I spent almost three weeks in Tunisia, visiting the cities of Tunis, Bizerte, El Kef, Tozeur, Tataouine, El Jem, Sfax, Sousse, Monastir, Kairouan, and a few smaller towns in between.

At first, I thought this post would be heavy on travel and light on history, but I got carried away on the background reading and surprisingly interesting politics of the country. Modern Tunisia is another one of those one-time democracies that recently fell into an authoritarian quasi-dictatorship, like Turkey’s Erdogan, El Salvador’s Bukele, Hungary’s Orban, etc. But compared to those examples, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied feels like more of an accident, a product of a flailing, random political trajectory that no one could have predicted. The fact that a guy like this ended up running a country like this in this way is more baffling than scary or exciting.

Before travelling, I read “Tunisia, a Country Study” in the Handbook series commissioned by the U.S. Army and published in 1987 (I’ll refer to this as the “Handbook”). Other historical and contemporary sources are linked within.

Overview

Population (2023) – 12.2 million
Population Growth Rate (2023) – 0.7%
Size –  63,170 square miles (a little bigger than Bangladesh, a little smaller than Wisconsin)
GDP (nominal, 2023) – $48.5 billion (a little more than Latvia or Vermont)
GDP growth rate (2023) – 0%
GDP per capita nominal (2022) – $3,978 (comparable to the Philippines or Bolivia)
GDP per capita PPP (2023) – $12,600 (it is SUPER cheap there)
Inflation rate (2020-2025)- 5-10%
Biggest export – “Insulated wire”
Median age – 31
Life expectancy (2023) – 74
Murder rate (2020) – 4.6 per 100,000
Founded – 1957
Ethnicity (2022) – 98% Arab, 1% European (mostly French)
Religion (2020) – 99+% Muslim
Corruption Perceptions Index – Rank #92/180
Index of Economic Freedom – Rank #149/184

On the Ground

I chose to go to Tunisia for the weather. Trinidad and Tobago wasn’t too bad but Guyana and Suriname were horribly, awfully, brutally hot and humid, and the Stans in the summer aren’t much better (until they’re freezing cold in the mountains). I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve travelled somewhere with actually good fucking weather.

And it’s hard to get better than Tunisia. The Mediterranean climate was crafted by the gods for humanity. Never too hot, never too cold, lots of sun, maybe occasional snow if you’re lucky, perfect for agriculture, perfect for travel, perfect for living. It’s enough to make people tolerate everything else about California.

That’s also why I was a little curious about Tunisia. The Mediterranean climate is at least part of the reason why civilization flourished so successfully in ancient Greece and Rome, and for a time in Anatolia and the Levant, and currently in California and parts of Australia and Southern Europe. Tunisia not only shares the same climate but is ever so close to Southern Europe, less than 100 miles from Sicily in fact. It should be so easy to trade with the West to adopt its technologies, even to compete, as it did thousands of years ago in the time of Carthage. So… why does Tunisia have a per capita GDP comparable to Bolivia?

Also, Tunisia is visa-free for 90 days for Americans. I looked into going to Algeria, but its tourist visa is weirdly difficult to get for Americans and Europeans, and the application process can take months. I also applied for a Libyan tourist visa online, which is surprisingly a real thing, but after three months of waiting, the website still says my application is “pending,” and I suspect the Libyan government has stolen my $63 application fee. I hope President Trump raises their tariffs.

As a traveller, my first and last impressions and summation of Tunisia are… that it’s a typical Arab country. Not great, but not terrible. I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit it unless you’re really into Roman ruins. Otherwise, I hear Morocco is better.

Tunisian cities are mostly ugly as hell. They actually helped me crystallize a traveller distinction in my mind between “enjoying cities” and “enjoying things in cities.” I enjoy visiting Paris, Rome, Istanbul, Singapore, and New York City. They all have amazing individual sites, but I can walk any street in those cities and it’ll be great. I can pick a point on a map miles away and enjoy walking for hours to get there. I enjoy the architecture, the streets, the atmosphere, the cultural and historical implications, everything. Honestly, nowhere beats Europe in this regard; any random city with over 50,000 people in Italy, Austria, or even the Balkans is worth seeing for its own sake.

