Tunisia needs urgent social, economic reforms

In Tunisia, the North African nation of 11 million, politicians have been navigating their way through mistrust, polarization and terrorist attacks with pragmatic consensus politics. But now that political consensus is fraying, and the broken social contract remains unrepaired. Inflation has surged, unemployment is stubbornly high, and strikes and street protests are widespread. The fragility of this vital democratic transition is suddenly exposed.

In a recent television interview, President Béji Caïd Essebsi declared an end to the five-year understanding between the secular party he founded, Nida Tunis, which largely represents the political and business elite of the old era, and its rival Ennahda, a former underground Islamist movement.

Under the constitution, Essebsi shares power with the prime minister in a semi-presidential system created to prevent a return to dictatorship. But he has talked of strengthening the power of the presidency again. The ambitious prime minister, Youssef Chahed, was suspended from Nida Tunis after his relations with the president worsened. He will continue in his post, though, if he can secure the support of Ennahda.

Many other Nidaa politicians have quit the parliamentary bloc in protest. One complained that it had become a “family project,” a reference to the president’s son, Hafedh Caïd Essebsi, who leads the party. Nidaa won the last elections on a promise to restore the “prestige of the state” but now leads the ruling coalition in name only. Legislation has been held up for months, including the formation of a constitutional court and the selection of a new head of the independent election commission. What Tunisia’s politicians have achieved over the past seven years is remarkable for the Arab world.

Parliamentary elections in 2011 and 2014 and presidential elections in 2014 have been free and fair and the losers accepted their defeat. Politicians wrote a new, progressive constitution, and a transitional justice process has slowly begun to reckon with the crimes of the past. Political maneuvering ahead of presidential elections next year is behind the falling out between Nida Tunis and Ennahda. In municipal elections in May, Ennahda performed well. But Nida Tunis came out worse than expected, a sign the party is no longer energizing its base.

Yet the municipal elections were significant for a more important reason: Turnout was just a third of registered voters. That means voter turnout has fallen at each successive election since 2011. Tunisians are now acutely disillusioned with politicians of all parties. Mass street protests have increased.

The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights says they have risen from 1,000 in 2014 to more than 11,000 last year. Some Tunisians have made the riskier decision to leave the country. As many as 4,000 Tunisians have departed with migrant smugglers this year alone, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

The Tunisian elite has focused on building a new political system, with little attention paid to deep social and economic reforms. The lives of those young people who brought down the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011 has barely changed. Youth unemployment is as high as 36 per cent.

Inflation has risen sharply, hitting a peak of 7.8pc in June this year, its highest level in nearly three decades. Tunisia’s economy depends largely on exports of electrical parts, oil and phosphates, as well as tourism. But economic growth has remained weak since the 2011 uprising, and a collapse in the dinar has pushed up the cost of imports. The government has come under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to shrink the public sector, and subsidies, and tackle inefficiencies at state-run firms. 

Ministers have reluctantly begun to comply, but social costs are high — and waves of demonstrations follow. The Tunisian General Labor Union has called a public sector strike for this month and a Civil Service strike for November to oppose government austerity measures.

The union wants higher wages and a freeze on public sector job cuts. But many of these protests aren’t organized by political parties, unions or civil society groups. Protesters are demanding jobs and a bigger proportion of state spending in marginalized regions. Last year, thousands of protesters in the southern governorate of Tataouine, whose the official unemployment rate of 32% is the highest in the country, staged weeks of sit-ins and roadblocks to demand jobs in the local oil industry. They shut off a tap on a pipeline in the desert, halting the flow of oil from Tunisia’s modest reserves.

The campaign was a highly energized reaction to decades of exclusion. The government calmed the protests for now with a stopgap promise of thousands of public sector jobs. No longer could authoritarian regimes afford to pay for an oversized public administration, free quality health care and education, and food and fuel subsidies, which they presented in return for their populations’ coerced political quiescence.

Cronyism and corruption flourished. Far from providing the political will to engineer a new social contract, the consensus politics of recent years has instead delivered a conservative transition. Not only have redistributive reforms been sidelined, but there has been an incremental decay in the quality of democracy.

A long-promised constitutional court has yet to be established, and Tunisia has been under a state of emergency for the past three years, giving the government the power to suspend some civil rights. A law last year offered an amnesty to public officials from the authoritarian era accused of corruption, and this has undermined the transitional justice process. In January, when a rise in sales tax met with nationwide protests, police arrested 800 demonstrators.

This past summer civil society organizations united in condemnation of a worrying new law regulating their work. This is not yet a reversion to the authoritarian past. But nor is it the dignified, democratic future Tunisians have been struggling for. A fresh starting point would be to reform the tax, investment, and banking laws that have for so long enriched a well-connected business elite, and to redistribute spending to long-neglected regions of the country.