 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we're going to be talking about a country which has undergone a lot of tumult in the past one year, that's Tunisia. So in July last year, President Kaisai essentially dissolved parliament and began to rule by fear. In September, he took over more powers. He's appointed an interim government. He's declared plans to hold a constitutional referendum this year and a fresh parliamentary elections. Recently, he dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council, which is a very key part of the state structure in Tunisia as well. So to talk about all this, what are the implications, why this has happened in the first place? We have with us Father Lileza, a journalist, a researcher, and also founder and founder and editor-in-chief of Mechakal, an independent media platform. Father, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So could you first take us through, I think one question the NFA viewers might have, which is that last July onwards, there's been this arc of actions by the president every few months. He seems to have taken some more power, seems to have taken some more, you know, some more abilities from the constitution, so to speak. So could you maybe first take us through the broad arc of what his moves have been in the one year and what seems to be the plan? Sure. Yeah. In July, 25th, when he dismissed parliament or froze parliament, he said he had suspended it. He dismissed the previous government. He had initially indicated that this would be a temporary move, that this would be within the constitutional article that would basically allow him to do this for one month. There were quite a few people who detracted at the time and said this was not constitutional, but at the time he had what seemed to be broad support because there was quite a lot of anger at the previous parliament for various reasons, particularly what had been seen as a total failure with the COVID crisis, but also many other deteriorating issues from health to transportation, etc., etc. But since then, he's actually extended it. In September, he, as you mentioned, he took more powers, basically suspended almost all of the constitution and decided to start ruling by decree. In the meantime, we've seen that his political opponents have been targeted one way or another. Some people would say that this was sort of expected, that the previous parliament had been corrupt. That's one of the very widely perceived issues that people had seen it as corrupt and that there were people in the parliament that did need to face justice. The fact that they lost their immunity, they lost their parliamentary immunity, did leave them open to prosecution, including cases that had to do with criminal charges prior to them becoming parliamentarians. However, we did see that the priority seemed to be that the high side and his government were going after people who were particularly critical of him and his government's moves. That's certainly been a concern of human rights advocates, of lawyers, and then just recently we've seen him basically dissolve the Higher Judicial Council, which had been in charge of appointments of the judiciary. The Higher Judicial Council took many years to set up. It was sort of one of those efforts after the revolution in 2011 to try and bring some independence from the executive branch to the judiciary. It was very tentative step in creating that independence and now even that very small tentative step seems to have been reversed. Absolutely. Of course, in this context, they have been, for instance, a lot of critics from the beginning called it a presidential coup. Over time, we've seen a lot of civil society organizations, even trade unions for that matter, hard in their stance, even some of whom were initially a bit willing to give some kind of leeway, but we have now seen that many more have taken to have more oppositional stance. But the key question here I also wanted to ask was that, what has been Kaiasai's support base so to speak, because I believe even when he was elected in the first place, it was a bit of an amorphous, he didn't particularly have a political party per se look like and it was a bit more of an amorphous support base. In these moves, what has largely been the kind of people who have backed that section? Sure. Yeah. His political campaign in 2019 was very strange, unique. I mean, he didn't have a political party. He didn't have anything that looked like a political organization behind him. It seemed to be sort of very ad hoc people who had known him personally, who were organizing his election campaign. He had very little media coverage. It seemed to be former students. President Kaiasai had been a lecturer for decades in constitutional law. He had quite a following among his students, admirers, including also some colleagues who admired him. So that seemed to be the sort of the core of his support base. And actually, since he's taking more powers, we've seen that a lot of his appointments have been from academia, people he's worked with seems to know personally. But in terms of his support base, since July 25th, I mean, we saw most of the parties were really sort of against this, particularly the largest party in parliament, the Anata party, seen as an Islamist party. But we did see some support from sort of an Arab nationalist movement. We saw sort of some leftist parties taking sort of, were on the fence at the beginning. They didn't really take a very strong position against them. But since then, we've seen more and more parties basically criticizing the president say that they supported the July 25th moves, but they don't support the extended sort of concentration of power under the executive. And particularly what they see as increasing repression, particularly we've seen of journalists. We've seen less space for freedom of association, particularly in the capital. And we've seen that even parties that hadn't been working together, I've started to work together saying that they are there against the president. But even if the entire political class has been against the president, it's taken a little bit longer for civil society to sort of try and act as an opposition to the president. We have seen some unions taking some positions we've seen, particularly the journalist union has on occasion really condemned the presidency and called on the presidency to really be responsible for some of the assaults on