I do not enjoy Tunisian cities. I enjoy parts of them, like the old walled old towns (called “Medinas”) or the occasional old mosques, but aside from those rare parts, the cities are ugly, filthy, annoying to get around, and repetitious. Note that “ugly” can still be interesting, as is the case with many Eastern European cities with their brutalist Soviet apartment blocks, or even inland Chinese metropolises with their mass pre-fab skylines. But Tunisian cities are “ugly” in a bad way, in part because they’re “ugly” in a generic way. They don’t look that different from cities in much of Africa or South America or especially the poor Arab Middle East. I wish I knew enough about architecture and civil planning to describe this look, but it consists of a lot of blocky 2-4 story buildings, usually made of concrete, with little-to-no ornamentation, nor differentiation besides oddly mismatching whatever buildings they are touching.

Fortunately, Tunisia is much better on the nature front. Northern Tunisia, especially closer to the sea, looks a hell of a lot like Italy and is obviously beautiful. You got rolling green hills, olive orchards, sandy beaches, and occasional oddly jutting mountains.

If you go more south and inland, you get the edge of the Sahara Desert. I’ve seen plenty of that before in Mauritania but I didn’t have much experiences with oases, which are quite cool with their palm groves growing in the middle of the desert. Better yet, completely unbeknownst to me before going and presumably to the rest of the world too, Tunisia has an Aral Sea thing going on with at least two large lakes in the south called Chott el Djerrid and Chott el Gharsa. If you look at them on Google Maps, you’ll see two blue bubbles:

These are lies. There is no water. They look like this:

But the best nature of Tunisia is in the southeast which very weirdly looks exactly like Arizona or New Mexico in the American southwest:

I have no idea why the term “troglodyte” is an insult, but I also don’t know why “nimrod” or “Cretan” “cretin” are insults. At least now I know that “troglodyte” also refers to buildings made by Bedouins in the Tunisian desert hundreds (thousands???) of years ago. There are Bedouin villages in the Tunisian countryside on the tops of mountains that are must-sees:

(Also, I highly recommend walking between the Bedouin villages instead of driving or taking taxis. It’s a great opportunity to hike through random farms and untouched countryside in beautiful terrain without a soul in sight.)

One final Tunisian nature highlight is the “Jugurtha Tableland” a plateau near the Algerian border. It’s annoying to get to, and through all the broken French I think the government limits visitors to narrow time slots of around an hour, but it’s definitely worth going to for the bizarre landscape and views when you’re on top. This could be a replacement for Iceland for movies that want an alien visual landscape.

The Tunisian people were generally nice. There are a decent amount of white tourists, but not many Americans visit, so that got me some attention. However, not many Tunisians speak English, and I don’t speak much French and I speak even less Arabic, so conversations were limited. As with pretty much all developing countries, the general sentiment is strongly pro-American, though somewhat modulated by recent Trumpism (more on that later). My most notable interaction was with a somewhat drunk Tunisian man in a bar who struggled to talk to me in French, tried to tell me how much he loved America, tried to tell me how much he wanted to move to America, tried to exchange phone numbers with me, tried to get me to promise to meet him back at the bar the next afternoon, and who ended the exchange by giving me a bracelet from his wrist.

The only problem with Tunisian niceness is that it blends into Tunisian mercantile craftiness. In touristy areas especially, Tunisian merchants are tricky. They talk really fast in sufficient English, they constantly identify and pursue marks, they offer handshakes and friendly questions with decent faux-earnestness, and then they leverage the general friendliness of Tunisian people to initiate conversations and to convert marks into suckers by selling them vastly overpriced trinkets. These techniques are common in touristy countries, especially Arab ones, but Tunisians are particularly good at it. I saw a lot of random tourists get pulled into stalls, be subjected to covert sales pitches, and acquiesce. I came close to falling for it more than I’d like, and I undoubtedly overpaid a few times.

There’s just one sales technique I truly don’t get. Often, I’d go to a market stall, start looking at something, and the stall owner would IMMEDIATELY pick up something else and put it my hand and start talking about how great it is, and then 10 seconds later, he would grab another object and put that in my hand, and so on and so forth. It’s so fucking annoying. I don’t see how that makes anyone buy anything. Yeah, I get it, these guys are good at selling and want to be proactive, but just shoving shit in my hands isn’t going to accomplish that.

For political reasons I’ll get into later, Tunisia is unusually culturally liberal for an Arab country, maybe even the most liberal? I don’t know, I’ve never been to Lebanon or Morocco. But you can feel it on the streets and with the people. You don’t often hear calls to prayer or see too many people pray. There aren’t many bars, but more than in most Arab cities. I saw occasional hijabs, especially in more rural areas, but no burqas, and the vast majority of women were uncovered. In Tunis, the relatively metropolitan capital, most of the women dress similarly to Western women, albeit more covered up regardless of the warm weather, though I did see some younger women in slightly more revealing outfits (short skirts, etc.). I felt no trepidation from female strangers during social interactions.

