The New Tunisian Order
The involution of the democratic institutions that had characterised the post-2011 Tunisia has reached a tipping point between the end of last year and the first months of 2023, a tumultuous time in which President Kais Saied has made his final push to establish a new order. The institutional overhaul operated by Saied has changed the face of Tunisia beyond recognition, dismantling step by step one of the most progressive constitutions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and depoliticising the public space at the same time. Initially supported by a large fragment of the public opinion, Saied’s authoritarian drift has indeed been associated with a political reset aimed at delegitimising the political opposition to the President’s grand design. Its main pillars were the revision of the 2014 Constitution, achieved not without significant challenges with the referendum held last July; and general elections to renew a parliament first suspended and then dissolved during the constitutional crisis of March 2022.
Part of the presidential roadmap announced in December 2021, both moves did not gain much traction as shown by the official turnout results announced by Instance Supérieure Indépendante des Élections (ISIE), whose same independence has been duly undermined by Saied himself with incisive changes to the elections law and the replacement of most of its members. The meagre 30.5% turnout for the referendum and, more importantly, the abysmal 8.8% for the first round of the general elections held on 17 December 2022 (followed by the 11% recorded in the second round on 29 January 2023) did not only show the widespread political apathy of ordinary Tunisians, still unable to make ends meet. It also confirmed the increasing distrust for a dysfunctional political system that is being deeply transfigured by Saied’s constitutional engineering, informed to a top-down approach that is changing the institutional architecture of Tunisia without any significant input from the base, political parties, civil society organisations or other relevant actors.
Gone are the days of the National Dialogue Quartet that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. The same dialogue that has been pivotal in paving the way for the successful transition to the democratic experiment after the Jasmine revolution is now missing in action, obfuscated by a one-man show that carefully uses symbolism as a weapon of mass distraction…
Umberto Profazio for IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationals et Strategiques)
