If the republic of Tunisia seems a wonder child of the now very surpassed Arab Spring, and perhaps the only in the league to live up to the name (or, at least, epitaph) of republicanism,
As the ambassador told me, with a fitting blockade of plastic between our mouths: Read my lips, the Tunisians will not accept another dictatorship, okay?! Truth be told, and with all respect to the heroes of the first, unprecedented (that year, and turn of a decade) of the Arab revolutions, I would have accepted the cry more if made by a Lebanese. For whatever the identitarian-based, sectarian, never particularly stable democracy can welter itself into, it has understood the plight or tyrants or tawagit (borrowing the Dawlah's favourite phrase) and the core of civilised political structure's understanding of anti-autocracy; perhaps better, indeed, than some Western constitutions... such as the one of the country whose bonds it let slip. But Tunisia, while enacting a , surely Tunisia should have stood firm. Or not? If so, what were the causes, and were they as ingrained as seemingly those of the Egyptian counter-revolution of 2012-14, and of Yemen, which was condemned to a plebiscite of weapons pretty much before the shot was fired; perhaps, in earnest, since "unification" in 1990?
Tunisia is at a crossroads as no Arab country is, and its political and civic culture is - predictably - a reflection of this sad reckoning with its positive legacy as the sole healthy child of the revolutions of 2010-11. The fact that it had its taghut - the blissless and unresponsive Ben Ali - and its founding tyrant, the admirable but much-overstaying his metaphorical welcome (and very real faculties) Bourguiba, is not eclipsing this fact more than the obvious half-baked nature of French retreat from its ex-colonial possessions ("ex" as in still living in, or returning to the apartment, storing her stuff, emptying fridge and porcelain cabinets and taking earnings from the kitchen counter to pay the rent, of the Elysée that is). Half of Africa, or a good third for a less grand phrase, is owned by France rather than any "exterior" force, and it is France which will, in competition with China, Russia and America the Liberator, battle for the fate and soul of the continent. The Tunisian backslide is only one blot in this trend, if particularly tragic with liberal democracy, and perhaps electoral politics as a whole, now dying in the metaphorical darkness.
Who is then this man, Kais Saied, who aims to undo what has been fought and preserved and fought still for many years, even the promises of generations, and who are his backers? Unlike Ben Ali and, yes, Bourguiba, it is not enough to secure properly the reins he, too, has fought and (metaphorically, if not eventually) died for. Being a seasoned constitutional scholar, and lacking the generation up to his popular and somewhat transient predecessor's age, he seems to unite the old and new Tunisia and firmly putting the mechanisms of authority for the purpose of delivering independent Tunisia into the future. But what will his constitution bring?
While the development of the decade past may seem for nothing, it also spawned a political culture which I like - a bit optimistically - to associate with the more long-grown fruits of the Arab socialist and nationalist movements, and what might tenuously be described as "secular Arab social democracy"... now speeding onto a highway, at a gear and pace set by its domestic conditions, with unpleased co-motorists making their best to holler and interfere with the process as they please.
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