Tunisia: When obsolete anti-imperialism kills democracy
Oct. 3, 2024
For most Tunisians, July 25, 2021, was not only the day when Kais Saied invoked article 80 of the constitution to claim emergency powers, dismiss the government, and suspend the parliament. It was also a moment of truth and division among friends and families. I had always known that many of my friends and acquaintances on the left resented the Tunisian Revolution of 2011 for offering their arch enemy, the Islamist party Ennahda, a seat at the table. What I hadn’t anticipated was how quickly this deeply rooted hatred of Ennahda would push some of them to turn a blind eye to Saied’s authoritarian turn. “This isn’t exactly a coup”; “We need to give him a chance”; “Ennahda leaders brought it upon themselves”; “the political elite has hijacked the revolution”: these were some of the rebuttals we heard when we questioned Saied’s commitment to democracy.
Fast forward to September 2024 and there is no room for doubt. July 25 was a coup that allowed Saied to institute an autocratic regime, depriving the parliament and the judiciary from their power and independence. Political leaders, activists, journalists, and civil society leaders are in exile or in jail. The latest arrests and unlawful imprisonments include three women: the prominent Black Tunisian intellectual and activist, Saadia Mosbah, lawyer Sonia Dahmani, and the former head of the Truth and Dignity Commission, Sihem Bensedrine. Ahead of the Presidential election of October 6, the High Independent Authority for Election, ISIE, has banned three candidates from running, arguing that they had not gathered the sufficient number of endorsements. And candidate Ayachi Zammal was sentenced on September 18 to 20 months in prison after being convicted of falsifying signatures in support of his registration as a candidate. While protesters took to the streets on September 13, chanting the 2011 Revolution slogan “Irhal!” (“Get out!”), the many who evoked anti-imperialism as an excuse for anti-democracy are stuck in an embarrassing silence.
It has often been asked how a country once seen as the poster child of democratization in the Arab world sunk into such an abyss of authoritarianism. A question that has attracted less interest is: why and how so many of the intellectuals and civil society activists on the left, who had been so intransigent with Ennahda’s democratic attitude, have been so willfully blind to the dangers of Kais Saied?
While the democratic experiment may have lost to a politics of rotten compromise, whatever was left of democracy after Kais Saied’s 2021 auto golpe (self-coup) has been lost to a fossilized and authoritarian form of anti-imperialist nativism. Breaking from the transactional politics that were the trademark of the post 2011 era, Saied built his popularity – according to the populist playbook – on a blunt rejection of party politics, elites, and institutions. He benefited from, and gave shape to, a collective sentiment of deep frustration with how little the years 2011-2019 had delivered in terms of economic prosperity and political stability. Yet, the success of Saiedian populism also has a substantive ideological content that combines nativism, Islam, and anti-Imperialism. While the elusive figure of the “disgruntled youth” has been cited as the main constituents of Saied, it is important to reflect upon the role of a segment of intellectuals and organizers from the urban middle class who perceived themselves as under-appreciated, side-lined and betrayed by the post-2011 coalitions. Some of these intellectuals and activists have given Saied’s anti-democratism a free pass under the pretext that Saied was a herald of anti-imperialism, and would turn Tunisia into a beacon of the non-aligned world. A similar phenomenon of appropriation of the anti-imperialist lexicon into anti-democracy justification has occurred in countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Venezuela. In Tunisia, the rapidity with which some opinion makers and political leaders have rallied to this narrative in service of a nativist, xenophobic and authoritarian platform has had dramatic effects on individual and public freedoms.
Anti-imperialism, as a story for Tunisia’s past failures, and as political program, has developed around the three related ideas of nativism, sovereignty, and purity. Right after July 25, 2021, a small yet determined constellation of analysts elaborated sophisticated arguments in the language of decolonialism that spoke in favor of Saied’s tabula rasa strategy. The democratic experiment that began after 2011, their argument went, was hijacked by Western experts and financial institutions. Under the pressure of foreign donors and experts, they argued, Tunisians were misled into lengthy constitutional debates and lost track of what they really wanted, social justice and dignity. From that point of view, the 2011 democratic experiment was obsolete and colonial. Tunisia needed to reset the course of its pure revolution. Anti-imperialists advocated for a type of democracy that would grant marginalized regions more power and revive Tunisia’s sense of authenticity and pride. Democracy, rule of law, and checks and balances, they argued, had become fraught concepts due to their association with liberal Western-centric political thought. From their standpoint, the Saiedian disruption, albeit worrying, may end up being beneficial to Tunisia’s retrieval of authenticity and postcolonial healing.
