The Tunisian experience post-2011: The crisis of democratization

Abstract

Offering a critical counter-narrative that upends the received wisdom about Tunisia’s fledgling democracy, the analysis here challenges existing literature on Tunisia’s democratization since the 2011 revolution, eschewing a romanticization of the country’s ‘exceptional’ transformation. The country’s ‘crisis of democratization,’ it argues, can be located within a number of variables: institutional, socio-economic, and partisan. A dual instability of government and political parties detracted from cooperation, trust, and policymaking that could deliver much-needed socio-economic goods. The chapter stresses the disjunction between deep-rooted socio-economic disparities, on the one hand, and the institutional thrust of political change, on the other. One open question is whether the instability of the democratization process and its crisis in Tunisia can be correlated with the failure of the semi-parliamentary system and its resulting power-sharing tensions. Mutual distrust between the executive and legislative arms of the new system fomented political inertia. Such paralysis did little to allay popular discontent with institutions and processes unable to meet popular (socio-economic, social justice) demands. Attempting an ethical interpretation of Tunisia’s democratization trajectory, the chapter contends that the ‘crisis of democratization’ was in the works years before President Kais Saied’s power grab on 25 July 2021.