from 2 to 9 percent (Monga and Lin 2015, 138), or East Asia and Pacific, where they mostly lie below 5 percent (Packard and Van Nguyen 2014, 16).

A majority of citizens, however, remains excluded from state employment, which is often seen to be allocated in intransparent ways. As formal employment in the private sector remains miniscule, the default option for most remains the badly paid, precarious informal sector.

A large informal sector also exists in other developing countries. But different from most other developing economies, the “insider” group on the labor market mostly consists of public employees (figure 5). This setup makes for a relatively large and protected insider group, but also crowds out state resources for more inclusive and growth-oriented policies.

Insider-outsider dynamics are also at play in Arab business, the top tiers of which are typically state-dependent cronies, protected through layers of heavy regulation as well as discretionary subsidies and credit allocation – themselves often distorted legacies of earlier periods of statist development

On labor markets, informality typically lasts longer, labor turnover is lower, and exits from public employment are almost unheard of

deep formal and informal state intervention and protection result in low mobility between segments

The only universal benefit on which most Arab states spend large amounts are energy subsidies, which are regressive as they disproportionately benefit richer households.

While Arab states have gone to great lengths to provide, popular expectations of provision in the region have also been particularly high (figure 6) – arguably a legacy of populist policies that have promised universal public services and employment to the masses since the age of Nasser.

Given these high expectations, material exclusion and inequality and the highly visible “winner takes all” business cronyism in the 2000s has been grating for many ordinary citizens – even if average levels of inequality in the region remain on a middling level in global comparison

While the elites leading the revolutions cared deeply about questions of political freedom, it is clear that material issues played an important role in the mass mobilization that tipped the balance in cases like Egypt or Tunisia.

Since 2011, some energy subsidies have been cut in a piecemeal fashion, but only under enormous fiscal pressure and without building a comprehensive social safety system to compensate. In the absence of such systems, public resistance to subsidy reforms has been strong. No ruler has yet dared to substantially change public employment policies.

This anti-development equilibrium of low capacity and vested interests has led Arab states even further down the route of unequal and exclusive distribution after 2011. In Tunisia, the most powerful interest group is the national union UGTT, which represents mostly middle aged, middle class government employees – not the informal sector whose rage fuelled the revolution. The UGGT has contributed to elite-level political pacts that have prevented Tunisia from backsliding into autocracy. In the economic field, however, it has mostly focused on defending insider privileges, investing much of its energy in fighting successfully for fiscally unsustainable civil service salary raises. In the meantime, little has been done for improving the lot of informal workers. They themselves remain fixated on the public sector: protesters from marginalized communities have been asking for the provision of one government job per family, and unrest has been triggered by the removal of individuals from an official list promising government employment.

Even “fierce” states embroiled in civil wars have deepened their old-style distributional commitments: Post-Saddam patronage policies under rival prime ministers have resulted in a state that now reportedly employs 7 million individuals, about half the total adult population (More than 55 percent of the population of about 36 million is under 20). Including in ISIS-occupied areas, 8 million individuals rely on a government salary or pension. Iraq competes with much richer GCC countries for the highest share of government employees anywhere in the world

Tunisian and Egyptian attempts to prosecute old regime cronies have been half-hearted at best and many cronies remain well connected to the new ruling elites. In the absence of an independent business class, both governments have made attempts to lure temporarily marginalized old-school business tycoons back into their countries to invest.

Saied shows no sign of willingness to compromise with his political opponents. Instead, relying on the support of the Ministry of Interior and its security forces, he seems to be adopting a repressive response

The EU and its member states can encourage Tunisia to return to its democratic path by making clear that they will only endorse a dialogue as legitimate if all mainstream political forces participate in it, and that the country needs to hold an election before revising the constitution. (The constitution Tunisia adopted in 2014 requires a two-thirds parliamentary majority to endorse any proposed amendments.) Europeans should also make clear that they would see attempts to prosecute MPs for conspiring against state security as a serious violation of the rule of law.

So far, EU officials have been reluctant to condition cooperation with Tunisia on a return to democratic standards. The European Commission recently announced that it would loan the Tunisian government €450 million to support its budget. A loss of European financial assistance would worsen Tunisians’ living conditions, which are already difficult.

In 2015, the Ministry of Interior officially launched this informal policy in order to prevent Tunisian youngsters from joining extremist groups. The Ministry of Interior defines it as “a preventative measure to be taken in the presence of information or suspicion about the possible recruitment of people by countries classified as conflict areas like Syria and Libya, or persons who have visited or taken part in conflicts in those countries”. Since then, many government officials have used this judicial flexibility to their advantage. Former chief of government Youssef Chahed, for example, was accused of using arbitrary travel bans as a bargaining chip in order to obtain majorities in the Parliament for the government’s bills.

“My parents are now worried when I post something on Facebook about the president,” explained Anis, a Tunisian student in France. “I was too young during Ben Ali’s regime to notice those kinds of things, but  my family tells me that Saied is using the same methods.”