Most of those who were delighted by or lenient towards the chaotic and liberticidal measures of Kais Saied came from a secularist and leftist political culture, such as the UGTT (Tunisian General Labour Union), or the Watad party, a nationalist party claiming Marxist-Leninist inspiration and formerly led by Chorkri Belaïd – who was assassinated in 2013 – or the nasserist pan-Arabism of the People’s Movement political party. A common thread was the deep-seated distaste of the Islamist party Ennahda. A number of the issues raised by the pro Saied anti-imperialists were legitimate questions that came up after 2011 regarding how knowledge about the “Arab Spring” was produced and by whom, of the reiteration of the vicious financial cycle of debt through dependance on loans from international financial institutions, and Tunisia’s subservient role in the regional balance of powers.
Yet the way in which these analysts answered these questions by rapidly discarding democracy altogether is intriguing. Claiming to speak strictly for the Tunisian people and to stand for indigenous knowledge production, most of these analysts were themselves part of Western networks of scholars and policy experts, based in the UK or the US. They embarked on a fierce policing battle on social media against foreign and Tunisian analysts who decried July 25.
Tunisian scholar Haythem Guesmi has offered a sobering reflection of how decolonial arguments were distorted in the service of anti-democracy. Reacting to a trenchant piece that the Washington DC-based Tunisian policy analyst Ouiem Chettaoui wrote in Jadaliyya which virulently denounced “Western-based pundits, think-tankers, and self-styled ‘progressive' US politicians” who had warned against Saied’s coup, Guesmi said: “When I wrote a few years ago about the myth of Tunisia’s exceptionalism and the fetishization of its democracy by dominant media narratives, the least I expected was for its main argument to be hijacked to accommodate middle-class anxieties of inclusion and prestige”. Chettaoui’s decolonial take, Guesmi argued, was doubly problematic. First, rather than actually promoting an alternative to colonial knowledge power, it came across as merely complaining of not getting enough recognition and benefits from that power: “Here, the discourse on decolonizing local knowledge production is hijacked to demand better access to the same systems of power.” Second, and most importantly, it misdiagnosed Saied’s popularity that had, according to Guesmi, more to do with a fascination for its conspiratorial tales than with its alleged revolutionary appeal.
No matter how biased, the expertise of Western transitologists did not cause the political deadlock that led to the 2021 coup. The witch-hunt orchestrated by decolonial analysts who have resorted to trolling, intimidation, and smear campaigns on social media has contributed to the shrinking of public space for debate and analysis about the very questions they claim to address. The question of Tunisia’s sovereignty in realms such as food security, military strategy, and migration policy is of essence. Yet the personal vendettas against analysts accused of being Western sell outs have discouraged many scholars and analysts from participating in these public debates.
A second key iteration of the pro-Saied anti-imperialist argument revolved around national sovereignty. Ridha Mekki, a leftist political activist often known as “Ridha Lenin,” acted as an unofficial advisor to Saied and is often referred to as the main source of inspiration of the July 25 coup. He was not part of any opposition group during Ben Ali’s dictatorship, and criticized the 2011-2019 phase as a distortion of the dignity claims of the revolutionary people. Playing on the distinction between legality and legitimacy, like many political leaders since 2011, he called for a rupture from the 2011-2019 phase that would set a new path. This would require the building of a strong and sovereign state and the promotion of national values. Most of his media interventions reveal a preoccupation with the risk of foreign meddling.
As early as January 2011, Mekki founded the organization Forces of Free Tunisia, an informal think tank dedicated to the revival of a truly revolutionary project that would draw upon local organizations in every region. Against party politics, Mekki advocates for a direct relationship between state and society, unmediated by intermediary organizations. One question remains unresolved: how the idea of a strong local democracy— in which citizens have deliberative and implementation powers—works with the idea of a strong state. When asked, “Rida Lenin” often reverts back to elusive Marxist notions to decry foreign influences.
