When Kaïs Saïed was elected President of the Republic, on October 13, 2019, with 73 % of the votes, this novice in politics, hostile to parties and surrounded by a narrow circle of fans, claims to embody “what the people wanna “. But the democratic transition opened, on January 14, 2011, the overthrow of the dictator Ben Ali, led, on January 26, 2014, to the adoption of a constitution of parliamentary inspiration, where the Head of State must Share the executive power with the Prime Minister.
Tunisia chose for this ii e Republic to break with the presidentialism established, on July 25, 1957, by Habib Bourguiba, a year after independence. This is why the exacerbated populism of Saïed led him, on July 25, 2021, to proclaim an “state of exception” and to freeze the activities of the Parliament, then to assume full powers. This coup initially enjoys an undeniable popular support, as political quarrels have paralyzed the management of the country.
the solitary of Carthage
Saïed discount renewed the successful maneuver in Egypt in Tunisia by General Sissi, who overthrews the Islamist president, however democratically elected, in 2013, before accessing himself, the following year, at the head of the ‘ State, with officially 97 % of the votes, in a highly contested election. Like his Egyptian counterpart before him, the tenant of the presidential palace of Carthage accuses all the Tunisian Islamists of Ennahda, actually discredited by their poor governmental performance. But it is more their partisan clientelism than their societal options which is denounced by Saïed, holding, in matters of death of death, homosexuality or gender equality, a very conservative line that the fundamentalists would not disavow. The major difference between the Egyptian and Tunisian “blows” is that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, quick to encourage in both cases the counter-revolutionary dynamic, were careful not to finance the capture of power by Saïed, then that they had immediately allocated about twenty billion dollars to the putsch of Sissi.
This generosity is not in order to present Tunisia, despite the historically high prices of oil, because the Emirati and Saudi leaders, anxious in 2013 to stabilize an Egypt which has become their obligatory, want less the rescue than the sabotage of The Tunisian transition, in their eyes inspiring all posterior uprisings in the Arab world. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are publicly justified by subordinating their aid to an agreement between the IMF and Tunisia, a prerequisite that they had never been put forward in Egypt. Saïed thus finds himself a short-shared master of a country where the economic crisis is deepened, even though social dissatisfaction had largely fueled the support of his coup of July 25, 2021. The Head of State, himself Specialist in constitutional law, launched, on the contrary, in a flight forward of institutional reforms, as if on this alone legal framework depended the resolution of the present crisis.
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