On July 25, 2021, when Tunisian President Kais Saied dismissed then-Prime Minister (PM) Hichem Mechichi and suspended the parliament, opposition politicians and critics labelled Saied’s move a coup. However, Saied dismissed their accusations and promised that he was cleansing Tunisia of corruption, bad policy-making, and religious extremism.
At the time, the President received overwhelming public support. According to a survey, 87% of Tunisians backed Saied’s move and believed that he could remedy the country’s problems, including rising COVID-19 cases and a slowly imploding economy. Saied’s supporters also blamed the previous coalition government for mishandling the COVID-19 crisis and further worsening the economy.
In fact, several concerns raised by Saied are valid. While Tunisia has long suffered from rampant corruption, even under the tightly controlled regime of former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the issue became widespread following Ben Ali’s ouster in 2011. A 2017 report by Carnegie states that corruption is “even more pervasive today than it was under Ben Ali.” For its democratic transition to survive, all stakeholders, including the government and civil society, must implement policies specifically aimed at tackling the root causes of the issue. Moreover, according to several surveys, around 70%-80% of Tunisians blame the democratically elected governments for worsening the situation and believe that corruption has become endemic since the Jasmine Revolution. Against this backdrop, Saied’s status as an independent candidate, his expertise in constitutional law, and his crusade against corruption propelled him towards the presidency in 2019.
Tunisia was lauded as the only democracy to survive the Arab Spring. “But that chapter effectively ended with the passage of” a new constitution, “which enshrines the almost absolute power that [Pres Kais] Saied conferred on himself a year ago.”https://t.co/o7GL853b6X
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 27, 2022
Saied has also portrayed himself as a champion of secularism and accused the Ennahda party, which secured a majority of seats in the 2019 election, of perpetuating religious fundamentalism in collusion with Islamist groups. Furthermore, he has proposed removing Islam as the state religion. Saied has also said Tunisia has failed to resolve the economic woes that sparked the 2011 protests in the first place, arguing that the revolution cannot be over until the country’s economic problems are addressed.
However, while Saied has been able to rally popular sentiment in his favour by promising to tackle the country’s most pressing issues, many have argued that Saied’s actions have not yielded any of his promised changes. There are also concerns that some of the measures he has taken since disrupting the political process not only threaten to end Tunisia’s democratic transition but also revert the country to the authoritarianism seen under the Ben Ali era.
Is Tunisia on a path back to authoritarian rule?
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 25, 2022
🇹🇳 July 25 marks one year since President Kais Saied dissolved parliament as Tunisians vote on a controversial new referendum.
Here’s a timeline of the last 11 years since the revolution ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/HsdZjW2wwc
According to Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at Brookings, the president’s move to dismiss the PM and freeze the parliament was a “slow-motion coup,” aimed at gradually gaining control of political institutions and standardising his one-man rule. In fact, since the events of July 25 last year, Saied has taken several measures to undermine the country’s democratic transition and consolidate his grip on power, including suspending the constitution, declaring rule by decree, unilaterally appointing a Prime Minister loyal to him, replacing the country’s independent judicial watchdog, and sacking 57 judges over alleged corruption charges. In what appeared to be the final nail in the coffin of Tunisia’s experiment with democracy, Saied’s newly proposed constitution passed a referendum last week (although less than 30% of the population voted for it) that will replace the landmark 2014 constitution and formalise his power grab. Once implemented, the new constitution would allow Saied to appoint and sack ministers and lawmakers at will, fire judges without consulting the legislature, jail critics, and indefinitely stay in power by removing lawmakers’ ability to impeach the president.
Moreover, when compared with the 2014 constitution, the text of the new document appears to have been prepared in a hurry. The drafters of the 2014 constitution took two years to finalise its text, which went through multiple drafts and was opened to the public for suggestions, many of which were incorporated. In contrast, the new constitution was prepared in less than a month and the head of the drafting committee, Sadeq Belaid, warned that the text is “dangerous” and could lead to a “disgraceful dictatorial regime.”
The president has also been more focused on intimidating opposition leaders and critics rather than taking steps to meet his promised reforms. In December last year, a court sentenced former President Moncef Marzouki to four years in jail in absentia for saying Saied staged a coup, and in June, Ennahda party member and former PM Hamadi Jebali was arrested on money laundering charges. Similarly, Ennahda party chief Rached Ghannouchi was detained and questioned last month for allegedly inciting violence against security forces.
Also Read: A Decade After the Success of the Arab Spring, Is Tunisia Following Egypt’s Path?
Saied is therefore both eroding democratic institutions and failing to honour his promises. For instance, his power grab was justified as something that was necessary to combat corruption. However, according to global corruption watchdog Transparency International, Saied’s seizure of power would only exacerbate the corruption problem. It cited the closure of the anti-corruption agency and the arrest of its chief as “worrisome measures” that will reduce accountability mechanisms and create a dangerous environment for whistleblowers.
Given that the President’s actions are leading the country towards authoritarianism, it is no surprise that Tunisia’s democratic credentials have been downgraded by several organisations. In its 2022 ‘Freedom in the World’ report, Freedom House lowered Tunisia’s status from “free” to “partly free.” The report cited Saied’s unilateral decisions to remove elected representatives and institutions and his crackdown on civil liberties as the reasons for the downgrade. Less than a year ago, Freedom House praised Tunisia for its democratic values and affirmed its status as one of the only two “free” countries in the Middle East, the other being Israel.
The fact that Saied’s power grab has radically transformed Tunisia’s democratic status in a year does not bode well for a country that is looking to leave authoritarianism behind. While corruption and religious fundamentalism are problems that need to be seriously evaluated, Saied’s measures provide no solutions. Rather, they have only created new problems and pushed the Arab world’s only democracy towards the path of a dictatorship.