154 - Tyranny, Tunisia, and Putin Wannabees

            Tyranny, says Aristotle, is “irresponsible rule over equals or betters in the interest of the ruler but not in the interest of the ruled.” Simpler, and modernized, tyrants “exercise arbitrary power for ends defined by the ruler, not the citizens..

  Tyrants – Putin is an exemplar of the breed – gain power by both acceptable and foul means.  Tunisia’s President Kais Saied follows fully in Putin’s footsteps. Massive protests reminiscent of the start of the Arab Spring in 2011 are now beginning to break out in Tunis and other major Tunisian cities.  But whether Saied will survive dissent as successfully as Putin is still an open question.

Like President Viktor Orban in Hungary, Putin initially achieved political ascendancy at the ballot box. Then he protected his electoral successes and continued in control despite the constitution by anointing a temporary president in his stead and running the Russian Federation from behind a prime ministerial title. Slowly but surely rivals were eliminated or marginalized, Alexei Navalny was poisoned (along with several others) and jailed. Wealthy oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was exiled to Siberia and then stripped of his riches before being expelled.

 Putin emerged before the invasion of Ukraine triumphant, with his finger on the engine of Russian domestic as well as military might.  Those insidious accomplishments, plus the West’s tepid responses to his occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, enabled him to invade the rest of Ukraine a year ago and imagine that he could overcome any local resistance in a matter of days.

Saied came to power in Tunisia in 2019 as a mild-mannered law professor who represented a sharp break from the religious fundamentalist and secular political operatives and parties who had tried to rule Tunisia from 2011. They had failed to generate the kind of economic renaissance that Tunisians and most outside observers anticipated would have flowed from the overthrow of despot Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had presided over a kleptocracy that generated wealth for the regime and its cronies, but not for ordinary Tunisians.

When he was elected in 2019, Saied declared that he had no intention of becoming a dictator.  His presidency was greeted enthusiastically because he came not from the usual political classes that had done little to uplift Tunisia. Instead, he appeared to be a technocrat with positive ideas and motives.

How wrong Tunisians were. In 2021, Saied suspended the constitution and sent tanks to close parliament. He wrote a new constitution giving himself great, unchallengeable, authority. (See #62, “Another Putin Emulator: Tunisia,” June 9, 2022) Ever since, he has steadily dismantled what was left of democratic practice in his country.

Saied effectively runs Tunisia by fiat. He locks up his critics and detains prominent opposition politicians, journalists, lawyers, radio station owners, heads of football (soccer) clubs, and activists. Islamists have been targeted. So have nearly all members of the judiciary and many prosecutors. Criticism of the president or king, as in Russia and Thailand, is forbidden.

In exchange for tyranny, Tunisians experience more corruption than before the Arab Spring. Inflation and unemployment are on the rise. Social services are non-existent. Because foreign exchange is limited, food is scarce, especially pasta, pita bread, and sugar. Food insecurity is widespread, with the poorest Tunisians suffering.

Protests, until last week, have largely been muted by fear. But, ten days ago, Saied lashed out verbally against Africans migrants, scapegoating them for the inflation, corruption, and the economic malaise that continues to afflict Tunisia.

There are roughly 12 million Tunisians and only about 21,000 darker-skinned sub-Saharan immigrants who are the target of Saied’s contumacious attacks. Many, along with thousands of Tunisians, have only come to Tunisia to reach the Mediterranean in order to ship dangerously across the seas to Italy and Europe. Nearly 18,000 tried this escape route in 2022. Others have left their own countries hoping for a better life in a once prosperous Tunisia. They generally have found work in low-skilled manual occupations shunned by most Tunisians.

But Saied has now accused those migrants of being “pawns” in a “criminal plot” to transform his Arab Muslim nation into “a purely African country.”  They were “cancer cells” responsible for all kinds of shortages in the shops.

Such notions are no less nonsensical than Putin’s claims that he invaded Ukraine to save it from being overrun by Nazis.  Or that Ukraine is ineffably part of Mother Russia. And that his is not war but merely a “special operation.”

            One of the sad outcomes of Saied’s hate speech has been the subsequent victimization of Africans by some Tunisians. Landlords have evicted Africans in recent days; some Africans have been assaulted. The police have arrested hundreds of black foreigners – all despite heavy criticism from the African Union, to which Tunisia belongs, and from an array of local critics. Reports of harassment come from all quarters.

            Tunisians have been marching against Saied, prompted by his verbal assaults on migrants but also driven by his many failures to improve the nation economically and socially.

A powerful national trade union has been leading some of the demonstrations against him and his policies.

            But whether all of this anti-Saied action presages a second Arab spring is unclear. Weary and discouraged by the failures of the first Arab Spring uprising to better their lives, and disappointed once again by the autocratic, Putin-like, maneuverings of the robotic-acting new president who at first seemed to constitute a welcome break with the past, Tunisians may be too tired to overthrow yet another miserable regime. Saied’s racist remarks might have won him some time; that is what scapegoating often does.  If not, sooner than a Putin or an Orban, Saied may be on his way out.