Tunisia after Revolution
A new constitution and halted democracy
The imperilment of Tunisian democracy is nothing new. Since the Kais Saied coup of July 2021, Tunisia’s formal democracy has not really existed, before that coup it was in trouble anyway, and since the July 25th 2022 referendum steamrollered in Saied’s own new constitution, it is certainly buried under his personal control. But to overstate the significance of a widely-boycotted and mostly illegitimate referendum - forced upon an exhausted and increasingly materially insecure electorate, under 30% of which voted - would by turns promote the idea that Tunisian democracy had meaningfully existed on July 24th or earlier.
I have always thought there a likeness between Kais Saied and UK Labour leader, Keir Starmer. I make the comparison because international comparisons are often made mostly or only between Western nations and seldom between Western nations and those called developing, still less a Muslim-majority state in the Arab world, such as Tunisia. Such comparisons are useful, also, because they press against the complacent illusion that Westerners live in a higher calibre of functioning democracy that can be trusted to represent their wishes and interests.
Aside from the purely cosmetic likeness of their KS initials, Starmer and Saied are both former lawyers. Both possess a general soullessness and apparent lack of any human concern or feeling, so that both have the unfortunate distinction of having been given the moniker “Robocop”. Both took the helm of what had been vibrant democratic and grassroots-led movements - in the case of Starmer a Labour movement energised by the leadership of an idealistic outsider in Jeremy Corbyn, in the case of Saied the fledgling Tunisian democracy - and both presented and promised themselves as a safe but more responsible custodian to these urgent political processes and changes. Both have betrayed this promise, and both have done so with an arrogance and a contempt towards due process in particular that should run contrary to their background as practitioners of law, but in reality reveals more that some lawyers are untroubled by either the abuses or responsibilities of executive power, and quite like to use its unchecked nature to knock things into an authoritarian shape of their choosing. Both men are without the necessary political imagination to detect, still less mitigate, that this form of their choosing seems not to correspond to any political vision of the greater good.
I always liked the above photo of empty boxes, painted on a wall in Tunis. The pictures of candidates appeared in the boxes for election day, and voters would vote by placing their vote in a ballot box of the corresponding number. I liked the peeled-back paint that saw the numbers fade, I liked that the painted boxes were in fact empty, I liked that it was simply a framework for democracy and could either be the edifice at which democracy itself was built, or only numbers painted uselessly on a wall.
Something in all of this was to me a useful metaphor for the reality of what a democracy is; a framework, in some ways only an empty framework that takes on the form of what you fill it with. Left uncared for it can peel away. It fades. Filled with corporate power, money as a form of speech, a corrupted information system, or under the thumb of an unchecked executive, “democracy” ceases to be meaningful anyway, and can quickly be reduced more to the form of a fetish, or a procedural fascination.
This verdict would certainly resonate with the majority of Tunisians who didn’t vote for Saied’s constitution, or at the other extreme those radicals who felt the political system that produced Saied was already betraying the Revolution they won in 2011. If Saied has achieved one thing befitting a Western democracy, it is a wholesale transformation of Ennahda - a party that has done more than any other single group (perhaps with the exception of the well-disciplined Tunisia General Labour Union (UGTT)) to bring Tunisian democracy into being - into a domestic enemy-within to mask his own failings, systemic Tunisian failings, global failings, and the fact that Ennahda are far less guilty of these failings than many others who have worked and profited from Tunisian politics.
It is not for me to overstate the meaning of either Tunisian democracy or its current loss. There were many Tunisians less excited by the level and pace of change than I was when I was there in 2021. There were many who, despite having participated directly in the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime, were apathetic about what their revolution - and it was a revolution - had birthed.
From an outside point of view, however, Tunisia was meaningful. The revolution had overthrown a tyrant, which is never a small feat. The revolution had installed a democracy in an Arab-majority country, helping to kill-off the racist and Islamophobic smears, so prevalent in Washington DC, Atlanticism, French colonialism and most Western foreign policy, that “Arabs aren’t ready for democracy”. For anyone working on Palestine, too, it was valuable to have demonstrated the not-just readiness but also hunger for democracy that existed in the Arab World. For anyone sick of “The Only Democracy In The Middle East” propaganda-lie that people - mercifully - no longer much bother to attach to the Israeli project, it was great to have a genuine democracy to speak of, and one that was both far more inclusive than anything in the Israeli apartheid, and that also bettered it on indexes including press freedom.
So Tunisia was important, but it also wasn’t. It wasn’t important because Tunisia showed very clearly that you could not create the political conditions for democracy when an economy and a country’s wealth is organised into conditions of oligarchy. You could not have democracy while the same families that plundered during the Ben Ali regime still held power, whether as the licensees for French supermarket chains or partners of French phosphate miners. The current global economic crisis is going to leave the failed orthodoxies and lies of the International Monetary Fund ever more exposed, but even before energy and food prices began to bite, the Tunisian experience had already showed that the IMF would have been more comfortable dealing with a single authoritarian in Carthage Palace than an elected parliament in Bardo, less capable of giving the simple and direct answers an autocrat was willing to back with authoritarian power. The IMF, having done nothing to help Tunisian democracy, now quite probably won’t even stabilise the authoritarian whose coup they created the conditions for, but beyond this it is important to state simply that the terms of international finance are authoritarian, not democratic, and that this is significant.
A final key lesson is that Tunisian democracy, which was and still is more than just an experiment, but was often treated or talked about in these terms by Western think-tank and donor classes, might have won many plaudits and even some aid on account of its political merit, but it was always the case that an authoritarian regime will get more money, faster, from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, than any parliament or economy can hope to receive for good behaviour from the US or EU.
Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, since pursued lapdog-style by the Biden Administration, and with its quid pro quo of forcing Zionism on pro-Palestinian populations in return for US favours to local authoritarians, has been another arrow in the quiver of those authoritarians, with the Sudanese revolution particularly hamstrung by a military dictatorship that gained traction by agreeing to recognise the Israeli project. Tunisia might still forego recognition of the Israeli state, but the UAE, naturally, was the first to bless the Saied coup.
I wrote a lot about and during my time in Tunisia in 2021. The project was Covid-interrupted, but I still see it as having produced a good deal of material that I’d like eventually to see light of day, even if it will probably need a publisher that will taken an interest in material sure to be regarded as niche.
As with the above point about Starmer and Said’s shared authoritarianism, however, there was a lot of Tunisia that - in a new democracy putting democratic structures in place - showed the essential nature of democratic construction. Tunisia cut usefully against a Western sense that Western democracies are possessed of greater merit or even much more legitimacy, rather than simply having been crafted for longer and more subtly against producing change, in ways that Tunisia’s was and is yet to. I left Tunisia just before the coup that saw Saied seize authoritarian control, and amidst a rising tension of lockdowns and political deadlock that - in hindsight - made the shift that came inevitable.
There are some Tunisia notes that I’ll write up soon, including some about how change can be attempted when the official political mechanisms of change break down, as they were doing in 2021 in Tunisia, and as they also clearly have done in the UK and US.
I was more dispirited then than I am now about the state of Tunisian democracy. Perhaps the most important thing is to remember that the spirit of such a thing always, or mostly, lives outside those formal structures designed to hold it, and that are too often left to run empty. A spirit of how best to replenish such structures, rather than merely an expectation that they should work when they clearly do not, may prove a smart use of time, in Tunisia and elsewhere.