Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the North Africa and Middle East program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
It's been two years to the day since Kais Saied unilaterally declared himself Tunisia's absolute ruler. After he sacked the prime minister, froze parliament and granted himself judicial powers, arguments raged—between Tunisian civil society and commentators, trade unionists and politicians—over whether this was a coup and whether Saied was a tyrant. Meanwhile, the army watched on from their tanks, ensuring that no matter the outcome of those debates, parliament would not be reconvening.
Tunisia's amateur autocrat has come a long way since then. Despite telling crowds that he was too old for a new "career as a dictator," Saied has reshaped the Tunisian state and rewritten its constitution according to his whims. The constitutional process was so clumsy, had such poor public engagement, and resulted in a constitution that was so disappointingly dictatorial—after Saied had spent years pontificating on "direct democracy"—that some Tunisians retorted that if only he had just taken his first career as a constitutional law professor more seriously, Tunisia would have been much better for it.
Because Saied was never elected, or supported, for who he was—an obscure yet proud constitutional law professor—but rather for who he was not. Saied entered the presidential elections in 2019 as the prototypical outsider, drawing from a deep well of discontent toward a festering political system and its elites, who had failed to steer the country out of economic collapse after the democratic uprising that ousted Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. But just because he was not of those elites, it didn't mean he would be any better. In fact, his lack of experience, political savvy and talent for governing have proven devastating.
All the problems that Tunisians lamented have worsened exponentially since Saied's coup.
- Tarek Megerisi
All the problems that Tunisians lamented have worsened exponentially since his coup. The economy is dissolving, with jobs, groceries and vital medicines increasingly scarce. Severe droughts brought on by climate change have made the absence of any leadership or effective government anxiety-inducing. And Tunisia's oligarchs are rampant, rapaciously robbing and polluting their country to collect ever greater rents while effectively dodging taxation. Police brutality and state oppression, in turn, have flourished as Saied jealously collects all power, and spitefully arrests anyone who publicly criticizes him, challenges his policies or represents a political threat. To distract from his disastrous rule, Saied is playing the populist—baiting Tunisians with racist theories blaming sub-Saharan migrants and other shadowy conspiracies for Tunisia's ills, all while staging public arrests of the leading figures from the country's revolutionary politics.
The obvious question, then, is how such an awkward character and unaccomplished politician has so effectively seized, centralized and retained power. The answer is, Saied didn't do it alone. As the old African proverb goes, it takes a village to raise a child, and so too does it take a community of state institutions, local supporters and international enablers to raise a dictatorship.
When Saied seized emergency powers for himself two years ago, Tunisia's lively civil society did not sound the alarm; in fact, many of them muted it. Having witnessed years of creeping authoritarianism driven by a virulent Interior Ministry, stalled progress on revolutionary ideals and rampant corruption, many Tunisians believed Saied could be the shock that the country's post-Ben Ali system needed, especially given his unabashed contempt for that system. In their desperation, civil society ignored the warning signs of Saied's own authoritarianism. They trusted in themselves to safeguard Tunisian democracy as they waited to see where Saied would go. Today, they are desperately preparing their defenses as the vindictive president turns his sights on civil society, going through the dictator's playbook of vilifying them as foreign agents and preparing a new law to throttle their funding and activities.
Similarly, Tunisia's powerful trade unionists, key to forging the consensus politics that symbolized Tunisia's evolution after 2011, were hopeful early supporters of Saied's tyrannical tilt, symbolizing the optimism permeating much of Tunisia's socialist state. For them, the post-revolutionary system they had helped create had become too submissive to the Tunisian oligarchs it was supposed to reel in and too supine to the International Monetary Fund's neoliberal dogma, leaving their members paying the price for Tunisia's economic stagflation. Saied, on the other hand, often espoused sovereigntist and socialist economic perspectives. Yet just like civil society's initial faith in Saied, the trade union's hopes quickly evaporated. Today, the petulant president arrests their leaders for advocating their positions, while a lack of any economic policy wounds their base with delayed salaries and price inflation.
If the disappointment and desperation of the many helped Saied's dictatorship take root, then it was the blinkered opportunism and greed of a few that let it bloom.
Europe, the self-professed best friend of Tunisian democracy, backed up its effusive sentiments by making Tunisia the highest per-capita recipient of the European Union's financial support. But when Tunisia's democracy really needed a friend, and when the EU's partners in Tunisia started getting locked up, Europe disappeared—suggesting that while a democracy might resonate with EU values, the leaders of many European states just prefer having a dictator to deal with.
That left the United States to become the loudest defender of Tunisian democracy. While the U.S. led multilateral pressure for a return to the constitutional order after Saied's coup, with a G7 statement and some senior American delegations visiting Tunis, rumors swirled that key European states with historically close ties to Tunisia dispatched ambassadors to reassure Saied. Most recently, a Europe drunk on migration-hysteria and led by Italy's far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, gave up any leverage, or integrity, that it may have had in dealing with Tunisia, when it struck a deal with Saied to pay his regime to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean. Europe sacrificed any hopes of reforming Tunisia's economy or constraining Saied's destructive authoritarianism to secure a flimsy migration pact founded on a mutual contempt for the human rights of migrants and refugees.
If the disappointment and desperation of the many helped Saied's dictatorship take root, then it was the blinkered opportunism and greed of a few that let it bloom.
- Tarek Megerisi
While Europe has cossetted Saied with a sense of impunity, it is Tunisia's security services that are the true financial and political beneficiaries of the humiliating "team Europe" pilgrimage to Tunis on July 16. It is also these security services that were Saied's integral backer. After all, despite the desperately hopeful support Saied's coup solicited two years ago, that support and the coup itself were only possible with the Tunisian military barricading parliament and enforcing a blatantly opportunistic misinterpretation of Tunisia's constitution by Saied. Since then, Saied's crackdowns are carried out by an Interior Ministry that arrests and allegedly tortures citizens on fabricated charges in violation of Tunisian laws. The populist deflection of Tunisia's woes onto migrants is also enacted by a National Guard that disregards international conventions on torture and human rights to abuse and condemn migrants to slow, agonizing deaths for merely existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Tunisia's security services are the lifeblood of Saied's dictatorship and its greatest profiteers to date, as they have thrown off the political oversight and unpopular political appointees of the previous, post-revolutionary system. They have also forged their own international relations—with the Egyptian military that was allegedly supportive of the Tunisian army's efforts to secure Saied's coup, and of course with Europe. The security services are the main beneficiaries of the EU's anti-migration aid, since there is very little oversight of how that money is spent, and they are Europe's practical counterparts in "managing" migration, as Saied totters about declaring he will not be Europe's border guard.
Tunisia's amateur autocrat has so far gamed the many different groups in Tunisia who raised his dictatorship, taking what he needs before viciously turning on them. But will his relationship with the security services remain mutually beneficial? That is what will ultimately decide whether Tunisia now settles into a dysfunctional dictatorship and dilapidating state, or if Saied goes the way of President Habib Bourguiba, declared unfit and ousted by a cruel yet ascendant security class.
