Tunisia’s body politic is in crisis

Scholar with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Chiba University, Japan.

xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoPeople gather to protest Tunisia's President Kais Saied during a demonstration marking five years since his suspension of parliament and assumption of emergency powers, along Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis on July 25, 2026. [AFP]Reports and rumours about a decline in President Kais Saied’s health underscore the classic political concept that the physical state of a leader deeply affects a country’s “body politic”. For the first time since 2011, Tunisia seems to be experiencing a dual climate of national distress and political change.

This concern is amplified by two factors working in tandem. One is the failure of public utilities: water and electricity cuts in sweltering summer conditions have created severe socioeconomic pressure that has spilled over into a broader climate of political dissent. The other is the undoing of the North African country’s fledgling democratisation.

How do structural constraints and institutional rigidities form the foundation of Tunisia’s current crisis?

Traditionally, January, one of Tunisia’s coldest months, has marked periods of high-stakes political shifts, student and worker protests, and civil rights marches. The January 1980 riots weakened Habib Bourguiba’s grip on power, while the January 2011 protests ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. That civic energy has now resurfaced in a “hot July”, amid intense summer heat, street mobilisation and heightened public friction over the past two weeks.

For the first time, protesters are displaying “Degage!” banners, asking Saied to “Get out”.

A recent drop in temperatures has brought some respite from the summer heat, but not from the pressures fuelling public anger. In some regions, water and electricity cuts have lasted up to two weeks, compounding the strain on households already facing severe economic hardship. These failures come on the heels of mass protests in late 2025 over toxic pollution from a phosphate-processing plant in the coastal city of Gabes, in southeastern Tunisia.

Successive post-revolution parliaments debated Tunisia’s unreliable electricity grid, costly energy bills, water rationing and transition to renewable energy. The 2015 energy law passed by parliament paved the way for non-state energy producers, with particular emphasis on renewable energy technologies. In 2022, there was also a plan to produce and even export so-called green hydrogen.

While planning for future energy needs is necessary, it will not solve the current crisis in the foreseeable future. Renewable energy remains limited. The country’s state-owned electricity and gas company (STEG) cannot keep pace with annual growth of more than 4 percent in power consumption or with peak demand during the hot season.

STEG has yet to fully implement the energy law passed by parliament in 2015 that opened the way for private energy producers. The concession and authorisation schemes intended to broaden opportunities for energy developers need to be accelerated urgently, particularly projects for 50MW to 100MW plants in Gafsa, Tozeur and Sidi Bouzid, among other regions.

Scaling up the Tunisian Solar Plan (PST) through Chinese photovoltaic technology is also on the horizon. Nonetheless, the goal of reducing reliance on imported fossil fuels, more than half of which comes from Algerian gas, and increasing renewables to one-third of the energy mix remains several years away.

Tunisia’s state-owned companies have operated under huge debt burdens since the 1990s owing to mismanagement. A January 2026 report by Tunisia’s Court of Auditors recorded staggering financial losses totalling 300 million dinars ($101m) across the port authorities and Tunisair. STEG’s own debt may be larger, partly because of subsidised electricity and broader mismanagement. The same state of insolvency applies to SONEDE, the state-owned water utility, which sells water at government-fixed prices. The combined debt of these companies is estimated at one-third of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

In short, Tunisia’s structural economic weaknesses constrain both growth and the state’s ability to provide reliable basic services. Olive oil, dates and raw phosphates, which form the backbone of the country’s economy, generate relatively little added value compared with high-tech manufacturing or complex services. Remittances and foreign aid fluctuate according to global economic shocks or donor politics rather than domestic market performance.

Saied’s suspension of IMF loans in the name of sovereignty is a worthy cause in an ideal world. In the real world of capitalist development, however, funding for basic social programmes stalls when the government relies solely on domestic borrowing and limited aid from Arab and Western allies, while remaining politically isolated and alienating and excluding opposition partners.

These structural constraints have been compounded by institutional rigidities.

Saied’s July 25, 2021 power grab, seizure of exceptional powers and dismantling of key democratic safeguards effectively aborted Tunisia’s transitional stirrings. Yet its failure to deliver tangible improvements to people’s long-term wellbeing has exacted a heavy toll on several levels.

However, one caveat is in order. Public opposition to Saied must not be confused with support for the pre-2021 political establishment. Those who originally supported his power grab did so for a range of reasons: economic stagnation, a fragmented polity riven by infighting, corruption, inefficiency and gridlock among the old ruling elites. They included leading politicians, members of parliament, union leaders, anti-Ennahdha activists, feminists and media figures who either chose silence or cheered the power grab.

Public sentiment has shifted markedly. Today, many of the same politicians who lent moral support to the power grab want people to take to the streets, reclaim “the republic” and oust Saied.

For a population that has long been accustomed, since independence, to trading freedoms for bread, protest is about recovering a modicum of dignity, securing regional development and asserting the basic “right to have rights”, including the rights to a nontoxic environment and uninterrupted access to clean water and electricity.

What has compounded the gravity of the situation is official miscommunication and evasive rhetoric about the president’s health, at a time when political power is concentrated in the presidency. This has had three consequences.

First and foremost, it has directly undermined public trust in Saied’s presidency, particularly among a segment of the public that has thus far given him the benefit of the doubt. Second, it has accentuated a state of paralysis owing to weak performance legitimacy. Finally, the crisis has created an atmosphere of speculation and polarisation.

Tunisia’s worsening human rights record is damaging both Saied’s reputation and the country’s. There are fears that poor conditions in Mornaguia prison could lead to the death or a serious deterioration in the health of prominent opposition leaders, including Islamist Rached Ghannouchi and centre-left secular politician Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, cofounder of the National Salvation Front. They should be freed.

The crisis itself presents Saied with an opportunity to mend the many fractures in the “body politic”. Whether he can buy time to bridge political divides, shift the focus from ideological polarisation to urgent economic reforms, pursue an inclusive national dialogue and reconciliation, and restore democratic governance remains one of the unknowns of Tunisia’s current historical juncture.

Whatever happens in Tunisia, with or without Saied, reform led by Tunisians themselves offers a more self-determined path than intervention led by the European Union or the United States. The government’s recent release of hundreds of prisoners should be followed by a general amnesty for prisoners of conscience.

That domestic path is especially important as the threat of external intervention grows. A political maxim holds that national leaders should pre-emptively close off pathways foreign powers might use to stage regime change. US Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa and is an avid supporter of Israel and cochair of the House Republican Israel Caucus, has Saied in his crosshairs.

His Tunisia Democracy Restoration Act, introduced jointly with Congressman Jason Crow in early September 2025, sets out the familiar mix of restrictive sanctions against ruling elites and aid cuts, measures that harm vulnerable populations and interfere with sovereign governance, whatever that means in modern geopolitics.

Instead of sustainable democratisation serving as petroleum-poor Tunisia’s “oil” and engine of development and wealth, energy shortages and autocracy now risk plunging the country into uncertainty and social upheaval.

The uncertainty surrounding Saied’s health evokes the medieval political notion of “the king’s two bodies”. Whether Tunisia’s institutions can sustain the immortal body politic if Saied’s health forces a transfer of power remains to be seen.

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