The Guardian Weekly

Saied purges officials and seizes judicial power

By Simon Tisdall SIMON TISDALL IS A FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMENTATOR

Kais Saied launched a purge of senior officials, including judges, and has taken on judicial powers, days after deposing the prime minister and imposing emergency law. President Saied’s crackdown dragged the country deeper into uncertainty shortly after its elected parliament was suspended for a month.

Tunisia, where the Arab spring revolutions began in 2010, had clung to hard-won democratic gains. Their abrupt end, and the muted response from inside the country and around the Middle East, has stunned proponents of the uprising and democracy.

“This was the last poster child of the Arab spring,” said Suha Rached, a teacher from Tunis. “It’s not even clear if it was worth it.”

Implicit in western support for pro-democracy movements and transitions around the world is an assumption that, given a free choice, a system of elected, representative government is what people will prefer. But what if a majority believes democracy doesn’t work for them?

Emerging testimony from Tunisia, the latest country to face a crisis over how it is run, suggests many citizens welcomed the forceful suspension of a democratically elected parliament that had failed to address people’s problems and was widely reviled as a self-serving oligarchy.

Mohammed Ali, 33, from Ben Guerdane, seems to typify this view. “I think what happened is good. I think that’s what all the people want,” he said after last week’s surprise move by Kais Saied, Tunisia’s president, to seize power and impose a state of emergency. Local politicians and western critics called it a coup.

Ali supported the 2010-2011 uprising to overthrow Tunisia’s former dictator, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, which sparked a series of pro-democracy revolutions known as the Arab spring. But a decade of disillusionment has followed, suggested Steven Cook of the US Council on Foreign Relations. “They seem to want a more effective state that can deliver jobs and a social safety net regardless of the character of the political system,” Cook wrote.

Western proponents of global democracy fixate on big ideas about peace, values and fundamental rights. Yet democratic transitions often trip up over more mundane issues – economic distress, inequality, lack of opportunity, poor education, insecurity.

“We had tremendous progress on the freedom front and the political front despite all the crises,” Fadhel Kaboub, a Tunisian economics professor, told the New York Times. “But what you have kept almost intact is the exact same economic development model that produced inequality, the debt crisis, the social economic exclusion that the population rebelled against.”

This points to another common failing. Like the democratic uprisings in Syria, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen, Tunisia’s revolution did not receive wholehearted (or any) support from western countries more concerned about Islamist terrorism and instability than the aspirations of the Arab street. To some extent it’s happening again in Lebanon now.

The broad message from around the world appears to be that if people are kept safe, fed, housed and in work by authoritarian or illiberal regimes, they may be prepared to forego the relative “luxury” of high-end, western-style democracy.

Put another way, political liberty in the modern era, like everything else, is transactional – no longer a universal principle expounded by Enlightenment philosophers and founding fathers but a tacky trade-off. For vote-suppressing, ballot-fiddling US Republicans who last week tried to wreck an inquiry into Donald Trump’s abortive 6 January coup, democracy is fine – if it produces the “right” results.

Given the Republicans’ terrible example, small wonder that democracy, as a governing system, is in trouble worldwide. Last year, an Economist survey found that fewer than 8.4% of the world’s population live in a full democracy and more than a third under authoritarian rule. And it’s getting worse.

As Britons also know to their cost, democracy often doesn’t function smoothly even in its heartlands. This grim situation has not come about by chance or thanks to a bully-nouveau vintage year for despots and tyrants. It’s a product of public apathy and connivance, global inequality and ubiquitous political malpractice.

If President Joe Biden is serious about turning back the authoritarian tide, the US and Europe must do more to convince Tunisians, among others, that prosperity and security, and collective and individual democratic rights, are not incompatible but mutually reinforcing. They can have both

– and they’re worth fighting for. Observer

What you have kept almost intact is the same model that produced the distress people rebelled against’

Global Report

en-gb

2021-08-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-08-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://theguardianweekly.pressreader.com/article/281960315798477

Guardian/Observer