In an even more extreme vein, Sofiane Ben Sghaier, the founding leader of the small Tunisian Nationalist Party, has played an important role in rationalizing and publicizing a nativist and xenophobic version of anti-imperialism. In November 2022, the party published on its website a manifesto calling out panafrican intellectuals such as Marcus Garvey and anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop as the inspiration for a plan to bring masses of Sub-Saharan African migrants to Tunisia in order to dilute its Arabic and Islamic identity. Saied’s infamous speech of February 2023, in which he blamed African migrants of being part of a conspiracy to “great replace” Tunisia’s Arab and Islamic identity, draws on the party’s reasoning. Since Saied delivered this speech, Black migrants and Black Tunisians alike have been the target of unprecedented levels of violence and discrimination.
Sghaier’s Tunisian Nationalist Party draws on an anti-colonial critique to justify a policy of “tunisianization” of all associations. In a memorandum issued in June 2024, they argued that “protecting Tunisia's sovereign national orientation requires depriving Europe of any internal weapon it can use against the Tunisian state”. The statement argues for “a new law on associations that imposes full Tunisianization of associations and their independence from abroad, as well as the evacuation of foreign organizations and associations from Tunisia.” This type of rationale has served to justify a politics of surveillance and repression against civil society organizations that operate under the constant suspicion of being traitors to the nation.
In the rhetoric of Mekki, Sghaier, and others, liberation is a style and sensibility rather than a political project. As political economist Hamza Meddeb has incisively noted, these nativist anti-imperialists see Tunisia as engaged in an ongoing war of liberation, even though the entity from which Tunisia needs to be liberated is undefined. Echoing Hofstadter’s paranoid style, liberationism is a style and emotion of politics that works in a self-referential manner. This conspiracist and liberationalist style has imbued the entirety of Saied’s rhetoric since 2021. In his aforementioned speech of February 2023, he borrowed from the great replacement theory of French right wing thinker Renaud Camus. In September 2023, he claimed that the “Zionist movement” was responsible for naming the flood that caused thousands of deaths in Libya “Storm Daniel.” On July 25, 2024, he celebrated Republic Day with a speech denouncing the meddling of Freemasons in Tunisian domestic affairs.
This nativist rhetoric is all the more outlandish since Saied’s strategy of international diplomacy comes across as anything but driven towards serving Tunisia’s self-interests and sovereignty. In North Africa, he has broken away with Tunisia’s well-known tradition of neutrality between Algerian and Morocco, and has sided with Algeria on the Western Sahara conflict. The rapprochement between Algeria and Tunisia has progressed at the expense of the relationship with Morocco. In the Middle East, Saied has given signs of an interest in a rapprochement with Iran. His own brother is seen as a key advocate of the formation of a pro-Iran diplomacy. In the ranks of the Saied supporters, observers have noted an enthrallment for Shiism as a proxy for anti-imperialism.
While agitating for this idea of turning Tunisia into a new beacon of the non-aligned countries in North Africa, Saied’s regime has worked hand in hand with the Italian PM Georgia Meloni’s government to implement strict policy of border control in the Mediterranean. Caricatures portraying his ongoing honeymoon with Meloni and Ursula Van der Leyen, the President of the EU commission, have proliferated since 2021.
In its nativist and nationalist iteration, the anti-imperialist narrative that has enabled Saiedist supporters is not just anti-democratic. It is obsolete. It situates the locus of anti-imperialist struggles solely at the level of the nation state at a time when a significant part of today’s decolonial political debates, despite all their internal diversity, revolve around centering peoples and communities rather than states, and when ideas such as diasporism, exile, transnational solidarities are key to the thinking of non or post Zionism and post supremacism. The silence of “decolonial” Saiedists vis à vis the plight of Sub-Saharan migrants reveals how decolonialism works as a fig leaf for authoritarian and statist nationalism.