Travelling In Tunisia

For whatever reason, I don’t have any larger, interesting things to say about travelling in Tunisia, but here are some thoughts and observations:

Cheap

Tunisia is wonderfully cheap; I can’t remember the last time I’ve had cheaper travel. Off the top of my head:

• Most meals were $3-4, lowest was $2, highest was $10
• Beer was usually a little over $1, most expensive was $2 at a decent hotel bar
• I found local hotels of decent quality in the smaller cities for $10-15. In larger cities for $20-30
• Tunis hostel charged $7.50 to rent a bike for an entire day
• Shared vans (known as louages) are the standard way to get around, typically pay something like $2-3 per hour of driving
• Taxis in Tunis charged maybe $3-4 for a 15 minute drive. Taxis in the smaller cities are absurdly cheap, something like $0.50 for 5-10 min rides, though you will almost certainly end up sharing the taxi with other people
• Cities with clusters of tourist attractions have single tickets for all the sites. For instance, you can see every site in Carthage (6+ ruin areas that take 3-4 hours to visit) for $4

Traveller pro-tip – when countries are this cheap, you can just offer random people money to drive you places and they often will. Anybody is a taxi for enough cash.

Societal Defection

I think a perfect distillation of mass societal defection can be seen in the way people get on/off trains in poor countries, and Tunisia is no exception.

A metro train arrives at the last stop. The train is full of people who want to get off the train; the metro station is full of people who want to get on the train. I don’t have a civil engineering background, but I think in these situations, the people on the train should get off first and then the people waiting for the train should get on second. It’s a matter of physics – there’s more room off the train than on the train. Most of the people off the train can’t get on the train until the people on the train get off the train. It’s heady stuff.

The Tunisians do not share my intuition. Instead, both the people on and off the train crowd the doors as closely as possible. When the doors open, they both rush through and try to push their way past the other. Two mobs collide and the strongest and most willful eventually burst through the mobs in their intended directions, and this opens up fissures in the crowds for others to follow. Of course, the people getting on the train end up having to stand around in the dense off-loading crowd while they wait for it to dissipate so they can find seats, while the off-loading people have to wade through an extended crowd on the platform trying to stuff themselves onto overloaded trains.

Why don’t the people trying to get on the train just wait until everyone gets off the train? Obviously, doing so would make the entire process faster, more comfortable, and less likely to injure the little old ladies hobbling in both directions.

Because no one trusts each other. Every single individual trying to get on the train is worried that if he waits, someone else won’t wait, and then that other person will grab the best seat. So every individual is incentivized to defect and just rush into the train at the expense of both the on-loaders and off-loaders.

Incidentally, all four times I got on or off the metro train, there were more seats than passengers. It didn’t matter, they pushed onto the train regardless.

Informality Has Its Advantages

I spent one day in Sfax and I wanted to spend a few days in Sousse. In between the two cities, I wanted to see El Jem.

I had two options:

1. Take a shared van from Sfax to El Jem and stay there one night and then go to Sousse the next day.
2. Take a shared van from Sfax to El Jem, walk around the city for a few hours, and then get another shared van to Sousse.

I preferred the second option since seeing everything in El Jem wouldn’t take that long and it was more efficient, but then I would have to lug all my bags around an art museum and a large Roman amphitheater. Note that the shared van (louage) stations are ramshackle affairs. There are no lockers to leave your stuff in like at a Western bus/train station.

I chose option 2 anyway and found a decent solution to the bag problem. At the entrance to both the art museum and the Roman amphitheater, I asked the ticket guys (using miming hand gestures since neither spoke English) if I could leave my bags there while I walked around. Both ticket guys were fine with it. I left my bags with my passport, computer, camera, 200 USD, and other valuables in their ticket office rooms, walked around, came back, got my bags, and left with a merci beaucoup.

This is the type of thing that isn’t possible in the West, at least not at any decently popular tourist attraction. I couldn’t just leave two backpacks with the ticket guy at the Louvre, or the British Museum, or the Colosseum. Maybe I could at some tiny local museum, but any sufficiently large organization is too formal and bureaucratic to permit minor, unaccountable acts of generosity that could result in lawsuits. While too much informality leads to corruption and bribes, a small amount of informality enables convenience.

