Second spring?

In Tunisia, almost everyone agrees on one point: The economy is the country’s greatest vulnerability. Twelve years after its revolution, widespread economic dissatisfaction and blind adherence to counterproductive austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are still the primary challenges to Tunisia’s prospects for building a resilient and progressive democracy.

Since the 2011 revolution, which was fuelled by economic discontent, none of the administrations that came to power managed to take concrete steps to address the country’s lingering economic woes. The resulting perpetual economic crisis eventually translated into a crisis in democracy and, as the recent Arab Opinion Index demonstrates, significantly weakened the Tunisian people’s faith in and support for the country’s young and fragile democratic institutions and processes.

The lack of improvement in the state of the economy led many Tunisians to the conclusion that no group within the political establishment is capable of enacting policies that would resolve the country’s deep-rooted economic struggles. This growing distrust in the ability of the established political classes to fix the economy was the main reason behind the Tunisian people’s embrace of populist, anti-establishment President Kais Saied as a potential saviour during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In October 2019, Saeid was elected president on a promise to end corruption, strengthen the rule of law, hold the establishment to account for its mistakes and, perhaps most importantly, reform the economy.

When Saeid assumed absolute power in a coup two years later, Tunisia’s economy was on the brink of collapse – poverty and unemployment were rising, inflation was skyrocketing, corruption and clientelism were still pervasive and debts to predatory multinational institutions such as the IMF were ballooning.

Despite wielding unlimited power to instigate change, however, Saied took no meaningful action to fix the dire economic and social situation. Rather than attempting to find sustainable solutions to the country’s many deep-rooted problems, he attempted to crack down on all forms of opposition through a series of repressive and violent measures – his regime brutalised anti-government protesters, imposed travel bans on opposition politicians, and even tried to jail activists over critical social media posts.

On the economic front, his authoritarian regime failed to come up with an alternative to borrowing from the IMF to keep the country afloat. Repeating the mistakes of the Ben Ali era, Saied appears willing to do everything necessary to remain in the good books of the IMF.

Excerpted: ‘Another uprising is in the making in Tunisia’. Courtesy: Aljazeera.com