Five Years After Saied’s Power Grab, Tunisia Is Isolated and Unmoored - Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Five Years After Saied’s Power Grab, Tunisia Is Isolated and Unmoored
Source: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mission of The Washington Institute is to advance a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East and to promote the policies that secure them. More on the Washington Institute can be found here.
Date of Publication: July 27, 2026
Authors: Sabina Henneberg and Sarah Yerkes. Henneberg is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute and director of its Junior Research Program. More on Henneberg can be found here. Yerkes is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. More on Yerkes can be found here.
You can read the full article here.
Summary of the Article: Five years after President Kais Saied’s July 2021 seizure of extraordinary powers, this article examines Tunisia’s transformation from the Arab Spring’s most promising democratic transition into an increasingly centralized and repressive political system. It traces how Saied’s initial state-of-emergency measures, suspending parliament and removing government officials, were followed by a new constitution, weakening of local and institutional checks, politicization of the judiciary, restrictions on civil society and the press, and the prosecution or exile of political opponents. The authors connect this political consolidation with Tunisia’s growing diplomatic isolation and persistent economic difficulties, arguing that disengagement by the United States and Europe risks further weakening both democratic actors and the country’s longer-term stability. They conclude by outlining relatively low-cost avenues for renewed international engagement, including support for reform-minded Tunisians, economic and infrastructure initiatives, diplomatic pressure on human rights issues, and planning for an eventual peaceful transfer of power.
Why We Are Recommending This Article: ISSE is recommending this article because Tunisia provides a particularly important example of how an asserted emergency can become the opening through which a broader constitutional transformation occurs. President Saied’s July 2021 invocation of emergency authority did not remain confined to addressing a temporary crisis; it was followed by the suspension and restructuring of democratic institutions, the concentration of executive authority, restrictions on political opposition and civil society, and the gradual normalization of forms of governance initially justified through exceptional circumstances. The Tunisian case therefore illustrates a central concern of ISSE’s work: the danger that temporary exceptional authority can alter the underlying distribution of political power and persist long after the circumstances invoked to justify it. The article is also valuable for examining the difficult question of what outside actors can do once exceptional governance has become institutionalized and reversing democratic erosion is no longer simply a matter of terminating a formal emergency.
