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was overthrown; the Islamists that won the first democratic elections immediately reverted to repression and have since been replaced by another autocratic regime.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.”

Tunisia was first ranked ‘free’ in Freedom in the World 2015, but democratic progress has stalled. Though municipal elections were held in May 2018 after a two-year delay, the government has failed to revise the country’s laws to conform to the constitution.

After adopting a constitution in 2014 that was hailed by the Norwegian Nobel Committee as “the most egalitarian and democratic” in the Arab world, the government started rolling back freedoms in response to terrorist attacks the very next year. It imposed a state of emergency that has yet to be lifted and passed an anti-terrorism law that gave sweeping authority to security forces.

Impunity for abuses and arbitrary restrictions by security forces, the government’s partial rollback of fundamental freedoms, incomplete judicial reforms, and a weak legislative branch are considered the most pressing challenges to Tunisia’s democracy.

International partners, the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the World Bank should focus their assistance strategy on achieving key democratic benchmarks. The US should restart public diplomacy, pressing for the establishment of a constitutional court, the cancellation of the state of emergency, and revisions of the penal code and other repressive laws.

Although freedom of expression was enshrined in Decree 115 of 2011 and the 2014 Constitution, the government continues to use older press, penal, and military codes to target outspoken critics and journalists. Between 2014 and 2017, the government reportedly suspended 157 associations, dissolved 198, and referred another 947 to court.

As the largest donors supporting Tunisia’s democratic development, the US, EU, and the World Bank should engage with the government. US democracy funding for Tunisia increased by over 4,000 per cent from $500,000 in 2015 to $20.89 million in 2016 and $40.99 million in 2017. The EU’s, from zero in 2015, accounted for 18 per cent of the bloc’s total €356 million aid package to the country, dubbed a ‘Marshall Plan’ to support democratic consolidation.

The World Bank has allocated $430 million to support Tunisia’s decentralisation, which had helped improve the capacity of governance institutions at the local level.

US and EU policymakers should ensure that their efforts directly address the country’s most critical democratic obstacles, including promotion of an independent judiciary and functioning legal system, protection of civil society organisations, and strengthening parliamentary and civic engagement on policy and governance.

The international community should rally round to save Tunisia’s democracy and push back the dark tyranny threatening to eclipse its people’s hard-won freedom.