62 - Another Putin Emulator: Tunisia
Tunisia was supposed to be the Arab exception. A self-immolating Tunisian vegetable seller set off the revolutionary events of the Arab spring in 2011. They led to regime change in Egypt, chaos in next door Libya, and a massive war in Syria. In Tunisia, long time dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled before enraged mobs. Democracy arrived for the first time ever.
At first, a mildly fundamentalist political movement, long in opposition to Ben Ali, won elections, ruling thereafter in coalition with less Islamic parties. Tunisia seemed to be the one Arab country that emerged out of the tumult that followed the Arab spring with a government responsive to the will of the people and not beholden to soldiers.
The Egyptian people ousted Hosni Mubarak, their long time autocratic president (and successor to Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat), only to replace him through the ballot box with representatives of Islamist-leaning Muslim Brotherhood. That regime lasted only a year before ambitious military officers led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi – the same security officials that had flourished under Mubarak -- ousted the Muslim Brothers and installed Sisi as their very own hard edged dictator, a throwback to Nasser.
Today’s Tunisia appears to be trying very hard to emulate Egypt and its top down rule by a self-empowered individual. But, in this case, the people rather than the military have seemingly installed their own autocrat. Pivoting away from corrosive corruption under the weak Ennahda governments and their secular successors, in 2019 Tunisian voters elected a mild mannered law professor as president.
At least he appeared mild mannered and apolitical at the beginning. Kais Saied had taught until 2018 at the University of Carthage, instructing students in constitutional law. He had presided over the Tunisian Association of Constitutional Law from 1995 until his election as president. Austere, speaking in standard Arabic rather than the Tunisian dialect, and calling himself an independent social conservative, voters opted for him rather than more standard candidates because they were tired of politicians, particularly those loyal to Ennahda other parties who seemed to favor business as usual. Saied argued that only a fresh face -- a proverbial outsider – could crack down on pervasive corruption and revive the promise of the Arab Spring revolution. He also promised to improve educational opportunity and revive Tunisia’s severely slumping economy.
Yet the self-proclaimed democrat, with high popularity ratings, proceeded rapidly to dismantle Tunisia’s democracy. Just this week, he purged fifty-seven judges, accusing them of “corruption and protecting terrorists.” (BusinessDay, June 5, 2022) Earlier this year, Saeied sacked all of the judges of the Supreme Judicial Council, replacing them with appointees loyal to himself.
One of the key judges dismissed from the Council told BusinessDay that “This injustice will not pass in silence …. These free voices will never be silenced," "The attack was not only against judges, but on the law and freedoms." The remaining judges went on strike.
Next, Saied wants to rewrite the liberal 2014 constitution and bring it before voters in a referendum scheduled for July. He says that he wants to give the executive (himself) greater powers, to diminish the prerogatives of the elected members of the legislative assembly, and permanently to reconfigure the ways judges try cases.
Saied has been consolidating his powers since last summer when he dissolved parliament, dismissed the prime minister, and decreed that he himself could rule by fiat. At the end of July, he granted himself “exceptional” executive powers “indefinitely” because of an “imminent peril” facing Tunisia. But he has never bothered to specify the “peril” or why it seemed imminent. Article 80 of the 2014 constitutions forbids president declaring emergencies and shutting parliament. Critics call Saied’s actions a “presidential coup.”
Saied avers that the actions against the judges, and the shutting of Parliament, were essential to address urgent national needs, to prevent political paralysis and economic stagnation, and to improve Tunisia’s ability to cope with the conoravirus pandemic. Tunisia, with a population of 12 million in country roughly the size of the U. S. state of Georgia, has admitted to 1 million cases and 29,000 fatalities.
Saied has not yet appointed a permanent prime minister and cabinet ministers, nor advanced an economic program to address his country’s abysmal statistics. The economy shrank by 8.2 percent in 2020, after growing by about 1.8 percent per year from 2010 to 2020. The State Statistics Institute says that 18 percent of Tunisians are unemployed. The nation’s fiscal deficit has reached 11 percent of GDP and the IMF says that Tunisia’s public debt stands at 87 percent of GDP. Saied has not said how he would address those significant economic issues. Nor has he enunciated a plan to return Tunisia to the prosperity it enjoyed under the rule of President Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987).
Saied has said nothing about stemming migrancy to Europe. Fewer Tunisians than Africans try to cross the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy boats, but Tunis is close to Italy and Malta. Given a poor economy at home, emigrating sometimes seems a better opton.
Tunisia is food short, too, thanks to the war in Ukraine and the growing shortages of grain from Russia and Ukraine. Food prices are escalating, as in neighboring Egypt. Without wheat to make traditional flat breads, the lives of Tunisians will become even more parlous than before.
“I am not a dictator,” Saied claims. “I have clean hands,” he also intones. He has promised to uphold basic rights and not to infringe on traditional liberties. Yet Saied has refused to establish any time limit for his arbitrary rule. Instead, he hopes that amendments to the 2014 constitution, drafted under his direction, would establish “a true democracy in which the people are truly sovereign.”
Saied may fashion himself a true Platonic savior of the Tunisian nation, with only the objective of producing prosperity and incorruptible good governance for his long-suffering people. But dismantling the democracy that followed the Arab Spring revolution hardly gives citizens any agency, any say in how are governed. Nor are there any checks, currently, on the authoritarian instincts of a one-time professor who has now arrogated to himself powers that only Bourguiba and Ben Ali hitherto exercised in Tunisia.
Saied was believable and popular when he won an election and swept out of office the standard political operatives. But protests have now erupted in Tunis and other cities. Without direct returns beneficial soon to his citizens, Saied will face his own personal Arab Spring, with Tunisia being plunged again into turmoil. Once more a leader who arrogates all power to himself may be sent away in a tumbril, with some version of the Arab Spring returning.