freedom of speech that we've seen. And we haven't seen a strong position from the UGDT, which is the main national trade union. But they may take a strong position now as the government negotiates to deal with the IMF. That seems to be maybe a red line for them, but we'll have to wait and see. In terms of support, the president without a party has been relying almost exclusively on the military and on the police. And so even when he said he was going to dissolve the higher judicial council, he did it at an announcement in the Interior Ministry. So he had not really brought in his justice minister to make the announcement. The justice ministry is part of the executive branch, and you would expect that this would be maybe the mechanism that is used to sort of reshape the judicial branch. But no, he went to the Interior Ministry, which seems to be his sort of strongest and last bastion of support. Certainly, you know, when he gave the orders to the military to freeze parliament, it was the military that was standing at the gates of parliament to block people from coming in. And it seems that perhaps he may have some support within the security forces, but it's unclear if that support will also last as, you know, they have their own grievances as well. And they may see themselves as above even the president. And oftentimes, security forces say, we are Republican forces, or we try to be Republican forces. We are above political parties and partisan interests, and oftentimes see themselves as quite immune. I mean, they're also immune from judicial procedures. We see that there's quite a lot of impunity among security officials, very few, if any, have been prosecuted for crimes since the revolution and before the revolution. And particularly, when we saw that there's quite a lot of violence during the revolution. Absolutely. Another key moment, of course, has been his declaration that there's going to be a constitutional referendum, which will be followed by parliamentary elections, of course. So is there any indication of how he plans to, you know, what he plans to do with the constitution, how he plans to redraft it since the constitution post the revolution was considered a very landmark moment in Tunisia's history. Yeah. I mean, the constitution seems to be the president's main focus. You know, we haven't seen, you know, since he was elected in 2019, we saw very little input from the president on laws. He proposed a few, if any, I think he may not have proposed any laws during that period from 2019 until he took greater powers this last July. And then we've seen that his main focus since July 25th has been on rewriting the constitution, changing the system. You know, as a sort of specialist on constitutional law, this had been something he had been quite focused on even before. I mean, during the just after the revolution, he was a commentator on national TV talking about the constitution. He was a big critic of the new constitution writing process after 2011. And he really has sort of disliked the parliamentary system, seen it as sort of a reversal or betrayal of the revolution. He says that he's correcting the revolution. He seems to have very strong ideas on the electoral system. He would like to see an electoral system that maybe even changes the system towards a more decentralized system, maybe a system of local councils that will eventually have representation at the national level. But so far, these have all been fairly vague. He is now basically launched an online consultation which has had very low participation rates, extremely low. I think it's in the, I haven't checked the latest numbers, but I believe it was even in the single digits after a couple months of being online, that people were not participating. You know, when you look at the questions, the sort of multiple choice questions about extremely complex and wide-ranging issues about sort of the legal system and the constitutional system, that doesn't seem to lend itself to a multiple choice question. And at the same time, it seems that the low participation rate means that people have either said whatever input we have will not matter. I think there's a suspicion that the president will sort of do what he wants, regardless. See that's certainly how he's been ruling since July 25th with very little input from other groups within civil society or other political parties. And so when they're doing this online consultation, whatever the results of it may be, he has said that there will be a referendum this summer on that to sort of change the political system, probably to change the constitution and the electoral system. But where it goes from there is unclear. He has said that there will be elections, legislative elections in December. We see that some people are suspicious that it will happen at all. People are sort of doubting that given the fact that so many of the president's decisions have not followed through, particularly with his commitments to temporary measures that have actually not been temporary. Absolutely. And Valil, coming back to the issue you pointed out earlier, which is that of the IMF loan itself. So could you also tell us about the context in which this loan is being talked about and discussed, especially considering what has been the broader economic policy framework of Tunisia since the revolution? Does the IMF known, for instance, mark any intensification of those policies? Is there any kind of break that we're looking at? So how does that fit in here? Sure. Well, it's important the context here because from 2013 onwards, this is really when the IMF basically got involved much more in Tunisia with a few loans from 2016 to 2020. They had quite a large loan by Tunisia standards. And there were some debates at the time whether Tunisia actually needed that loan. The debt to GDP ratio hadn't been too bad. Just after the revolution, it was about 40%. But now, since then, with the IMF loan, it's gone up to about 100%. And actually, the repayments have sort of gotten out of hand. Debt repayments have gotten out of hand. And at the same time, since the last loan by the IMF ended in 2020, we haven't seen that Tunisia's credit rating has been downgraded. So there's a real pressure from international creditors and lenders and donors that Tunisia signed a new deal. Tunisia hasn't been able to get financing on international markets without this loan. And that's starting to have effects. We're starting to see