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authoritarian regimes use pseudo-democratic institutions to enhance the durability of their regimes. The figure below shows the increasing durability of authoritarian regimes, particularly in the post-Cold War period. From 1946 to 1989, the average authoritarian regime lasted 12 years. Since the end of the Cold War, this number has increased to 20 years. Today, the typical autocracy has been in power for 25 years. From China (where the current regime has been in power for 66 years) to Jordan (69 years), and Belarus (21 years) to Zimbabwe (35 years), today’s authoritarian regimes are remarkably durable.

rising authoritarian durability has tracked closely with the spread of democratic institutions (elections, legislatures, and parties), suggesting authoritarian leaders have learned to leverage these institutions to enhance their staying power

Dictatorships with multiple political parties and a legislature now last 14 years longer than those without

former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt as an autocrat for three decades, appeared as a witness against imprisoned former Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, who was Egypt’s first freely elected leader. Besides being former Egyptian presidents, they had something else in common: their religious supporters both considered revolting against them to be a forbidden form of "khuruj ‘ala al-hakim" – "withdrawing from the ruler." This wasn’t just an idle sentiment; it was expressed by Ali Gomaa’, the-then Mufti of Egypt whose words I heard when in Cairo during the revolutionary uprising of 2011. “Khuruj ‘ala al-shar’iyya haram, haram, haram” – ‘exiting’ from [political] legitimacy is religiously forbidden, forbidden, forbidden.”

Supporters of Arab autocratic regimes of Mubarak and others that faced the Arab uprisings were not the only ones to use this tool

it is undeniable that the world has changed a great deal since the concept had widespread currency among Muslims and was applied to pre-modern modes of government. Whether Muslim religious establishments have collectively realised this or not, the modern autocratic ‘president’ holds far more power—if only due to technology alone—than the medieval sultan. And far more destructive than that is that civil society in today’s world is far weaker—especially in the modern Arab world—than it was in pre-modern Muslim societies

This piece aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the constitutionality of the measures taken by the President of the Republic Kais Saied, by examining both the text of the Constitution and the context. This piece argues for a contextual interpretation approach in order to adjust to the dynamic nature of societies.

Article 80 is conditioned on the existence of an “imminent danger threatening the nation’s institutions or the security or independence of the country and hampering the normal functioning of the state.” It is worth noting that, during the Constitutive Assembly’s (NCA) voting on the above-mentioned article, concerns over the broad wording of the article were voiced, due to the absence of definition of what constitutes an ‘imminent danger’ and ‘exceptional circumstances’, those concerns were dismissed by the Rapporteur-General to the NCA, who maintained that the formulation of the article was “clear”.

the intent and real desire did not seem to be there from the beginning to endow the country with a constitutional court formed of competences and working to guarantee the supremacy of the Constitution. Its formation was hindered by the failure of the Assembly to elect its 4 appointees,11The President of the Republic, the Assembly of the Representatives of the People, and the Supreme Judicial Council shall each appoint four members. motivated by disagreements between parliamentary blocs. In April 2021, to unblock the situation, an amendment was proposed to the Article 10 of the Constitutional Court’s Law to cancel the order of the parties that have the authority to appoint members of the Court12The Article lists “successively the Assembly of the Representatives of the People, the Supreme Council of the Judiciary, and the President of the Republic.” . The bill was rejected by the President Kais Saed and sent back to the parliament for a second reading.13Parliament has preserved the same amendments that were proposed, allowing the Supreme Judicial Council and the Presidency of the Republic to choose 8 members of the Constitutional Court without waiting for Parliament to complete the election of 3 out of 4 members of its appointees.  His decision was motivated by the fact that the passing of the law exceeded the constitutional deadlines provided for in Paragraph 05 of Article 148 of the 2014 constitution

18 Oct 2011 11:27

A total informal way of life pervades that includes schooling, healthcare, food supply and social services. People here are friendly and welcoming and they know what needs to be done to better their community, but there are no channels for them to officially take part in civil society and government. Although this area is part of the capital and is reached by metro, it is at the periphery of the regime’s concerns. In Mounib, nothing has improved since Hosni Mubarak passed his presidential powers to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF)

Egypt’s government is designed for a dictatorship: It is extremely centralised and tightly controlled by national policy, and local councils are void of power. Although Cairo’s three governorates have separate budgets and various departments, they largely depend on the country’s ministries, led by presidentially appointed ministers, to care for essential elements of the urban environment: housing, schooling, transport, parks, healthcare, etc.

the Truth and Dignity Authority (Instance Vérité et Dignié or IVD), a body created at the end of 2013 to highlight abuses suffered by thousands of people, mostly before the 2011 revolution that toppled long-term president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

More than 62,000 people and communities have filed cases with the IVD, a figure that includes those claiming to be victims as well as repentant perpetrators.

