Contenu du sommaire : Tunisie : arrêt sur la transition

At the origin of the “Arab Spring”, the Tunisian revolution of 2010- 2011 became bogged down in a long transition that distanced it from the democratic aspirations and social demands of the beginning. After a phase dominated by political Islam (the first expression of the conservative revolution in Tunisia), the rejection of Islamism favoured the emergence of another expression of the conservative revolution embodied by the national-conservative project claimed by President Kais Saied and his supporters. The article analyses the dynamics behind this evolution by showing the differences and links between the two Tunisian expressions of the conservative revolution.

Since the coup of July 25th, 2021, the democratic transition that took place in 2011 after the fall of Ben Ali, has come to a standstill. In the name of the state of emergency, President Kaïs Saïed has systematically unravelled the whole edifice imagined during the post-revolutionary decade to prevent the return of dictatorship. Taking advantage of the errors of the political class and popular discontent, he gradually installed a hyper-presidential regime hostile to intermediary bodies. While the various popular consultations have highlighted the lack of enthusiasm of Tunisians for this undertaking, he was able to count on a large part of the elites who paradoxically supported an anti-elitist regime.

The idea of constitutionalism is philosophically, as it has been historically, essentially an idea of freedom and the guarantee of rights and freedoms. A Constitution that is “granted”, disrespectful of the rights and freedoms of individuals and groups, authoritarian, counter-revolutionary and conservative is a good illustration of the disillusionment with constitutionalism following the coup d'état of 25 July in Tunisia. The exceptionally low turnout for the referendum to adopt the Constitution is an indication of this and raises questions for observers as to the significance of this act of “refoundation” desired by Kaïs Saïed.

Since July 25th, 2021, Tunisia's institutional and political transformation, which began a decade earlier, has taken a new turn. The political landscape, which was already a state of flux, has been turned upside down. This article attempts to unravel the political dynamics and decode the interactions between the various players by analysing the post-July 25th political landscape in the light of the major trends that have been at work for more than a decade.

The rise of a new authoritarian regime in Tunisia has had repercussions on its foreign policy. Tunisia's ties to the West are being called into question in the name of the policy of non-alignment now promoted by Kaïs Saïed. Foreign Policy Analysis and the Practice Theory of International Relations make it possible to examine the driving forces behind Tunisia's new sovereignist doctrine, whose ideological orientations are striking. This reveals an à la carte sovereignism and an antagonism towards the West that is reminiscent of the ideological context of the 1970s. However, the desire for change expressed repeatedly by President Kaïs Saïed is likely to be constrained by the socio-economic crisis facing Tunisia.

On February 21st, 2023, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President Kais Saied delivered a speech against the “horde of illegal migrants”. These comments do not stand out, on the one hand, from the populism of the Tunisian president, who considers irregular migration as the result of a “criminal enterprise” and, on the other hand, from a security conception of the governance of migration in Tunisia. Official reactions and those of civil society have prompted the Tunisian authorities to multiply gestures of pacification. However, the measures taken do not undermine the security spirit of the migration administration. The geopolitical environment and the deepening of the Tunisian economic crisis will not facilitate a human rights-based approach.

The externalisation of the EU's borders to manage and prevent irregular migration is not without significant collateral damage in the countries that have readily accepted it. Tunisia is a case in point. By creating areas where people from the southern Mediterranean are turned back and confined, this policy forces the populations of third countries to endorse a policy of controlling migratory movements at a time when they themselves are subject to restrictions on movement, and very often suffer the loss or death, sometimes without burial, of a child forced to emigrate illegally. The recent speech by President Kais Saied, stigmatising sub-Saharan immigration in terms tinged with nationalism, xenophobia, and religious fundamentalism, has reactivated the scapegoat logic of sad memory. To gauge the extent of Tunisians' growing hostility towards sub-Saharan migrants and the impact in the country of tighter controls on foreigners, this article is based on three surveys conducted in Tunisia in 2023.

The recent controversial statement by Tunisia's head of State regarding sub-Saharan migrants in the country has rekindled discussions about North Africa's legacy of slavery, and its present-day antiblack racism. Beyond a “racist drift”, this article argues that the president's remarks are the expression of a malaise regarding the Africanity and “whiteness” of Tunisia, and more broadly of the Maghreb. Through the case of black Tunisians, taken here as an example, the survival of a racialised colonial cartography of Africa and the problematic historiography of a taboo slavery past are apprehended here as the root causes of a post-independence national identity construction that integrated black nationals into so-called “modern” tunisianity by keeping them on the margins.

Despite the significant progress made mainly during the twenty years following the independence in 1956, Tunisia's health system is currently facing a crisis, and it is far from being able to guarantee its citizens fair access to healthcare or to face the challenges of the incoming demographic and epidemiologic transition. This crisis is multidimensional. The public healthcare supply has deteriorated, thus leading to a high dissatisfaction rate of the service users. The private healthcare offer is gathered essentially in the biggest cities and is only reachable to a well-off part of the population. The crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic has shown the disastrous consequences, both on the healthcare level and on the social and economic aspects, of the defective management of health system and has therefore brought to light a need for reform.

The aim here is to document the Tunisian feminist associations that have developed a feminism that aims to be autonomous and different from the State feminism promoted by the government since independence with the adoption of the Personal Status Code, which recognised important rights for women while maintaining discrimination based on patriarchal norms imbued with sacredness. By highlighting the various campaigns led by these associations for the recognition of women's rights on the basis of gender equality and the improvement of their condition in a context marked by the consecration of religious references, In a context marked by the consecration of religious references, a challenge to the achievements of the civil state based on citizenship and the primacy of the law, restrictions on the exercise of public and individual rights and freedoms, the absolute power of the Head of State and the undermining of rights and freedoms, this text reviews the importance of the autonomous Tunisian feminist movement in the country's democratic dynamism. At a time when the latter is being strongly challenged, the aim is to emphasise the need for this feminist civil society to exist in Tunisia, and the particular importance of its independence in an unstable and threatening political context.

Since its appearance in 2004, the term “Shiite crescent” has rapidly gained popularity to describe Iranian influence in the Middle East through the Shia populations. While it certainly allows for a better understanding of the importance of Shiism, both as a religion and as a political ideology, in Iraq and Lebanon, the term ignores the diversity of this influence and its growing fragility. Indeed, on a strategic level, Shiite militias such as Hezbollah or the Badr organisation appear to be the main building blocks of this “Shiite crescent”, notably in order to constitute a logistical corridor from Iran to the Mediterranean. However, the successive wars against Israel, the United States, or Daesh have allowed these militias to gain independence from Tehran, and therefore call into question the relevance of the “Shiite crescent”.