Tunisia’s failing democracy: The inevitable return of the strong man

Abstract

Speaker: Francesco Cavatorta, Laval University Discussant: Maryam Ben Salem, Sousse University Since 2021 Tunisia has gone through a process of de-democratisation, with President Saied progressively dismantling the rules and institutions that had been built following the 2011 revolution. Recent studies on Tunisia have focused on the shortcoming of the Tunisian institutional design and the poor performance of political parties to explain such an outcome. Building on the work of Hopkin on western European democracies and Sallam on the crisis of the Arab left, this talk will discuss the external constraints that Tunisian political parties and decision-makers had to face over the last decade. Through an analysis of these structural factors, a picture of the inevitability of the fault of Tunisian democracy emerges.