The alleged incident must have taken place between 1 July 1955, when Tunisia became independent, and 31 December 2013, when the country's new Transitional Justice Law came into force. The accused perpetrator must be the state or persons acting on its behalf or under its protection. Finally, crimes should be considered serious or systematic.

Dictatorships have a way of manipulating historical narratives. So alongside any of the most pressing issues of the day, the past, too, is in play.The struggle to shape the past, and give it new authenticity, can be witnessed all around the Tunisian capital.Last summer, the Tunisian government restored a statue of Habib Bourguiba, the founder and first president of the republic, to its original place on the capital’s main avenue.

Mr. Bourguiba’s statue had replaced a humiliating symbol of colonialism: an image of the colonialist politician Jules Ferry with a Tunisian woman at his feet proffering an olive branch, he reminded Tunisians.“That used to be the symbol of colonialism, and Bourguiba is the symbol of freedom, of independence and of the modern state,” he said at the unveiling.

“Usually history is written by the victors, but this is the opposite,” said Adel Maizi, the president for preservation of memory at the commission. “These testimonies will reveal the truth.”

“In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine,” said Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance.

Reconciling with the past is an issue that has hovered over post-Communist Europe for decades. But today that experience has broader global resonance, serving as a point of discussion across the Arab world where popular revolts have cast off long-serving dictators, raising similarly uncomfortable questions about individual complicity in autocratic regimes. Arab nations are forced to grapple with the same issues of guilt and responsibility that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are once again beginning to seriously mine. Time makes the past easier to confront, less threatening, but no less urgent to resolve. The experience here, however, suggests that it may be years, decades perhaps, before the Arab world can be expected to look inward.

The resurfacing a generation later of these issues is not entirely without controversy, often driven by hard-line governments and prompting accusations of score-settling and political opportunism.

“There was some dispute about enshrining sharia,” he said, “that’s why we had to push away the controversy and we settled for what was said in the 1959 constitution about Tunisia as an Arab country.” 

there will be no sharia or anti-blasphemy laws in the Tunisian constitution

Rabbi Benjamin Hatab leads Tunisia’s main synagogue and said that Ghannouchi had reached out to the country’s Jewish community. "He declared that the country would not change and that the only difference would be that it would be more democratic than Ben Ali's Tunisia,” the Jewish leader told Ynet.

it appears that if there was "betrayal" of the revolution, it is not necessarily in the opposition between "religious conservatives" and "secular progressives." The partisan tactic of pitting these two camps against one another masks the difficulty of the entire political class to meet the popular demands for social justice.

the voices of social resistance are never killed: they occupied sites in the capital until the month of March, they occupied factories, besieged the ministries, and, more recently, occupied the streets of Sidi Bouzid in the summer of 2012. They no longer oppose and harass Ben Ali’s regime, but instead, shift their frustration toward the provisionary government led by the Ennahda party. They were reunited under a simple slogan, that of the revolution before the final “Dégage”: “Work, freedom and national dignity,” similar to the winter variety heard sometimes as “Bread, Water, No to Ben Ali!”

The consideration of social fractures shows to what extent the confrontation between the "secularists" and "religious," given so much scope in the French newspapers, is not a central concern. There is no denying that there were certainly demonstrations to protect the status of Tunisian women, and there is equally an obvious presence of radicalized young Islamists in the streets of Tunisia who intend to impose a puritan and orthodox rule. Yet, the reading of social tensions in Tunisia in terms of identity imposed both by the defenders of secularism (Tunisian specificity, Bourguibist inheritance) and by the Islamists (who, in this way, mask their inability to meet the social demand for justice) is an illusion. After the elections of October 2011 the Islamists, who had strongly emphasized their religiosity and the persecutions they had suffered under the former regime – deemed, in particular, to distance them from corruption – have suddenly lost their subversive potential. After being persecuted, after presenting themselves as "pure," they are now in power.

