Tunisia has been in a quiet sort of tumult over the last week. After the president, Kais Saied, seized total power by firing his prime minister and suspending parliament on 25th July, there was a wave of jubilation and a bit of resistance, and then almost immediately everyone—whether supporters or opponents of the president’s actions—went home. People here in Tunis have told me that the whole affair is very à la tunisienne. That is to say “no blood, no [political] project,” according to historian Salhi Sghaier. One MP for Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party which dominates parliament, Samir Dilou, said “we [Tunisians] are scared of blood and it’s a good fear.”
Following the Arab Spring uprisings, Tunisia came out relatively unscathed—fewer deaths, no civil war—and held multiple free and fair elections. Each country has its own specificities. Tunisia isn’t Egypt, where in 2013 around 800 people died during a coup by an unelected general backed by the army. Tunisia was going through its own crisis at that time, following two political assassinations. After the second, a video appeared of the future president Saied, then a law professor, saying furiously: “everyone has to get out, those in power and those in the opposition.” He blamed the political class and wanted a reset. Instead, a national dialogue was opened between the warring parties, sparing the country a potentially gruesome conflict. A Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the civil society organisations that made up the National Dialogue Quartet, but the process also opened the path for corrupt old regime practices to return.
Exactly eight years after that video was recorded, Saied got his way and most of the country cheered. The relief was natural, given the pressure everyone has been under over the last year and a half. Hospitals were crumbling under the strain of record numbers of Covid-19 cases and years of underinvestment and lack of strategy. Prices were rising just as work was scarce. Meanwhile, when Tunisians turned on their TVs, they were met with scenes of chaos and quarrelling in parliament, even fistfights. On that Sunday evening, Saied swooped in as a self-styled saviour, pulling Tunisia out of an impasse. While Tunisia’s democracy is now “frozen,” its future direction as yet unknown, what was happening before was not serving the people either. According to one survey, Tunisians believe that basic necessities like food and shelter are as essential to democracy as freely choosing leaders. For one cafe owner in Tunis, the two are linked. “You work, you eat. There is no time or space to think about [politics],” said the 40 year old, who has banned election campaign flyers from his premises because "they are all liars.” The only time he voted was in 2019, for Saied.
Saied’s move can be described as a “coup,” but in Tunisia the word currently has less to do with legal definitions and more to do with politics. Ennahda was the first to decry the “coup” against democracy. The party’s leader Rached Ghannouchi, who is also the speaker of parliament, staged a sit-in outside parliament from 2am to midday on 26th July, before adopting a more conciliatory approach. “We were asking for this,” says his colleague Dilou, who credits himself with having persuaded Ghannouchi to give up on the sit-in. “The responsibility for this crisis—political, social, health—rests with the political class in power, of which I am part… people didn’t go out and burn state property, they burnt the headquarters of Ennahda.” The party is in a weaker position than it has ever been. Though it is still the largest party in parliament, it has fallen in popularity and there are deep divisions within its ranks; people like Dilou think that Ghannouchi should give up the leadership, retire and “write a memoir.” By Thursday, Ghannouchi had posted a smiley photo on his Facebook page, writing: “we are ready for any compromise.”
For his part, Saied—a political outsider—doesn’t seem to want dialogue with the political parties. After being invited to the palace, the powerful workers’ union the UGTT, which helped Tunisia’s democracy survive the last crisis, abandoned the idea and decided to support Saied. “We wanted a national dialogue before [25th July] but each of them refused—the president of the republic, the head of the government and the president of the assembly,” said Naima Hammami, a member of the UGTT’s executive bureau. “That is why we were waiting for ‘a someone’ to save the country.” She said the union plans to be a force for proposing ideas. It gathered 26 experts—on history, economics, sociology, finance—together to create a roadmap for the president, though he didn’t ask for their advice. “We’re not the ones at the steering wheel,” she said.
Saied, the one who is at the steering wheel, has not hinted at his roadmap, or nominated a prime minister yet. He is in charge of public prosecutions and has replaced ministers in key positions, including at the ministry of interior and the ministry of justice. Arrests have started now that parliamentary immunity has been lifted; an MP who criticised the president on Facebook was immediately arrested. The reason given was that he had a two-month unserved prison sentence from 2018. Human Rights Watch warned that “concentrating powers that could be used against basic rights should always set off alarm bells.” Saied has given himself a 30-day limit for the parliamentary freeze—but this can be extended. Some think that he is planning to use a legal case about foreign financing of electoral campaigns to declare the 2019 election void, and dissolve parliament.
Although some in the region may be celebrating his actions as a blow to political Islam, very few here see it that way. If anything, being more “Muslim” may have helped Ennahda. “I voted for them because I thought they feared God, but they did things that no Muslim should do,” said Slim Gibloaui, 48, a shopkeeper in a Tunis neighbourhood. According to someone close to Saied, he felt that Ennahda manipulated people by playing the religion card, but he hated the “secular” party Nidaa Tounes just as much.
For months Gibloaui hadn’t been able to stock in his shop any subsidised cooking oil—which he says is not distributed properly. Miraculously, though, the cooking oil reappeared this week. “Oil is just an example—we feel there will be change,” he explained. “Everyone that comes to my shop is happy. We have gotten rid of Ennahda and the lobbies.” This feeling has also fed a wave of political activity. Paradoxically, while the president has frozen the country’s democratic institutions, new parties and movements are being created. “He [Saied] has created an opening in the system [and] there are enough Tunisians who are determined not to let the country become a dictatorship,” says Aziz Krichen, sociologist and political activist. “There is a breeze of change, which will make our work a bit easier.”
One Tunisian who is certainly determined not to let the country become a dictatorship is more wary. “We are going towards another regime. We have left the 2014 constitution,” said the law professor and feminist, who was violently attacked online by Saied supporters after giving a critical interview to a French newspaper. “Never trust a man,” she said.
