Tunisia, a country hypnotized by a single man

Hassen Zargouni, the director of Sigma, the main Tunisian polling company, asks the journalist in his office in the Tunis capital:

– Do you see tension in the street?

He himself replies that the street is calm; that although January and February are usually “hot months”, months where money is lacking and protests abound, this year there have hardly been any demonstrations. And the money is still missing. Zargouni assures that President Kais Said, the 63-year-old jurist who assumed all powers on July 25 through a much-discussed interpretation of an article of the Constitution, still enjoys the people’s trust. And that only “an elite” thinks that the country is getting into the cave of a dictatorship.

Zargouni spares no criticism of Said’s “populism”. “The president systematically attacks the entire press, he only expresses himself on Facebook, without granting interviews. He uses a language of hate against the parties and the elites that connects perfectly with the unemployed young people who are in the cafe with the little money that the mother has secretly given them from the father”. And despite everything, Zargouni believes that Said is the right man to bring the country out of the paralysis in which he has been since 2011, when he started the Arab Spring revolution. “He should be in power for another year or two, to clean up the system,” he argues.

Said came to the presidency in 2019 with a resounding 72.71% of the vote, against 27.29% for his rival, the liberal media mogul Nabil Karui. He presented himself as a man of integrity, who had never participated in politics. He advocated regenerating the system to return democracy to the people and fight corruption. However, there was one major obstacle to tackling that herculean task: the president’s powers were limited to defense policy, foreign affairs, and national security. And for any constitutional reform, a two-thirds majority in Parliament was needed.

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The Constitution that Tunisians approved in 2014 established a parliamentary regime in which they tried to prevent neither the president nor the prime minister from becoming too strong figures, in the style of the country’s two great autocrats, Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987 ) and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011). But Said broke the legal ties of his position by resorting to article 80 of the Constitution, which allows the president to take “exceptional measures” in the face of a situation of imminent danger to the country.

Said suspended Parliament on July 25, 2021 and became a strong man. 76.8% of the population agreed with the president’s measure, according to the Sigma company. Pollster Zargouni explains: “You Westerners can’t understand it because you believe in institutions. You raised your hands to your head and thought that this was going to be a dictatorship. However, we Tunisians knew that the system was rotten. And 80% of the blame lay with the Islamists of the Ennahda party. In 10 years they did the same thing that Ben Ali had done: put their people in all the institutions”.

Zargouni describes the situation in the country in July as “unsustainable”: economic deterioration, paralysis of Parliament, a bad image of deputies with physical attacks on each other, a coalition government that was in conflict with the president. And to all this was added the pandemic, with 250 deaths a day in a country of 11.8 million inhabitants. “The disagreement between the head of the Government, Hichem Mechichi, and the president stopped the massive arrival of vaccines,” adds Zargouni. “As soon as Said assumed full power on July 25, vaccines started arriving.”

Political scientist Aziz Krichen, 75, maintains that the Ennahda Islamists had “colonized” all sectors of the Administration, from justice to the police. “We Tunisians know that Ennahda had created a parallel state. For this reason, although Said formally has all the powers in his hands, in reality he does not control justice, the media or the Administration”.

Krichen assumes that Said made an “arbitrary” interpretation of article 80 of the Constitution. But he believes it was “necessary” to close Parliament. The political scientist does not save criticism for Said either. He says that he uses a populist discourse, but has not done anything concrete to respond to the wishes of the population. And he worries about the economy. “Freedoms are important, but they are not everything. People continue to express themselves freely. However, their social and economic conditions have deteriorated a lot.”

On September 22 Said began to govern by decree and on February 7 he dissolved the Superior Council of the Magistrature (CSM), the body of 45 magistrates in charge of appointing judges. While the European Union and the United States have repeatedly expressed their concern about the state of democracy in Tunisia, Said is following his roadmap towards a new regime endorsed by a referendum in July and elections in December.

A fragmented opposition

The opposition to Said is fragmented. The most active group is that of Ennahda’s followers. There is a part of the left that has joined the Islamists “against the coup”; another that supports Said and a part that says that he would never join the Ennahda “mafia” in any claim.

In the streets of Tunisia it is easy to find someone who immediately accuses Ennahda of the great evils that the country suffers. At the headquarters of this formation, the leader Noureddine Arbaoui, however, blames Kais Said. “The president boycotted the work of Parliament and the Government. In the last six months of government, out of 24 ministries we had 11 vacancies because the president did not accept his appointment. During the pandemic, the president hid the vaccines and as of July 25 they all appeared at once.

Riadh Chaibi, Ennahda’s political adviser, explains that what Said did is a coup. “There is no democracy in the world with Parliament closed. Does the fact that a coup is supported by the people make it legitimate? Most coups are carried out with the support of the people.”

At the door of the Faculty of Law in Tunisia, where Kais Said taught, the opinions reflect the gap that has opened in the country around the figure of the president. Hanén, a 21-year-old student, says that Said is a dictator. “And he’s also homophobic.” When someone objects to her that most leaders in the Arab world are homophobic, she replies with a smile: “But Tunisia has always been the exception, hasn’t it?” Ameny, a 22-year-old student, confesses that she is worried that there is no separation of powers in Tunisia right now. But she is not afraid that the regime will become a dictatorship.

Samir, a 60-year-old man in a suit and tie, who passes in front of the faculty because he works in a nearby bank office, expresses himself in favor of Kais Said: “He is not the ideal head of state, but he is a person of integrity. And we have to rebuild now what has been destroyed in the last 10 years.” Samir says that he is very well placed in his bank position to know the extent of corruption in Tunisia. “You Westerners think of all the democratic achievements of Tunisia. But those achievements are of no use when the institutions are corrupted.”

The economy is what worries the most

Most of those consulted in this report feel more concerned about the economic situation than about the loss of freedoms and the concentration of power in one person. The economist Radhi Meddeb points out that unemployment in 2010 was 13% and now it is higher than 18%. “And that 13% was already unacceptable. That’s why people got up in 2011.” Meddeb is currently concerned about the public deficit, which in 2010 was 1% and in 2021 it was 7.8%. “With such a deficit, the room for maneuver to fight against unemployment is very fragile. And today we are still not clear about the president’s economic vision, ”he says.

Meddeb also believes that the suspension of Parliament on July 25 had some “salvage”, that the situation was “unacceptable”. But he warns that a purge, a cleansing of the institutions, cannot be undertaken by one man. “That has to come from a cultural transformation that can last 20 or 30 years.”

a western observer requesting anonymity explains that Tunisians are very proud of the freedoms they have won. But, at the same time, he points out, “culturally they have the need to know who’s in charge, who’s the boss, what door to knock on.”

Now, there are no doubts.

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