that, for example, in December, there were several shifts with cargoes of wheat. There was quite a long delay before that they released their cargo. And as a result, we're seeing that that is probably one of the reasons why we're seeing food shortages. We're seeing bakeries that are increasing the prices of subsidized bread, saying that they can't access subsidized flour. We're seeing bakeries that have limited amounts that will only open for a couple hours in the day with long lines of people outside of them. This seems to be worse outside of the capital. We've seen some of our reporters going outside of the capital to different places and seeing that the problem is actually much worse at bakeries outside. And of course, bread is sort of the staple in Tunisia, rather than rice or some other product. And so there seems to be quite a lot of pressure. Now, there's been negotiations before the previous government was negotiating before with the IMF and that was sort of paused after high side came to power. But now we're seeing that there's quite a lot of pressure. We've seen a big letter by quite a lot of people in the US, Middle East experts and former ambassadors saying that they would like to see the IMF loan not be given or that they would until they see political reforms back towards democracy from the side presidency. So that certainly puts the pressure up on him, particularly as people are really starting to feel the pinch, both with food, but other subsidized products. And of course, the IMF is demanding a freeze on public sector hiring at a time when there's quite a need for doctors, for example. There's very few doctors. We saw that during the COVID crisis. They're also calling for a freeze in public wages, which again might be a red line for the unions. But definitely, there looks like more austerity that's likely to come regardless, whether the deal is signed or not. It does seem to be a continuation of increasing austerity measures that we've seen basically from 2013 onwards and maybe even a bit before that. And this is even as I believe there have been massive protests in Tunisia, especially in certain regions, because the high rate of youth unemployment this way. Sure. I mean, there's been, you know, not necessarily linked to the post-July 25th scenario, but for many years we've seen social movements, particularly in regions outside of the capital that see themselves as marginalized, that see themselves as not benefiting from natural resources, whether that's agricultural resources or even oil and gas resources, that they don't see that reinvested back into their communities, whether that's in terms of transportation, hospitals, schools, but also in terms of jobs. Yes, I mean, youth unemployment in some areas is close to 50%. And as a result of that, we've seen people, you know, migrating. We've seen large numbers of Tunisians going for informal migration to Europe on very dangerous journeys. And that problem has only increased in recent years. Absolutely. And finally, a question on the point you just mentioned in the previous answer, which is about democracy itself, because across the world, for that matter, Tunisia was known as one of the few countries which is able to tide over the initial banks post-revolution, build a system which of course had a number of problems. There was chaos, a lot of parliamentary elections were held, uncertainty, but nonetheless managed to keep that system intact and running until 2021. So how do the developments of July and since actually what kind of implication does it have for the legacy and the structures that were built during this period from 2011 onwards? Yeah, unfortunately, I think post-July 25th has really revealed how sort of the democracy narrative and the celebration of democracy was a bit, not just premature, but I think was ignoring some of the fundamental problems and really the lack of democracy. I mean, you can have a parliamentary democracy which we saw, but without the parliamentary democracy actually being responsive to people's needs, those structures were seen as quite useless and actually responding to people's demands. And more than that, I mean, the laws that have been or the measures that have been taken since July 25th, particularly the repressive measures, a lot of them are using laws that were on the books that the parliamentary democracy never reformed. So whether that's an extremely repressive penal code that basically criminalizes insults to officials or insults to the president, even the previous president had gone after and actually previous two presidents had gone after people who had targeted the presidency for cartoons and for other sort of public speech issues. In terms of police reform, we saw that in fact, you know, the transitional justice process after 2011, looking at state abuses going back 50 years, was not only stalled, but was attacked by other institutions of the states, was sort of justified in sort of these partisan bickering, but the net result was that you didn't see almost anyone, you know, seeing jail time or restitution or paying back for some of the crimes pre-2011 and even after 2011, you know, police seeing themselves as above the law, I mean, at one point they had even gone to a court house that had been holding police on accusations and they basically freed their colleague under pressure. So you can see that there was a growing tension between the police and the judiciary, that there was no real will to sort of have justice for sort of the violent oppression that the state had visited upon people, particularly on ordinary people, on poorer regions, on poorer neighborhoods, something that we saw even as recent as, you know, 2019-2020, we saw, you know, mass arrests, we saw particularly going into neighborhoods where young people would be targeted, people would, you know, just go into poor people's homes and sort of do sweeping arrests without sort of a collective punishment for any sort of conflict between people and security officials. So I think really July 25th and sort of the steps we've seen taken since then have really revealed something that was rotten at the core and maybe exacerbated it as well. Absolutely. Thank you so much for the ladies for talking to us and giving us such a concise and clear explanation of what's happening in Tunisia right now. We'll get back to you more to talk about this. Thank you. That's all your time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.