TUNIS – It seemed like an echo of the protests that toppled the Tunisian dictator, leading to a series of uprisings that devastated the Middle East 10 years ago: young people on the streets of more than a dozen Tunisian cities over the past three nights. Fury that corruption seemed to be everywhere, jobs nowhere. Clashes with security forces resulted in more than 600 arrests on Monday.
Only this time, the end of the game was unclear.
The Tunisian dictatorship has passed. Its president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country in January 2011 after a brutal 23-year rule, the first strongman to fall in the Arab Spring uprisings that started in Tunisia and spread across the Middle East. Ten years later, Tunisians built a democracy, albeit a dysfunctional one, complete with elections and – the rarest of Arab goods – the right to freedom of expression.
That is how protests, strikes and protests almost never seem to stop. Graffiti happily denounces the police. Citizen bloggers and journalists howl about official mismanagement, despise political opponents and launch allegations of corruption against government officials from top to bottom, their Facebook posts then shared and amplified by thousands of Tunisian colleagues.
But none of this corrected an economy that was headed for sinking. Almost a third of young people are unemployed, public services are sinking and corruption is increasingly infiltrating daily life. Opportunities for most people have become so scarce, especially in the impoverished interior of Tunisia, that at least 13,000 Tunisian immigrants risked their lives by crossing to Italy by boat just last year.
“The only positive thing we got from the revolution was the freedom to say what we wanted,” said Ayman Fahri, 24, a trade student who said he wanted to leave Tunis, perhaps for Turkey, because of the lack of opportunities at home. . As for the rest of democracy, he said: “Perhaps we have misunderstood freedom, because we haven’t made any progress in the past 10 years.”
Thanks to the stalemate in its post-revolutionary parliamentary system, Tunisia has torn apart new governments at the rate of one per year and three in the past 12 months alone. Political parties dominated by wealthy businessmen scramble and reshape power – occasionally reaching real coups in Parliament – while making little progress in economic reforms.
As faith in politics has waned, so has electoral participation. Throughout Tunisia’s seven free elections, participation dropped from 68% in the 2014 parliamentary elections to 42% in 2019.
“Why do we rebel?” said Ines Jebali, 23, a sociology student. “Everything has changed for the worse.”
Without warning, Jebali, like Fahri, recognized an exception. At least, she said, there is now freedom of speech – although even that is occasionally threatened, with security forces beating protesters and prosecutors often taking bloggers to court on charges of defaming public officials.
“With today’s democracy, they may not be able to eat,” said Sihem Bensedrine, a longtime activist who, as head of Tunisia’s truth and dignity commission, investigated the abuses and corruption of previous regimes. “But they are free to fight for whatever they want.”
On that front, indignant Tunisians are no louder than the megaphone of Abir Moussi, a former Ben Ali party official who has reinvented himself as one of the country’s most popular policies by highlighting the decline in public services, promising to restore what it he says it is Tunisia’s prosperity under the former president and openly denies that a revolution has taken place.
Soon after Ben Ali’s fall, his regime was so stained that Moussi had his hair pulled out while defending his party in court. Now his Free Destourian Party leads the polls, and some analysts fear that his populist appeal, which mixes Ben Ali’s nostalgia with proposals to strengthen the presidency and security forces, may push Tunisia back to authoritarianism.
Mrs. Moussi rejects the statement.
“Those who criticize us do so to hide their own shortcomings,” she said in a recent interview, saying she supports the presidential oversight to prevent an authoritarian relapse. “The average Tunisian is now worse off than before.”
Routinely disturbing Parliament with protests on Facebook Live, repeating conspiracy theories that classify the revolution as an Islamic plot against Ben Ali and accusing the Islamic party in Tunisia of maneuvering to impose religious rule, Moussi manages to invade the headlines almost daily.
Most of the time, she has little evidence. But she speaks for many Tunisians who revolted for a better life, without access to the polls.
“Under Ben Ali, everything was honey,” said Basama Benzakri, 42, a second-hand clothing salesman who had to get a second job as a supermarket security guard to feed his two children last year.
He had warm words for Mrs. Moussi too.
“She is perfect, she is perfect, she is perfect,” he said. “I see her supporting the poor and always criticizing the government.”
Tunisia’s future may depend on young Tunisians seeing their rights hard-won, not a strong ruler, as the best way to put bread on the table.
Take the case of Haythem Dahdouh, 31, a law graduate who sat on a recent afternoon in a cafe in Zaghouan, an hour from Tunisia’s richest coast, because he had nothing else to do. His friends were better off, he said, although not much: a trained accountant could only find work on the floor of a factory, a colleague from law school in a call center.
“I have experience in unemployment”, he joked.
Dahdouh protested a decade ago, mostly against corruption, but now corruption saturates daily life, he said. Getting jobs requires bribes. Basic paperwork requires bribes.
Would he like dictatorship again?
“That is out of the question,” he said. “You can fight corruption now. Under the old regime, there was no way. “
Still, said Dahdouh, there was only one organization working seriously to fight corruption: I-Watch.
If Tunisians are now free to complain, lament, fight and defame, they can also openly denounce or defend human rights and then publish it in the press.
In the busy days after the revolution, non-profit social justice organizations and parliament watchdogs proliferated by the thousands. But none has become as famous as I-Watch, an anti-corruption group founded in 2011 by some university students that went almost alone to denounce land after denunciation aimed at powerful governments and business leaders.
His initial efforts were on the irregular side of fragmentation. To promote an initiative, they resorted to billboards in the middle of nowhere (they could all afford to pay), some street graffiti (courtesy of a friend) and rap music in praise of whistleblowers (never reached 12,000 views).
Last month, however, I-Watch landed its biggest blow yet with the second arrest of Nabil Karoui, a former presidential candidate, on charges of money laundering and tax evasion.
The I-Watch investigation irritated Karoui so much that he was recorded in a leaked audio clip in 2017, conspiring to use his owned television channel to defame the group’s founders, whom he called “four children”, as traitors and American spies. The shot backfired: the clip went viral. Nearly half of Tunisians now know I-Watch, according to research.
But its founders say that discovering corruption is no longer enough. Its new objective is nothing less than to reform the entire political culture of Tunisia.
“I lost hope in the political elite,” said Mouheb Garoui, 34, one of the founders. “We need to start working on the political education of young people. Why not see young people competing in 2024? If we continue to fight corruption, it will never end. “
The group is starting its own radio station and digital media medium, hiring young influencers from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok with millions of followers to create content about political rights and responsibility. Like other new Arab media companies, including the Tunisian investigative journalism collective Inkyfada and Lebanon’s Megaphone, the goal is to bypass traditional media, which tend to be owned – and gagged – by powerful entrepreneurs.
“Civil society generally preaches to converts, to the elite,” said Achref Aouadi, 35, another founder of I-Watch. “We want to be consumed by millions, by the masses.”
He can be sure that the audience is there. After all, young Tunisians, unlike older people, grew up with the right to consume whatever they want.
“We are still traumatized by the censorship,” said Aouadi. “The younger ones, they don’t care.”