As usual, the severe deviances of the socio-political system in Tunisia drowns you in a flood of hard-to-answer questions about their legitimacy, validity, and the potential of the state to quickly recover from their side effects. That is the case since the 2010 revolution, which brought down Ben Ali’s dictatorship and sparked the waves of the Arab Spring. Since then, Tunisia has gone through major political transitions, but fortunately managed to overcome all of them without affecting the comprehensiveness of the state. The most prominent of which are the death of former President Beji Caid Essebsi in 2019, and the step-down of the Islamist-led government in 2013.
At the moment, one of those perplexing questions is about the ability of the Tunisian democracy to survive the recent radical decisions taken by President Kais Saied, against the two parallel authorities of his regime – the parliament and the government. To answer this question, we have to first validate two key issues. The first is about the claim of Tunisia being a democracy. The second is about whether Saied’s decisions, taken in his capacity as an elected president of the state and in conformity with the constitution, are intended to harm the state which he leads and his existence in power depends on its existence.
In a surprise move, on the night of July 25th, President Saied, launched a ruthless war against the government and the parliament of his own regime. Saied, who worked all his life as professor of constitutional law, used the powers given to him by Article 80 of the Tunisian Constitution to grab all state civilian and military powers in his own hands. Saied justified the shocking procedure by the need to control the risks aroused by the massive angry protests that erupted all over Tunisia on that day against the failures of the regime in running state affairs and recovering the depressed economy.
This was not the first protest of such a big size and for the same reasons. Tunisian Protesters have been marching in the streets since February. The incapacitating system of three presidencies (President of State, President of Parliament, and President of Government) has led to paralyzing the decision-making process within the state, and thus negatively affected the already-deteriorated economy. In 2020, the governmental National Institute of Statistics, in Tunisia, conducted survey, wherein 30% of the surveyed households nation-wide stated that they fear running out of food, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic which added to their miseries of unemployment and bad economy.
In the early years following the Arab Spring, western scholars referred to Egypt and Tunisia as the only two successful survivors of the Arab Spring. However, after the removal of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, in 2013, they tended to exaggerate in labeling Tunisia as the only “successful democracy in the Arab world,” allegedly because it is the only Arab Spring country that could accommodate Islamists in power. The same scholars, today, are firing alarms that Tunisia’s democracy is at great risk as Islamists are being pushed out of the political scene by Kais Saied and his supporters from the secular parties. Some pro-Islamist propagandists on social and traditional media went as far as calling Saied a putschist. In either case, those analysts are mistaken, or at least too emotional and too quick, for making judgements about the current gloomy situation in Tunisia.
The fight between Islamists and secularists is not the core motivator of the current transition in Tunisia. This ideological dispute is a fight of the elite politicians, not the fight of the people who suffered hell on their hands. Those elected politicians failed to serve the interests of the people who elected them. Both Tunisian Islamist and secularist parties abused democracy to fulfill their own narrow political interests. Now, the public masses decided to hold them accountable and the President of the State, who comes from a non-political non-partisan background, decided to stand on the people’s side in this fight. This, in a nutshell, is how we should view the current scene in Tunisia.
Democracy in Tunisia, represented by elections that is held on regular basis and an ideal constitution that is inapplicable in real life, failed to make citizens’ lives better. On the contrary, this democracy was brutally abused by the political elite – secularists and Islamists alike – to magnify people’s economic and social sufferings rather than relieving them. Therefore, the world does not need to fret a much about the future of the Tunisian democracy, after Saied’s move, because democracy in Tunisia cannot get worse than what it is right now.