Carthage and Rome

Another reason I chose to go to Tunisia is that it’s the historical home of Carthage, ancient Rome’s greatest foe. I’ve long been fascinated by the alt-history theories of what would have happened if Carthage had won the Punic Wars. Would the Mediterranean world have been better off under this more mercantile, naval, commerce-oriented power than the brutal Romans? Would Europe have reached higher heights? Or would we be worse off without Roman technical/political ingenuity, and instead the Western cannon would be tarnished by child human sacrifices far into antiquity?

Regardless, tragically, there is very little left of the ancient Carthaginians today. Basically just a cemetery:

And one cool ruins complex:

Aside from that, almost all the ruins at the site of Carthage are Roman ruins from the Roman city built on top of old Carthage about two centuries after it was razed at the conclusion of the Third Punic War in 146 BC.

Fortunately, one of the big surprises of my trip to Tunisia was how great its Roman ruins are. I’d go as far as to say that with the arguably exception of Turkey, Tunisia has the best Roman ruins of any country besides Italy. At Dougga, much of an old city is still intact:

And El Jem has easily the best amphitheater on earth beside Rome’s Colloseum:

Food

I asked the front desk guy at a hotel if there were any good restaurants nearby. He asked me, “do you want Tunisian food or fast food?”

I don’t think he offered me that dichotomy because I’m a tourist; I think that’s actually a good encapsulation of all Tunisian food. And “fast food” is by far the more dominant of the two. I’d seriously estimate that over 90% of the restaurants in urban Tunisia serve “fast food” of the fried, fatty, generally unhealthy variety.

Back in Notes on Benin, I wrote that all poor countries seem to converge on serving burgers, pizza, and pasta as their restaurant food. I need to amend that claim by adding shawarma to the list, or the closely related gyros or doners. They, along with the occasional pizza, constituted about 95% of my meals in Tunisia. Here are the menus at a typical Tunisian restaurant (note 1 USD = 3 Tunisian Dinar):

A good Tunisian culinary surprise was the “baguette shawarma.” I assumed it was just a regular shawarma on a baguette instead of that standard Muslim bread, but it’s more like a cheesy calzone type thing. It’s fucking good and I wish I had taken a picture of one of the countless I ate.

Butcher

Speaking of food, fairly unique in my travel experience, Tunisian butcher shops tend to hang not just hunks of meat but animal heads in front of their stores. For example:

Star Wars

I’m not a Star Wars person, but I feel obligated to mention that much of the original 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope was filmed in Tunisia. The set for the cantina town where Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan meet Han Solo is still intact to this day as a little tourist trap in the desert near Tozeur:

The southern city of “Tataouine” inspired the name of Luke Skywalker’s home planet, “Tatooine.” And even though there is no other Star Wars connection to the city, the tourist sites in and around it sell (presumably illegally unlicensed) Star Wars merchandise. Some stores just put a random Star Wars logo up and then sell normal tourist stuff:

The Sousse Scam

Shortly after arriving in Sousse, I was wandering around the rather touristy market area, and a random older Tunisian guy walked right up to me and asked, “how are you doing, sir?”

Tunisian merchants constantly tried to talk to me and get my attention, so I ignored him like all the others. But then he said he was from my hotel, pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of him in the hotel uniform. I then smiled and said hello to him and we made some basic chit-chat with me for a minute. Then he asked me if I wanted a good restaurant recommendation, invited me to his favorite restaurant, and finally began telling me about a shop his friend owned where I could get great discounts on rugs. I had to turn him down maybe five times before he got the message and walked away.

It seems so obvious writing about it now, but I was surprised by how well his little scam worked in the moment. He was not from my hotel. I was staying in a $20-per-night hostel where no one wore uniforms and I had clearly not seen him there. But his claim to know me and photo verification (I guess it was just a picture of him in a random hotel bellhop uniform) triggered my Western politeness, so I took him at his word without thinking about it, and I gave him a few minutes of attention he didn’t deserve. I wasn’t dumb enough to fully fall for the scam and actually follow him to a restaurant or store to buy overpriced rugs, but he got closer to selling me something than 99% of Tunisian merchants.

Mosques

Sorry Tunisia, but your mosque game is weak. They are pretty much all generic and boring by global mosque standards, though the Kairouan Grand Mosque at least has a cool tower.

It’s interesting that a lot of the most beautiful mosques of all time were built recently, like in the last two decades. I’m not sure anything will beat the Hagia Sophia (which was originally a church) or the nearby Blue Mosque in Istanbul, but the Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi is pretty spectacular, and every other petrol state has at least one great mosque, like Kazakhstan’s Astana Grand Mosque.

