The Tunisian “Caramilk” | The Press

When you are a columnist specializing in international affairs, you spend your life trying to find out why President So and so chose to do this, why a group X took to the streets.

Calls in the country concerned, but also to experts from here and elsewhere, help us to understand. When we have done the field in the country in question, when we know the key players there, the answers come even faster. There are more nuances.

But sometimes, sometimes, we come up against a mystery, a secret of the Russian, Chinese or Nicaraguan version of Caramilk. To a puzzle that no one seems able to put together convincingly.

For my part, since July 25, 2021, I have been trying to solve the Tunisian enigma and I simply cannot.

On that day, President Kaïs Saïed, elected less than two years earlier, took hostage the young democracy of the Maghreb country, the only one to have emanated from the Arab Spring.

That day, using an article of the Constitution, the former law professor dissolved Parliament, fired the Prime Minister and kicked out all the ministers. He has assumed all the powers of a system designed so that they are widely distributed.

And despite this hostage of democratic institutions, thousands of Tunisians celebrated. On the phone, people I had known in Tunis who had demonstrated 10 years earlier to bring down dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali were enthusiastic. ” A coup ? Of course not, what are you talking about? they told me. I was speechless.

When Hatem Nafti, author of an essay entitled Tunisia: towards an authoritarian populism?, contacted me to tell me that he would be visiting Concordia University at the invitation of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Diversity and Democracy, I jumped at the chance to meet him. “We see the return to dictatorship in Tunisia and it does not move many people. I wrote this book as one does therapy. I needed to understand,” he says straight away. That’s good.

According to this engineer and observer of Tunisia, many have overestimated the scope of the Tunisian revolution. Of course, there was a great social movement that was set in motion by a “founding myth”, namely the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, a graduate who became a fruit seller who set himself on fire after being humiliated by a policewoman. . His gesture was a spark plug for a trio of demands: work, freedom and dignity.

But, maintains Mr. Nafti, if Ben Ali fled the country after a few weeks of demonstrations, the elites who were nourished by the regime did not disappear and never accepted the transition to democracy and the participation in power of Ennahda, the Islamist party, which quickly imposed itself as the main political force in the country. “Ennahda is not a political party, it is a social class in the country that has long been excluded,” argues the essayist today.

For 10 years, there were cohabitation efforts, he adds, but the heart was not there. “The elites of the old regime spent 10 years explaining by all means that democracy is bad. That democracy means Islamists and it means chaos, ”explains Hatem Nafti. We talked ad nauseam about the “dark decade” that the country had just gone through.

Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many Tunisians felt liberated when the president promised to take control of a chaotic system and fight corruption.

The formula had already been used successfully in another country which tried the democratic adventure for a decade before accepting without reluctance the return of a strong man at the head of the state: Russia.

Vladimir Poutine speaks since his accession to the capacity of the “castastrophe” which were for the Russians the years 1990, years of freedom, but also of economic difficulties.

Again, the equation that was presented to the population put democracy, instability and poverty on one side and prosperity and the acceptance of strong power on the other.

The majority of human beings live with difficulty with the chaos that results from a great change and quickly prefer order to it, no matter what, wrote Barbara Kellerman, professor at Harvard University, expert on “followership”, or the study of the circumstances that lead a group of individuals to accept the authority of a leader.

The problem in Tunisia is that the strong man has not brought back the stability he promised. The country is not experiencing a period of economic catch-up like Russia experienced under Putin. On the contrary, the country is plagued by shortages of food, medicine and essential commodities. Political opponents and overly critical journalists find themselves behind bars.

The young people, who supported Kaïs Saïed when he regained all the powers in 2021, are disillusioned. When the president proposed changes to the Constitution in July 2022, 70% of Tunisians boycotted the consultation. During the last legislative elections in December 2022 and January 2023, 88% of voters deserted the ballot box.

Hatem Nafti, who voted for Kaïs Saïed in 2019, is today one of his fiercest opponents. When he speaks of a presidential coup, more and more Tunisians agree.

It is clear that the Tunisian enigma solves itself.