Within the Arab world, Tunisia was an exception. Its civil liberties and its parliamentary system brought it closer to Western democracies than to the traditional semi-authoritarian, even tyrannical regimes of the rest of the Maghreb and the Middle East (with the exception of Israel). This singularity ended on July 25 with the adoption by 94.6%, by referendum, of a new Constitution referring to a bygone past that of 2014, product of the revolution that occurred three years earlier.
President Kaïs Saïed, elected in 2019, managed to impose an “Arab nationalist” system, with an all-powerful head of state, on Tunisians, scalded by the economic crisis, tired of quarrels between parties and the impotence of the last governments. He is now in a position to govern the country alone, by decree, without safeguards or counterweights to his decisions. “This Constitution makes us fall towards authoritarianism, not to speak of dictatorship”, regretted with L’Express the political scientist Khadija Mohsen-Finan, author of Tunisia, the apprenticeship of democracy (New world editions).
Former professor of constitutional law, Kaïs Saïed, with a certain popularity, does not – yet – present a resolutely dictatorial profile, like his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, whose prisons have nearly 60,000 prisoners of conscience. . If he rejects parliamentarism, he has pledged not to attack freedom of expression and that of demonstration. But its prerogatives, considerably extended, offer it the possibility of easily going back on this promise. In the wrong hands, such powers could permanently tip the country.