In contrast, when is the last time one of the greatest cathedrals were built? Probably not for hundreds of years. I still prefer cathedrals to mosques overall, but with Islam’s far greater modern exuberance and ample oil wealth compared to Christianity, maybe mosques will eventually overtake cathedrals in aggregate beauty.

Bars and Cafes

There aren’t many bars in Tunisia, even in the major cities. On a Saturday night in Sfax (the second largest city), I went to La Palette, which by external appearance, was a solid Irish pub, but it was a little strange inside. The place was fucking packed with easily 100+ people and the entire bar and every table was completely full, and plenty of people were standing without seats. As far as I could tell, literally every single person was drinking Beck’s. Everyone was holding a Beck’s and the tables had piles of empty Beck’s, sometimes dozens split between a few individuals. It was loud, lots of talking and shouting, which drowned out a soccer game playing on a few TVs. A lot of people were smoking.

Also, there were no chicks. None. Zero. 100% men. Just 100+ Beck’s-drinking Arab dudes stuffed into an Irish pub.

I went to another bar in El Kef, this one more low-key, and I can only describe its aesthetic as “concrete.” This one didn’t have Beck’s but it also only seemed to serve a single alcoholic beverage: Celtia, authentic Tunisian beer. Also similarly, it was fairly crowded, maybe 30 patrons, 100% male, all drinking beer, and quite a bit of it. I was able to find a seat and the very pro-American local struck up the very slow conversation with me in French that concluded with him giving me a bracelet.

I wonder if Arab beer culture is a holdover from Arab coffee culture. Alcohol is still fairly taboo in most Arab countries, even in relatively liberal Tunisia, so they probably adopted cafe cultural norms. I have a Syrian friend who once told me that his Arab parents drink 8+ cups of coffee per day, just knocking them back periodically from sun-up to past sun-down. In Tunisia, like every other Arab country I’ve been to, there are omnipresent cafes throughout the cities which are crowded day and night, often with customers drinking coffee into the late evening. And like the bars, the patrons are nearly always male. In the United States, we lament the loss of third places to socialize in the modern day, but in Arab countries, at least for men, the café third place is alive and well.

(Also, there was an American-style drip coffee in one of my hostels, and none of the Italians, Brits, Aussies, or Kiwis could figure out how to use it. I thought that was funny.)

Tariffs

British people remember where they were and what they were doing when Princess Diana died. I’m sure decades from now I’ll talk to fellow old people about what they did with their lives during the COVID era. I think I experienced a very niche form of this how did you experience this important world event phenomenon with Trump’s tariffs.

I must have been asked about Trump’s tariffs 15+ times in Tunisia, sometimes by other travellers, but mostly by locals. I wonder if this is common throughout the world for Americans or if it’s especially pronounced in Tunisia, which in April 2025, was threatened with 28% American tariffs, well above the standard 10%, so the diabolical Tunisian peasant would stop exploiting the American worker with his cheap olive oil and insulated wire exports.

I’ve written many times about how people from poor countries love America by default. In many places, revealing that I’m American turns me into a microcelebrity and gets me lots of smiles, handshakes, and questions. Trump’s tariff threats have finally blunted this a bit. None of the locals were hostile toward me, but they also said tariffs and/or Trump were bad, and a few asked me why America was doing this. At a date plantation in Tozeur, the owner said that they were planning on stopping all their sales to America. Another random Tunisian said he didn’t like how the tariffs would hurt Tunisia, but he admired Trump’s business savvy and assumed they would help America. The travellers who talked to me about this (Europeans + Aussies + New Zealanders) usually laughed about the absurdity of it all.

As of writing this, I’m pretty sure that Tunisia is one of the many countries allegedly in the process of renegotiating its tariff rate with America, so there is hope for the date plantation guy yet.

Local Viagra

At the aforementioned date plantation in Tozeur, I bought a jar of ginger date jam. While standing in line at checkout, one of the workers sidled up beside me and whispered, “that is our Viagra.” With the accent and the strangeness of the comment, it was a little hard to understand him and I must have looked confused, so he elaborated that all the local men eat ginger date jam when they want to get revved up for sex. This wasn’t a sales pitch or anything, I was already trying to buy it.

Where does this type of stuff come from? Everywhere on earth seems to have local aphrodisiacs and headache treatments and period-alleviators, etc. Is it all placebo? Mostly placebo? Or does big pharma just not want us to know the power of ginger date jam?

