Restoring democratic momentum in Tunisia

DEMOCRACY is under threat in Tunisia, the birthplace of the 2011 Arab Spring. The incremental power grab by President Kais Saied has reversed major democratic gains the Arab nation recorded after the momentous protests. With a dodgy referendum that gave him new sweeping constitutional powers last month, the last surviving spark of democracy in the Arab world appears to have dimmed.

It is a setback for democracy. It dismays liberals around the world, who had hoped that this country of 11.8 million would beam a democratic light in a region dominated by autocracy. In its Democracy Index 2020, The Economist ranked Israel and Tunisia as the only democratic countries in the Middle-East.

The slide back into autocracy in the North African country is therefore troubling. It was there in 2011 that years of economic hardship and political repression boiled over into pro-democracy protests that spread through the Arab world. Tunisia emerged from the struggle as a democracy, the stirrings in Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria and Iraq were met with either outright repression or cosmetic institutional changes. In Syria, the hunger for democracy was violently quashed. No fewer than 306,887 civilians were killed and millions displaced between March 2011 and March 2021, reported the UN Human Rights Office.

Today, protesters in Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq and Palestine hold on to democratic aspirations. In Libya, it led to rebellion against strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, his ouster and death. Libya has since descended into civil war among rival factions and Islamist terrorists. In Egypt, strongman Hosni Mubarak was overthrown; the Islamists that won the first democratic elections immediately reverted to repression and have since been replaced by another autocratic regime.

Tunisian masses that toppled long-time despot, Ben Ali, in 2011 are today confronted with an undisguised autocrat. In September, Saied established a system under which he would essentially govern Tunisia by decrees, bypassing the 2014 Constitution that was adopted after years of painstaking negotiations. Saied invoked Article 80 of the constitution ostensibly to prevent imminent “danger threatening the integrity of the country.”

He froze parliamentary activities for 30 days, suspended parliamentary immunity for all lawmakers and dismissed Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi so he could pick a PM of his choice. These moves effectively rubbished the sacrifices and progress of the last decade. He topped it up with a referendum in July with only 30.5 per cent turnout and 94.6 per cent approval of a new constitution that grants sweeping presidential powers and erodes parliamentary oversight.

In the decade since its democratic revolution, nine successive governments have failed to fix Tunisia’s serious economic problems. Ominous signs that the democratic experiment in Tunisia is facing headwinds emerged in a September 2020 poll by the International Republican Institute, in which 87 per cent of Tunisians said their country was “headed in the wrong direction.”

Since 2011, the Tunisian dinar’s value has halved. Unemployment currently hovers around 18 per cent nationally and as high as 32 per cent in some parts, and corruption is endemic. Public debt has more than doubled from 39 per cent of GDP in 2010, and with the government forced to shell out large sums to service its debt, there is some concern that Tunisia could go the way of Lebanon and default.

Unsurprisingly, Arab Barometer’s 2019 country report on Tunisia found that confidence in democratic institutions had “fallen dramatically” and Tunisians were “far less likely to trust the government or parliament than at the time of the revolution.” Tellingly, 51 per cent of the Tunisians surveyed said democracy is “indecisive;” 42 per cent said it “leads to instability” and 39 per cent blamed it for “weak economic outcomes.”