As Jebali spoke Friday, thousands of Tunisians were demonstrating in the streets of the capital in outrage over the assassination, calling on Jebali to resign. Jebali denied that his party had anything to do with the killing -- the first assassination since Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" -- and urged his fellow countrymen to act with restraint. "I already told them -- don't play role of the law, do not respond with violence," he said. "Otherwise, we are trapped, because the goal of those who shot Belaid is to make us react violently."

"Tunisian people made the Jasmine Revolution for two goals: revolution against dictatorship and revolution against corruption, and they also wanted social justice," he said. Those goals have not been betrayed, he said. "The biggest proof is what is happening in the streets -- protests, free press. I don't think that another press in the world enjoys more than here in Tunisia. Beside, we are not corrupt people, but if people made a revolution against us, that's their right, and we will bow to the will of our people."

A general strike called by trades unions for Friday, the first such action in Tunisia in three decades, closed many shops, cafes and other businesses. The national airline, Tunisair, warned of possible flight disruptions.

(Reuters) - Tunisia's ruling Islamists dissolved the government and promised rapid elections in a bid to restore calm after the killing of an opposition leader sparked the biggest street protests since the revolution two years ago. The prime minister's announcement late on Wednesday that an interim cabinet of technocrats would replace his Islamist-led coalition came at the end of a day which had begun with the gunning down of Chokri Belaid, a left-wing lawyer with a modest political following but who spoke for many who fear religious radicals are stifling freedoms won in the first of the Arab Spring uprisings.

In Tunis, the crowd set fire to the headquarters of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party which won the most seats in an legislative election 16 months ago.

Prime Minister Hamdi Jebali of Ennahda spoke on television on Wednesday evening to declare that weeks of talks among the various political parties on reshaping the government had failed and that he would replace his entire cabinet with non-partisan technocrats until elections could be held as soon as possible.

the thesis of a threat from the old deep state does have credence, according to Chatham House fellow and North Africa specialist Jon Marks. Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment think tank also shares this view; she argues that there are still significant remnants of the old regime in Egypt and Tunisia.

Youssef Cherif, a prominent Tunisian political commentator, points out that it is common among the elite to talk about having a less authoritarian version of Ben Ali. That Tunisians should think about compromising their hard-won democracy for dictatorship is not strange, as Kenneth J. Perkins, author of A History of Modern Tunisia, points out: “Countless Tunisians who preferred protecting their personal privileges to safeguarding the rule of law looked the other way as the repression of the Islamists [under Ben Ali] proceeded . .  . their tacit acceptance of the suspension of some citizens’ civil and human rights bound them to the regime.”

“The Tunisian revolution was largely peaceful, but it also meant that we inherited the whole administration intact and many of these civil servants are trying to hold on to the past and the privileges that they received.” These administrators have valuable skills, which the new transitional state cannot just purge.

Tunisia’s military is widely perceived as having successfully maintained its historically non-political role in Tunisian society throughout the country’s 2011 revolution. In a region where national armies and political struggles have made for not-so-strange bedfellows, this nonpartisan mindset makes the Tunisian military something of an anomaly.

Arab and international news sources reported that it was the refusal of General Ammar, Chief of Staff of the Tunisian Armed Forces, to fire on civilians that led to the final exit of Tunisia’s former President Ben Ali. Although such reports remain unconfirmed, most local and international analysts affirm that the Tunisian Armed Forces served as a pivotal force supporting the country during its fragile transition.

the army continues to enjoy popular credibility

Egypt’s parliamentary elections scheduled to  begin Oct. 18 are more political circus than a step on the path to democracy. It is intended to entertain, distract and recruit some new political performers, rather than decide — or even influence — the country’s future. It is nonetheless highly revealing about the intentions and the underlying nature of the political system emerging under President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. Sissi’s solo performance is remarkably similar to that of various Latin American presidents, described by the Argentinian scholar Guillermo O’Donnell in an influential 1994 Journal of Democracy article as “delegative democracy.”

Voters delegate their authority to the president, who rules unconstrained by a balance of institutional powers

Small surprise that in the face of these profound constraints on the election and on the parliament to emerge from them, the forces contesting for seats have dissolved into political incoherence, precisely the outcome those constraints were designed to achieve