Even More Date Stuff

The Tozeur date plantation tour was actually pretty cool and informative even besides the sexual vitality assistance. There’s a big room with a written history of date palm groves in the region, and it claims that back in the day (like 1,000+ years ago), the average local resident ate 200 kilograms (441 pounds) of dates per year. Insert a joke about Arabs having a lot of dates because they have so many wives.

In the date palm grove, all of the thousands of trees are female except for one single male tree. This is because, as with animals, a single male can reproduce with many females simultaneously but not vice versa. That makes sense, but isn’t it risky to have only a single male on which the entire plantation depends? What if he gets sick or struck by lightning or gets murdered by the owner of a competing date plantation? I asked the tour guide and… he didn’t understand the question.

Also surprisingly, the palm grove’s exposition room said that date palms and all palm trees aren’t trees. They are grass. The classification has something to do with the nature of their trunks, which unlike trees that are made of wood, are made of fibrous tissue that is fundamentally… grassy.

But wait, there seems to be some controversy on this point. You can find random websites online corroborating that palms are grass but other people say it’s a myth and they seem to be right. Palm trees and grass are both in the monocot taxon but are part of separate families (the arecaceae and poaceae families respectively).  According to Wikipedia, a tree “is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are usable as lumber or plants above a specified height. In wider definitions, the taller palms, tree ferns, bananas, and bamboos are also trees.”

Iranian Freedom, Portuguese Oppression

At a hotel, I met an Iranian woman, early 30s, loquacious, attractive, pretty intense. She had left Iran 5ish years ago to live in Portugal, and her strong conclusion was that she experienced more freedom living in the former than the latter.

No, she was not a Shia radical. She hated the Iranian government, but she explained that in Iran, the vast majority of people (at least where she lived) were basically liberal-minded and respected each other’s dignity, rights, personal freedoms, etc., while for all its faults, the Iranian government was clear and consistent in its demands. As long as she did the necessary kowtowing to the state, she could live her life as she saw fit, and these days, she wouldn’t even need to wear a hijab.

In contrast, she found Portugal to be an Orwellian hellscape. Her landlord and a cabal of elderly neighbors monitored her every move, reported them to each other, and made constant comments, judgements, and sometimes demands of her behavior. They got mad if she made too much noise, if she came home too late, if she wore the wrong clothes, if she ate the wrong food, if she smoked pot, etc. Similar comments were made by strangers on the street and by co-workers, and her bosses seemed to abide by an archaic patriarchal paternalism that she found stifling, including constant questioning and commentary on her lifestyle and relationship status.

Sure, she wasn’t in danger of being arrested and tortured in Portugal, but she was subjected to nearly constant surveillance and behavioral control, and maybe worst of all, the rules to which she was supposed to abide were vague and arbitrary, and their enforcement inconsistent. At least the Ayatollah was clear in what he wanted.

House of the Governor and the Black Wife

I went to the “House of the Governor” in Kairouan. The building used to be where the provincial governor lived, but it was converted into a government-run museum at some point after independence, and then turned into a manufacturing facility for Berber rugs… I think. I don’t know, the explanation didn’t make much sense to me, but both of the tour guides tried to sell me rugs.

When I arrived, the first tour guide walked me around the exterior of the building and told me a bit about this history, but he was most excited to tell me that the U.S. Ambassador had just visited the House of the Governor two weeks ago along with his “black wife” who “wasn’t white like you and me.” Ok, then.

This guide handed me off to the second guide who waited a full five minutes before pitching me on the Berber rugs, but before that, he also excitedly told me about the Ambassador’s visit and showed me a framed picture of the event. He pointed a finger to specifically note the ambassador’s “black wife.”

Israel and Palestine

On my first day in Tunisia, I ran into a pro-Palestine rally in the capital:

And throughout the rest of my time in the country, I saw lots of pro-Palestine graffiti, like:

It’s safe to say that Tunisia is quite pro-Palestine and anti-Israel. This extends up to the highest office where President Saied is particularly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel even by the standards of Arab leaders. Saied rejects a two-state solution in favor of a completely independent Palestine with its capital at Jerusalem, and has called normalizing relations with Israel a form of treason. He called the October 7 attacks a form of “legitimate resistance” against “Zionist occupation.” Apparently being increasingly anti-Israel is one of the few positions that keeps President Saied popular with his own people (more on that later).

As North As North Africa Goes

I have not climbed Mount Everest nor been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But now I can add an achievement to my traveller geographic accomplishment checklist by saying that I have been to the northern-most point of Africa. Tunisia even has a little statue to mark the site (see above).

Ferry

I took a ferry from Tunis to Palermo (Italy) and I don’t recommend it.