In July 2023, an anthropologist friend of mine and I sat down with D., a migrant from Côte d’Ivoire who had tried to reach Europe a number of times through Tunisia. After eight failed attempts at crossing the Mediterranean by boat, he finally succeeded, and reached France through Italy. His retelling of the various dehumanizing processes he had been exposed to in Tunisia by the state and its proxies was chilling. He described his fear when in February 2023, Tunisian vigilantes banged at the door of his apartment to scare him away. He recalled the fear and anxiety during the long days of waiting for the next crossing, at the mercy of smugglers who parked the would-be travelers in random shelters near the beach. He told us with amused disillusionment how when the boat that got him to Italy was about to sink, Tunisian fishermen demanded parts of their boats (such as the engines or the iron pieces that could be sold) in exchange for pulling the boat to the Italian waters. There is an abundance of stories like D’s. They show how inadequate it is to look at the tragic question of migration through Tunisia from a nationalist lens. D., the smugglers, and the fishermen are all caught up in an ecosystem of mutual exploitation and dehumanization that Saied’s subservient submission to EU demands has consolidated, notwithstanding his anti-imperialist rants. D. was very clear-eyed about how hard his life in Europe would be. It didn’t change his determination to leave Tunisia. “When I saw the Italian coast guards, I knew we had finally left the dark waters of Tunisia, and were reaching the blue water of Italy”, D. recalls. Saiedists’ decolonial harangues about the evils of the West, and the so-called unity of the anti-imperial south had no impact on his life.
Why did the nativist anti-imperialist refrain take hold with such relative ease after 2021? First, a number of the themes around which Saied’s supporters built their agenda were already part of the moral landscape of civil society since 2011. Movements such as Mnich Msamah, a social movement opposing reconciliation bills, Winou el Trottoir, a grassroots movement advocating for clean and walkable sidewalks, or Winou el Petrol, a campaign calling for transparency in the wealth repartition of the energy sector, have contributed to making themes such as dignity, wealth distribution, and local empowerment central aspects of Tunisians’ political conversations. Organizations such as I-watch and mourakiboun have accomplished key educational work by illuminating issues of electoral accountability and anti-corruption. Saiedists didn’t create anything from scratch, and drew upon an ecosystem where generative democracy activism was growing hand in hand with a culture of resentment and revenge. Saiedists capitalized on a kairos of disenchantment and frustration, and transformed the 2011 uprisings’ grammar of dignity into an authoritarian dogma of purification.
Looking at the longer political history shows that the Saiedist self-appointed intellectual avant-garde reenacts the old ideological campus wars of the 1970’s and 1980’s that opposed the leftist secularists and nationalists, and the Islamists that organized around the Movement of Islamic Tendency (the ancestor of Ennahda). Ridha Lenin, influenced by the leftist movement Perspectives, was an activist in law school in the 1970’s. He then became inspector of high school education and got closer to Chokri Belaïd. Interestingly, Mekki argued in a 2020 interview that the key rupture of Tunisia’s political history was not the end of the protectorate in 1956 but the 1980’s in which he saw the beginning of a new era.
In other words, the Saiedian version of nativist anti-imperialism and the impulse toward a politics of revenge instead of a politics of dignity was already engrained in Tunisian politics. The key question is: what is it that made it so easy for it rise from one political view among others into exercising hegemonic power over Tunisia? What was there or what was missing that enabled the hijacking, distortion, and simplification of these important and legitimate trends of organizing and debate around dignity, accountability and social justice, into weapons for authoritarian return? While all eyes are on the October 6 election, it will be essential to find answers to these questions in order that we not make the same mistakes if another democratic opening ever occurs. Aside from electoral battles, finding resources, and creating conditions for the elaboration of political visions that address questions of decoloniality and independence without falling into the trap of authoritarian anti-imperialism will be of essence.
One can only hope that in the long run, a contribution of Saiedism will be to have immunized Tunisians against this kind of rigid anti-imperialism. Some of the early supporters of Saiedism are quietly confessing a change of heart. On September 13 and 22, protestors took to the streets of Tunis to denounce Saied’s authoritarianism ahead of what many fear will be a staged plebiscite rather than a democratic election. “Ministry of Interior = Ministry of Terror,” “We are the people and the anger,” “the people want the fall of the regime,” “Kais Saied dictator, it’s your turn” were some of the slogans they chanted. Children of political prisoners, journalists, cyber activists, and civil society leaders have called for more demonstrations. Legal scholars and the Administrative court have denounced ISIE’s bias when excluding some candidates from the race. However fragmented and marginalized, pro-democracy Tunisians remain determined and faithful, and are now even more clear eyed about the lure of outmoded ideological framings.
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