Internal political betrayal, external cynicism, and the unravelling of the Arab Spring’s last laboratory.

On 25 July 2026, thousands of Tunisians took to the streets of central Tunis, not to mark the 69th anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, but to denounce the power grab carried out exactly five years earlier by President Kais Saied. The demonstrators called for his resignation and an end to what they described as an increasingly authoritarian regime, accusing it of imprisoning dozens of political opponents, driving the country into economic decline, and dismantling the democratic experiment born of the 2011 revolution.

Yet the scenes stood in stark contrast to those of 25 July 2021. When Saied suspended parliament, dismissed the prime minister and concentrated power in his own hands, many Tunisians greeted his move not with alarm but with relief. A poll conducted by Emrhod Consulting at the time initially found an extraordinary 87 per cent approval rating for his actions. That largely forgotten figure serves as an uncomfortable reminder that the erosion of Tunisia’s post-revolution democratic experiment did not begin with the repression that followed, but with the popular embrace of a leader who promised to rescue a political system many had come to see as broken.

Saied did not destroy Tunisian democracy in a vacuum; he stepped into a house whose foundations had already been hollowed out from within.

Tunisia’s political crisis is not, at bottom, a crisis of personalities. It resurfaces decade after decade because its roots run deeper than any single ruler, reaching back more than sixty years to an institutional choice made at independence: the founders of the Republic placed the presidency, rather than a balance of powers, at the centre of the Tunisian state.

The 1959 Constitution borrowed heavily from France’s Fifth Republic, promulgated the year before. Like de Gaulle, Habib Bourguiba believed a strong executive was the surest bulwark against instability.

Each successive constitutional revision widened that gap. In 1975, Bourguiba was made president for life. Under his successor Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the same architecture hardened into full authoritarian rule — proof that Tunisian authoritarianism has never rested on any one man, but on a system built to accommodate him.

The First Betrayal Was Domestic

The 2011 revolution briefly broke the pattern: the 2014 Constitution divided power between president, government, and parliament for the first time since independence. But the experiment proved fragile — nine governments cycled through office in as many years, staffed by a political class with little experience of governing, its coalitions built to secure each party’s share of power rather than to solve the country’s problems. Ministries became spoils to defend, not instruments to deliver with, and the resulting improvisation left unemployment, regional inequality, and an unsustainable subsidy system unaddressed, government after government. Tunisians read that dysfunction as proof of a paralyzed state. But what exhausted them was the incompetence and self-interest of those who held power, not the parliamentary system itself — and conflating the two is exactly the trap that let the coup de force happen in 2021.

The Trap of a Temporary Measure

In July 2021, Saied invoked Article 80 of the 2014 Constitution to suspend parliament. What was promised as a temporary corrective has since hardened into a permanent system — and it has done so despite a spectacular collapse in public backing.

Saied’s 2022 constitution consecrated the return of a dominant presidency, sidelining parliament and government and restoring the vertical logic of 1959. Tellingly, the text put to referendum was not even the one drafted by the advisory commission Saied himself had appointed: its chair, the jurist Sadok Belaïd, publicly disowned the Saied’s version, warning that it paved the way to dictatorship.

The July 2022 constitutional referendum drew only 30.5 per cent of registered voters; the parliamentary elections that followed saw turnout of barely 11 per cent, among the lowest ever recorded.

By concentrating power in his own hands, Saied did not merely block political life: he also weakened the economy, the public services and narrowed the country’s room for manoeuvre in foreign policy.

It is at this critical juncture that the second betrayal took place: the geopolitical retreat of Tunisia’s Western partners …