The only advantage of a ferry over a flight is cost, in my case, about $50 to $170. Everything else is 10X worse.

Of course flights are faster but I didn’t know they were THAT much faster. The trip from Tunis to Palmero takes one hour in the air and 12 hours by ferry, or at least that’s what my official itinerary said. My ferry took over 13 hours.

But you have to factor the time getting to the airport, through security, and buffer time. Depending on how close you want to cut it, the airport pre-flight time for most people is going to be 1-2 hours. However, my ferry stopped check-ins for tickets “210 minutes” before departure. That number is so large in the context of minutes that it took me a few re-reads to realize it meant 3.5 hours. Though to be fair, you could definitely arrive later since they didn’t start boarding until 2.5 hours before departure and boarding didn’t seem to finish until an hour before departure.

Airplanes are not comfortable if you’re not in business or first class, but at least there’s an order to its system. You get your seat and you sit in it. The ferry from Tunis to Palermo, and presumably most other ferries in the Mediterranean, has a basic ticket called “deck space.” I literally didn’t know what that meant when I bought it and I was confused by the explanations I found Googling. But basically, it means that you, the deck space passenger, can go wherever you want besides the cabins (which are reserved for higher-paying customers).

In practice, for a 12 hour ferry that left at 7:30 PM and was scheduled to arrive at 7:30 AM (but really arrived at 8:30 AM), the deck space passengers are thrust into a colonization scramble across half the boat. You can go to the dining area, you can go to the hallways, you can go to the stairwells, you can… actually that’s about it. You go to one of those three areas and you claim a spot of your own. It could be a chunk of hallways, it could be a chair and corner of a dining room table, it could be a random spot on the floor, it could be anywhere.

I already described what it’s like getting on and off Tunisian trains, and honestly, Italian line etiquette isn’t that much more advanced, so once I figured out what was really going on with “deck space” I became cagey and made a bee-line for a corner dining room chair. I was one of the first 20 or so people on board, so I thought of making a break for what I quickly figured out was the absolute prime real estate – the soft booth/banquette bench seats, which were obviously great for sleeping.

But I hesitated… I wondered if it was socially permissible to lie down on them, thereby taking up 3+ seats for the sake of one person’s comfort. If it wasn’t acceptable, then they were scarcely better than the standard wooden restaurant chairs, or arguably even worse since the booth/banquette benches were lining the wall and didn’t have tables in front of them for forward lean-sleeping. So I stuck with my chair and table, only to discover within 10 minutes that Tunisian-Italian ferry etiquette did in fact permit the hogging of 3+ of the best seats by a single person for the sake of comfy lying down sleeping. Damn my American politeness.

Then again, the booth/banquette benches were only the best innate seats on the ferry. The true best seats were those brought by some passengers. Some brought rugs, some brought quilts, and at least a dozen brought inflatable mattresses, usually with accompanying blankets.

I tried to forward lean-sleep on the table for awhile, but my head and neck don’t work that way, so I eventually migrated to the floor. By that point, it was maybe 11 PM and the whole boat was thoroughly colonized, so I laid down under my half of the table with my feet reaching under another guy’s chair as he more successfully table-lean slept. I used some (dirty, kinda smelly) clothes for a pillow, but I didn’t have anything to put under my body so I settled for the hard floor. I eventually managed to sleep with a rhythm where I would wake up every 15-30 minutes due to discomfort and adjust either on to one side or my back. It was definitely not the best sleep of my life, but I stretched it out across a good 10 hours, so I was alright by the morning.

Do systems like this exist in the U.S.? Are they allowed? Or do they break laws about providing passengers with proper amenities or something?

The Other

I asked maybe six young Tunisians (separately) whether they wanted to leave Tunisia, and all said, “yes.” But when I asked whether they wanted to move to the most logical foreign destination – France – they all said, “no.” Tunisia is yet another former French colony I’ve visited (including the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Benin, Togo, Mauritania, etc.) where there’s a lot of lingering resentment against their former overlord. Granted, there’s a certain level of respect for the wealth, culture, and food of the French in all these places, but there’s also the widespread belief that the French are treacherous exploiters, and perhaps most significantly, that the French people still look down on their former African subjects.

Then again, maybe this modern colonial resentment is just a symptom of broader European/Mediterranean ethnic hostility. Throughout this trip, I talked to many Europeans, including Frenchmen, Italians, Maltese, Germans, and a few Brits, and from an American perspective, it was surprising how often the topic of conversation turned to immigration. Or rather, anti-immigration.

