Five years after Saied’s power grab, Tunisians are no better off

On July 27, 2021, Tunisian President Kais Saied suspended parliament in what was then considered the Arab world’s only functioning constitutional democracy. As the United States’ acting assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs, I was sent on a mission along with Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer to ascertain Saied’s plans. Then-US President Joe Biden had expressed his hope to see a swift return to parliamentary democracy, and for the naming of a prime minister and a government that could address the country’s looming economic problems.

During our meeting, President Saied asked Mr Finer and me to reassure President Biden that he was merely responding to the popular will to end a culture of bribery and corruption, and his actions were meant to fully implement the country’s constitution. He did not indicate when or if a new prime minister would be named, a new constitution would be promulgated, or if he viewed the parliament as temporarily suspended or disbanded entirely.

To see if we could better understand President Saied’s intentions, we requested to meet with his closest adviser, Nadia Akacha, over lunch. Pointing to Tunisians having fun on a nearby beach, Ms Akacha told us, “You see?  They are not unhappy with President Saied’s decision to take the reins of leadership. They want change. They want someone whom they can hold accountable.”

Five months later, Ms Akacha would resign, and within a year, she would be on the run from the law, denying all accusations and denouncing Saied’s consolidation of power. As for the kind of change she and many Tunisians were expecting, they are still waiting for it five years later.

In response to President Saied’s measures, the US government slashed its military assistance allocation to Tunisia by 50 percent as a signal to both Congress and the Tunisian leadership that all was not well in the bilateral relationship.

On February 1, 2023, the Biden administration sent me to Tunis as ambassador with instructions to find ways to help put Tunisia back on a pathway to representative democracy.

Less than two weeks later, I confronted a crisis: virtually all the country’s political party leaders were arrested. Soon a similar crackdown on civil society leaders and the press followed.

In the coming years, Tunisians lost a great deal of their civil liberties. The country’s score in Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” index fell from 70 to 42 between 2020 and 2026, with lower scores reflecting less freedom.

At the same time, Tunisians gained nothing in economic performance. Tunisia’s real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2026 and unemployment are no better than they were in 2018, the year before President Saied came to power, while its debt-to-GDP ratio has grown from around 73 percent to over 81 percent.

President Saied nonsensically rejected as “foreign diktats” the subsidy reform programme that his own government presented to the International Monetary Fund and that won support from the US government, among others.

Meanwhile, with ministerial longevity hovering around six months, Tunisian officials could never be sure what their president wanted, or what would cause them to be fired. When I asked the CEO of a major American energy company what he wanted from Tunisia as a priority, he said, “A phone number with someone on the other end.”

Bilateral security cooperation offered the one bright spot over the past five years, perhaps because US military assistance comes in the form of grants, training, and exercises, not loans with the type of conditionality President Saied sees as “diktats”. As a result, the Tunisian security services have had all the support they need to rid the country of virtually every known terrorist cell, which is quite an achievement given the instability that racked the country previously.

Perhaps therein lies a way forward for the United States and Tunisia’s other traditional partners. They can take advantage of the security infrastructure in which the US and Tunisia invested hundreds of millions of dollars together since 2014 to help provide similar training and exercises to security forces from the Sahel nations, who so desperately need it to stabilise their own countries.

The Tunisians can deliver all of this far less expensively than the US can on its own, and it would likely be more welcome among African governments than an initiative coming solely from Washington in the current global context.

Whatever direction in which Tunisians decide to take their country in the coming five years, they will need security and stability not just at home, but in their neighbourhood as well. If the US and Tunisia’s other traditional partners remain engaged on these most fundamental goals, this will provide the Tunisian people the environment they need to find their own ways to rebuild their political and economic lives.

In the current circumstances, the United States and others can at the very least help ensure that President Saied’s inability to spur economic growth or tolerate political pluralism does not drive the country into an even more desperate situation.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.