Impoverished, isolated, and geostrategically unimportant, Tunisia is nonetheless the last living heir to the Arab Spring. Over the past decade, one nascent Arab democratic movement after another collapsed into civil war, sectarian Islamist enmity, and resurrected tyranny. But Tunisia was the one country that seemed to find a way forward—to successfully navigate between “the Scylla of the national security state and the Charybdis of political Islam,” as the Lebanese American journalist Hisham Melhem described it.
In 2015, the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet—comprising key groups in civil society—won the Nobel Peace Prize for “its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia” in the wake of the toppling of longtime dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. But now that country’s delicate experiment is at risk of failing thanks to President Kais Saied’s authoritarian power play since the weekend, in which he has removed the prime minister, suspended parliament, taken control of the public prosecutor’s office, and banned public gatherings for 30 days.
