TUNIS – It felt like an echo of the wildfires that the dictator of Tunisia dropped, leading to a series of rebels tearing up in the Middle East ten years ago: young people in the streets of more than a dozen Tunisian cities over the past three nights. Anger that corruption seems to be everywhere is not working anywhere. Clashes with security forces led to more than 600 arrests by Monday.
Only this time the endgame was unclear.
Tunisia’s dictatorship is long gone. Its president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country in January 2011 after a brutal 23-year rule, the first strong man to fall in the Arab Spring uprising that began in Tunisia and across the Middle East has risen. Ten years later, Tunisians have built a democracy, however dysfunctional, complete with elections and – the rarest Arab commodities – the right to freedom of speech.
It is therefore that the protests, strikes and sit-ins almost never stop. Graffiti cheerfully condemns the police. Bloggers and citizen journalists are crying over official mismanagement, political opposition to politicians and allegations of corruption against high and low government officials. Their Facebook posts are then shared and reinforced by thousands of fellow Tunisians.
But none of this corrected an economy heading for shipwreck. Nearly a third of young people are unemployed, public services are established and corruption has increasingly invaded daily life. Opportunities for most people became so scarce, especially in the impoverished interior of Tunisia, that at least 13,000 Tunisian migrants transferred their lives by boat to Italy.
“The only positive thing we got out of the revolution was the freedom to say anything we wanted,” Ayman Fahri, 24, a trade student, said he wanted to leave Tunis, perhaps to Turkey, because of the lack. to events at home. . As for the rest of democracy, he said: “Perhaps we have misunderstood freedom because we have not made any progress in the last ten years.”
Thanks to the deadlock in its post-revolutionary parliamentary system, Tunisia has been torn apart by new governments at a rate of one a year, and three, for the past twelve months. Political parties dominated by wealthy businessmen are rocking and rocking power – sometimes getting real blows in parliament – while making little progress with economic reforms.
As faith in politics diminished, so did voter turnout. Over the course of the seven free elections in Tunisia, turnout dropped from a peak of 68 percent in the 2014 parliamentary elections to 42 percent in 2019.
“Why did we revolt?” said Ines Jebali, 23, a sociology student. “Everything has changed for the worse.”
Without asking, Ms Jebali, just like Mr. Fahri, an exception acknowledged. At least, she said, there is now freedom of speech – though even that is sometimes threatened, with security forces beating up protesters and prosecutors, who regularly pursue bloggers in court on charges of defamation of public officials.
“With today’s democracy, they may not be able to eat,” said Sihem Bensedrine, a longtime activist. As head of Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, he investigated the abuses and corruption of previous regimes. “But they have the freedom to fight for what they want.”
On the front, incensed Tunisians have no louder bullhorn than Abir Moussi, a former official in Mr. Ben Ali, who has once again reinvented herself as one of the most popular politicians in the country by highlighting the decline in public services and promising to restore what she says was Tunisia’s prosperity under the former president and the denial of the fact that a revolution has ever taken place.
Just after the downfall of Mr. Ben Ali, his regime was so affected that Moussi had her hair pulled when she defended his party in court. Her Free Destourian Party is now leading the polls, and some analysts fear that her populist profession, which mixes the nostalgia of the Ben Ali era with proposals to strengthen the presidency and security forces, could push Tunisia back to authoritarianism.
Me. Moussi denies the allegation.
“Those who criticize us are doing this to hide their failures,” she said in a recent interview, arguing that she supported the presidency’s investigation to prevent an authoritarian relapse. “The average Tunisian is worse off now than he was before.”
Moussi manages to disrupt parliament regularly with sit-ins streamed on Facebook Live and repetition of conspiracy theories blaming the revolution as an Islamic conspiracy against Mr. Ben Ali accused and accused the Islamic Party of Tunisia of maneuvering to impose religious rule. .
She usually has no shortage of evidence. But she speaks for many Tunisians who have revolted for a better life, not access to the ballot box.
“Under Ben Ali, everything was honey,” said Basama Benzakri, 42, a second-hand clothes seller who had to take a second job as a security guard in the supermarket last year to feed his two children.
He also has warm words for me. Moussi had.
“She’s perfect, she’s perfect, she’s perfect,” he said. “I see her supporting poor people and always criticizing the government.”
The future of Tunisia may depend on whether young Tunisians see their real rights, not a strong ruler, as the best way to put bread on the table.
Take Haythem Dahdouh, 31, a law graduate who recently spent an afternoon in a cafe in Zaghouan, an hour inland from the richer coast of Tunisia, because he had nothing else to do. Friends of his were better at it, he said, though not much: a trained accountant could only find work on a factory floor, a classmate at law school at a call center.
“I have experience in unemployment,” he joked.
Mr. Dahdouh protested a decade ago, especially against corruption, but corruption saturates daily life. Getting a job requires bribes. Basic paperwork requires bribes.
Would he like dictatorship again?
“It’s out of the question,” he said. “You can now fight corruption. Under the old regime there was no way. ”
Dahdouh said there is only one organization that works seriously to fight corruption: I-Watch.
If Tunisians now have the freedom to seize, complain, quarrel and slander, they can also blow the whistle or openly advocate for human rights and then make it known in the press.
In the dubious days after the revolution, non-profit organizations and parliament’s watchdogs multiplied thousands. But no one has become as famous as I-Watch, an anti-corruption group founded in 2011 by a few university students, which almost single-handedly turned to land exposure after exposure to powerful government and business leaders.
Their earlier attempts were on the awkward side of scraps. To promote one initiative, they used billboards from the middle of nowhere (everything they could afford), street graffiti (courtesy of a friend) and a rap song in praise of whistleblowers (it was never more than 12,000 views).
Last month, however, I-Watch achieved its biggest coup yet with the second arrest of Nabil Karoui, a former top presidential contender on charges of money laundering and tax evasion.
The investigation of I-Watch revealed Mr. Karoui is so incensed that he is caught up in a leaked 2017 audio clip that plans to use the television channel he owns to smear the group’s founders, whom he called ‘four children’, as traitors and American spies. The move backfired: the clip went viral. According to polls, almost half of Tunisians now know about I-Watch.
Its founders, however, say that the discovery of corruption is no longer enough. Their new goal is nothing more than to reform the whole political culture of Tunisia.
“I have lost hope in the political elite,” said Mouheb Garoui, 34, one of the founders. “We need to start working on the political education of younger people. Why do young people not see running in 2024? If we just keep fighting corruption, it’s never going to end. ”
The group launches its own radio station and digital media and hires young YouTube, Instagram and TikTok influencers from millions of followers to create content on accountability and political rights. Like other youthful Arab media outlets, including Tunisian investigative journalism Inkyfada and the Lebanon Megaphone, it aims to bypass traditional media, usually owned and muzzled by powerful businessmen.
“Civil society usually preaches to converts, to the elite,” said Achref Aouadi, 35, another founder of I-Watch. “We want to be consumed by millions through the masses.”
He can be confident that the audience is there. After all, young Tunisians, unlike their elders, have grown up taking the right to consume what they want.
“We are still traumatized by censorship,” he said. Aouadi said. “The younger one doesn’t care.”