The star had already pale well but, there, she turns dark and, perhaps tomorrow, in the dark. What remains of the aura of Tunisia? What does it keep from its prestige when each week brings its share of arrests or arrests of a political nature? What radiation can she take advantage of after its president, Kaïs Saïed, threw the stigma, Tuesday, February 21, on sub-Saharan immigrants by associating them, in a conspiracy mode, with a “criminal plan” aimed at “transforming the Demographic composition of Tunisia “? The time is for the worst concerns about the national-populist and authoritarian drift of this small North African country that has long shone with a singular flame. A certain idea of Tunisia is wasting.
Not that the past autocracies of Habib Bourguiba (1956-1987) and Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011) have ever been frankly distinguished from neighboring dictatorships. However, under the armed concrete screed, had matured germs of political modernity during all these years, drawn from a long reformist tradition, which hatched in 2011 under the colors of a democratic spring. Devoid of oil rent, Tunisia was rewarded with a political rent: its avant-garde status. A unique pluralist project in the Arab-Muslim world, which has earned him respect and even admiration on the international scene.
Now this credit is pulverized today. Since the coup de force of July 21, 2021, thanks to which Mr. Saïed has arranged full powers in the name of an “imminent danger” never defined, the country is sucked in in a political regression plunging the Tunisian Democrats into the stupor and despair. After having deconstructed brick by brick the institutional building set up by the semi-parliamentary constitution of 2014, Mr. Saïed has his own model which, behind the totemic exaltation of the “people”, restores a hyperprésidentialism to the airs of already-vu .
Those who had not felt the danger coming, crediting noble intentions a president “clean and honest” resolved to warn against corruption, must today face the obvious: the power of Mr. Saïed takes An openly repressive and retrograde face. Since February 11, an unprecedented wave of arrests has been falling on opposition circles. Adept of conspiracy, the Head of State accuses a dozen defendants (political activists, businessmen, judges, lawyers, journalists) of “conspiracy against the inner and external security of the state”, of “terrorism”, To foment an “assassination” project against his person or to organize “shortages” to “envenue the social situation”.
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