Internal political betrayal, external cynicism, and the unravelling of the Arab Spring’s last laboratory.

On 25 July 2026, thousands of Tunisians took to the streets of central Tunis, not to mark the 69th anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, but to denounce the power grab carried out exactly five years earlier by President Kais Saied. The demonstrators called for his resignation and an end to what they described as an increasingly authoritarian regime, accusing it of imprisoning dozens of political opponents, driving the country into economic decline, and dismantling the democratic experiment born of the 2011 revolution.

Yet the scenes stood in stark contrast to those of 25 July 2021. When Saied suspended parliament, dismissed the prime minister and concentrated power in his own hands, many Tunisians greeted his move not with alarm but with relief. A poll conducted by Emrhod Consulting at the time initially found an extraordinary 87 per cent approval rating for his actions. That largely forgotten figure serves as an uncomfortable reminder that the erosion of Tunisia’s post-revolution democratic experiment did not begin with the repression that followed, but with the popular embrace of a leader who promised to rescue a political system many had come to see as broken.

Saied did not destroy Tunisian democracy in a vacuum; he stepped into a house whose foundations had already been hollowed out from within.

Historical Roots of Autocracy

Tunisia’s political crisis is not, at bottom, a crisis of personalities. It resurfaces decade after decade because its roots run deeper than any single ruler, reaching back more than sixty years to an institutional choice made at independence: the founders of the Republic placed the presidency, rather than a balance of powers, at the centre of the Tunisian state.

The 1959 Constitution borrowed heavily from France’s Fifth Republic, promulgated the year before. Like de Gaulle, Habib Bourguiba believed a strong executive was the surest bulwark against instability.

Each successive constitutional revision widened that gap. In 1975, Bourguiba was made president for life. Under his successor Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the same architecture hardened into full authoritarian rule — proof that Tunisian authoritarianism has never rested on any one man, but on a system built to accommodate him.

The First Betrayal Was Domestic

The 2011 revolution briefly broke the pattern: the 2014 Constitution divided power between president, government, and parliament for the first time since independence. But the experiment proved fragile — nine governments cycled through office in as many years, staffed by a political class with little experience of governing, its coalitions built to secure each party’s share of power rather than to solve the country’s problems. Ministries became spoils to defend, not instruments to deliver with, and the resulting improvisation left unemployment, regional inequality, and an unsustainable subsidy system unaddressed, government after government. Tunisians read that dysfunction as proof of a paralyzed state. But what exhausted them was the incompetence and self-interest of those who held power, not the parliamentary system itself — and conflating the two is exactly the trap that let the coup de force happen in 2021.

The Trap of a Temporary Measure

In July 2021, Saied invoked Article 80 of the 2014 Constitution to suspend parliament. What was promised as a temporary corrective has since hardened into a permanent system — and it has done so despite a spectacular collapse in public backing.

Saied’s 2022 constitution consecrated the return of a dominant presidency, sidelining parliament and government and restoring the vertical logic of 1959. Tellingly, the text put to referendum was not even the one drafted by the advisory commission Saied himself had appointed: its chair, the jurist Sadok Belaïd, publicly disowned the Saied’s version, warning that it paved the way to dictatorship.

The July 2022 constitutional referendum drew only 30.5 per cent of registered voters; the parliamentary elections that followed saw turnout of barely 11 per cent, among the lowest ever recorded.

By concentrating power in his own hands, Saied did not merely block political life: he also weakened the economy, the public services and narrowed the country’s room for manoeuvre in foreign policy.

Western Betrayal

It is at this critical juncture that the second betrayal took place: the geopolitical retreat of Tunisia’s Western partners.

