Coup in Tunisia: Is Democracy Lost?

In short, the de facto dissolution of parliament by President Kais Saied in July 2021, abandoning the constitution, and targeting the opposition-all these point to one thing: Tunisia is no longer a democracy and slipped into the autocratic playstore of Arab leaders past and present. Three are the main reasons that this democratisation process came to an abrupt end after a decade in Tunisia: 1) failure to accompany political reform with socio-economic benefits accruing to the people; 2) this followed the rise of populism; and 3) mistakes by the Islamic party. For Tunisia and the Arab world to move on, prodemocratic forces should relate freedom, development and social justice.

On 25 July 2021, after months of economic and public-health hardship induced by covid-19, major protests erupted against the Tunisian government. That same evening, President Kais Saied announced that he was dismissing Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, suspending parliament, rescinding the legal immunity of legislators, and presiding over their public prosecution. Ironically, Saied contended that he was taking these measures in the name of the 2014 Constitution, which prohibits such an unchecked concentration of powers.

A month later, Saied extended these exceptional measures for an undefined period. On 22 September, he promulgated a presidential decree confirming the suspension of parliamentarians' immunity and explaining that legislation will be "made in the form of a decree law promulgated by the President," introducing a long list of powers that would make any would-be dictator in the world envious. All these decrees run in the complete opposite direction of the letter and spirit of the 2014 Constitution, which has been de facto repealed. This presidential decree indeed marks the end of Tunisia's democratic transition that was embarked on ten years ago after longtime dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had been removed.

No single causal factor explains this failure due to the complex contexts and processes that vary from country to country. Therefore, I can give an explanation only for that country whose democratization process I have not only observed but also in which I have participated already for over forty years. Drawing on my experience as head of the Tunisian League of Human Rights, 1989–94; as the leader of a democratic opposition party, 2001–11; as president of the Republic, 2011–14; and today, yet again, as an opponent of a nascent dictatorship, I see three main reasons for the return of dictatorship in Tunisia. They are: 1) inability of the political system set up in 2011 to connect political rights with socio-economic rights; 2) rise of populism; and 3) negative role played by the feelings about political Islam.

Political and Economic Rights: The Missing Link

The Tunisian middle class and the poorest communities from the hinterland came together in the early days of the 2011 uprising and overthrew the Ben Ali regime. It was no longer acceptable that the middle class be deprived of the individual and collective freedoms which their counterparts across the Mediterranean enjoyed in full, nor for the poorest class to continue to bear their socio-economic rights in front of the scandalous corruption of the ruling elites.

The middle-class demands were promptly met. After 2011, Tunisians soon enjoyed a degree of political freedom until then unprecedented. The new normal was freedoms of expression and association, including the right to hold public protests, which became common right away. Several months later, Tunisians in free elections chose a constituent assembly to have the historic task to design a constitution for the new democratic state. It was three years later on 27 January 2014 that Tunisia adopted her first democratic constitution in their hope to get rid once and for all from dictatorship.

The poor, the jobless, and the forgotten in the interior regions of the country had less cause to hail the establishment of the democratic state. Certainly, they too have benefited from the climate of freedom, but their expectation of a better life economically has been destroyed. Worse still, for some among the poorest, the revolution has made an already precarious situation even grimmer.

But it was a race impossible to win-the pace of meeting economic expectations was as fast as that of the political ones-with how deep the financial and economic crises that Tunisia fell into in 2011 were. Decades of cronyism and corruption by the ruling families and their entourages had left the economy anemic. While corruption was the main cause of Tunisia's economic ordeal, few analysts noticed that the much-needed anticorruption policy which the government-in which I took part-implemented actually made the condition of society's poorest members worse.