How could such a blatant erosion of popular legitimacy be met with such a profound lack of clear, decisive international opposition? Ignorance was no excuse. The arbitrary dismissal of 57 judges in June 2022 and the introduction of a hyper-presidentialist constitution were documented in real time by foreign embassies. What the West lacked was not information, but political will. Washington and European capitals chose to stick to routine expressions of diplomatic ‘concern,’ carefully avoiding real leverage — neither conditioning financial aid nor suspending security cooperation. Tunisia’s remaining civil counterweights, namely trade unions and independent journalists, were left to face the state apparatus entirely alone.

That indifference had a deeper logic. For many policymakers in Paris, Brussels, and Washington, the failure of the Tunisian transition was not viewed as a tragedy to be averted: if democracy cannot take root permanently in the region, why bother sustaining it?

This dynamic found a favourable echo among regional autocracies — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — delighted to see the end of the Arab Spring’s last laboratory. Admittedly, the petrodollars they promised never arrived in Tunis, since Gulf states demanded the IMF imprimatur that Saied had refused to grant. But no matter: for these regimes, the ‘stability’ of an impoverished strongman will always be preferable to the contagion of a successful democratic transition.

The Immigration Obsession

The European Union, for its part, ultimately capitulated to its own domestic political obsessions. Blinded by the migration issue, Brussels stopped viewing Tunis as a democratic beacon and began treating it merely as an outsourced border guard. The memorandum of understanding signed on 16 July 2023 formalised this transactional approach. It mattered little that the Tunisian president had, months earlier, delivered a conspiracy-laden speech about Sub-Saharan migrants — a tirade condemned by the United Nations. Europe signed regardless.

The choice was a cynical profession of faith: it consecrated a preference for concentrated executive power over pluralistic institutions, prioritising immediate border policing over the rule of law.

The Illusion of Stability

Yet modern Tunisian history carries a warning carved in 2011: regimes that claim to guarantee stability at the expense of liberty may turn out to be houses of cards. A concentration of power without countervailing forces inevitably collapses under the weight of its own economic and social contradictions. And its fall, in a political landscape systematically hollowed out, will not pave the way for an orderly transition, but for a leap into the unknown — a shockwave that will destabilise the region and inevitably cross the Mediterranean.

The Tunisian tragedy is not merely that of a people weary of defending institutions that failed to satisfy their needs or sustain their hopes. It is the result of a double failure: an elite at home that betrayed the promise of governance, and an international community abroad that abandoned democratic values the moment they became geopolitically inconvenient.

Institutions, Not Saviours: The Path Forward for Tunisia

What presidentialism produces runs deeper than any legal text. A president elected by direct universal suffrage and holding the bulk of executive power carries a mandate no other institution enjoys: he ceases merely to represent the state and, in the eyes of much of the population, comes to embody the nation itself. Campaigns cease to be contests of policy and become contests of personality. Every crisis revives the hope that one leader, by will alone, can resolve what institutions could not — and the more citizens expect of the president, the more indispensable he appears, and the more indispensable he appears, the more every other institution loses credibility: parliament becomes an obstacle, parties become dividers, intermediary bodies become brakes on action.

Bourguiba, Ben Ali, Saied: three men, three eras, one architecture. The men change; the mechanism endures. That is the trap — correcting the system by replacing the man only guarantees that the crisis will repeat.

A move toward a genuine parliamentary system deserves serious consideration: a president elected by parliament, confined to roles of arbitration, representation, and constitutional guardianship; a government emerging from the parliamentary majority, accountable to the nation’s representatives; clearly delineated competencies, with each institution answerable for its decisions to one another.

This would not be a panacea. But the Tunisian experience, like so many others, confirms it: the concentration of power does not produce lasting stability — it fosters a recurring dependence on providential figures who, sooner or later, succumb to the temptations of unchecked power and are ultimately destined to disappoint. It also tends to serve a small circle of insiders who prosper in the shadow of power and its abuses.

The effectiveness of a state is not measured by the power of one person, but by the clarity of responsibilities and the ability of institutions to cooperate while checking one another. The true challenge of the coming reforms is not to find a better president. It is to build institutions strong enough so that Tunisia never again needs a ‘saviour.’