When travelling, especially in Europe, and especially among hostels, I assume that most other travellers are of the broadly left-ward political persuasion. This is a matter of selection effect – such travellers tend to be young, open-minded, educated, and have other traits that make them more likely to be left. I’ve commented before that I hear more open, unironic anti-Americanism in Western Europe than I do anywhere else in the world, and much of it comes from other travellers.

That’s partly why it was jarring for me to hear so much anti-immigrant sentiment expressed by Italian, French, etc. locals and tourists. It felt like virtually every impromptu traveller discussion in a hotel lounge would inevitably end up back at immigration. The talk rarely veered into open hostility, but often took the form of something like, “more and more Arabs and Africans are coming to my country every day, they cheat the refugee system to get in, then they take money from the state and give nothing back, and they commit a lot of crime, I feel bad for them but it shouldn’t be our responsibility to take them all in, but unfortunately the government does nothing to stop them.”

N = 1 and all that, but an anecdote:

While waiting for my flight from Palermo to Malta, a Maltese woman started talking to me. She was in her mid-40s, had a son, was born in Malta and had lived there her whole life. Within two minutes of conversation, she began lamenting all the Albanians and Indians that had come to Malta and seemingly taken over much of the island. She admitted that they did jobs Maltese didn’t do (which I can confirm, seemed like none of the service workers were locals), but said they were costing the Maltese people a fortune in welfare and were driving up real estate prices, and she felt like the mass of Maltese people were being exploited by an alliance of immigrants and the wealthy Maltese who used their cheap labor. Her explanation of the perils of immigration went on for a good 40 minutes while we sat in the terminal. Later on, she asked me what parts of the United States had the most black people with the fairly strong implication that she would try to avoid such regions.

I wasn’t shocked by any of this, I’ve heard things like it many times before while travelling. But I find it notable that for all the cultural debate in America over immigration, these days, I find anti-immigrant sentiment to be far more intense in Europe, or at least Southern Europe, than in the US. When even young, lefty travellers can’t stop talking about immigrant welfare abuse, you know that the culture is boiling.

One other anecdote:

In Palermo, I went to a little restaurant and had a great meal until the chef got into a huge fight with a group of customers who ended up in a shouting match with the owner/chef. I obviously don’t speak Italian, but I think it had something to do with the bill. After the customers stormed out of the restaurant with some final insults yelled back, the owner then turned to me and started ranting about how rude and terrible “Italians” are.

I tried to be polite but I couldn’t help asking him, “aren’t you Italian?”

He said, “no, I’m Sicilian.”

The Founder, the Thug, the Chaos, and the Robot – A Short History of Modern Tunisia

Tunisia has been inhabited by civilized people for quite a long time. Suffice to say that for almost 1,000 years, various Islamic Arab caliphates and lordships ruled over the land, until 1574 when the Ottoman Empire gained dominion over Tunisia. For the next 300 years, Tunisia was run by a series of local dynasties of “Beys,” sort of a Turkish equivalent of a duke, under the relatively indirectly sovereignty of the Ottomans. In the 1860s, one of these dynasties borrowed way too much money from international creditors and couldn’t pay their debts, so Westerners were brought in to stave off bankruptcy and were granted economic access. Frenchmen and Italians in particular set up aggressive business and little enclave communities, and since it was the age of imperialism, both France and the newly formed Italian state eyed Tunisia as a potential protectorate. In 1881, France used a minor and probably fabricated political crisis in nearby Algeria as a pretext to invade Tunisia and officially make it a French territory, albeit still under the nominal rule of its bey.

To me, what makes the eventually Tunisian independence struggle interesting is that from the French perspective, it was a side-show to a far more important conflict: the Algerian War for Independence. Tunisia’s western neighbor had been under French control since the 1830s, but unlike the vast majority of European colonies, all the way back in 1848, Algeria was made into multiple “departments” (basically provinces) of France, giving the land practically the same legal status as any other department in mainland France. Then for over 100 years, Algeria was subjected to a largely unprecedented level of integration into French law, economics, and culture, rendering Algeria a supposedly integral part of the nation of France. Prior to Algerian independence, there were 1 million French Europeans living in Algeria, constituting about 10% of the population, and Algeria was the fourth largest wine producer on earth.

Tunisia was never anywhere near that important to France. In fact, arguably its single most important contribution to French political objectives was simply not being under Italian control. Otherwise, its main value was to keep one of Algeria’s flanks secure. Hence, French investment in Tunisia was fairly limited and the French population never passed the low tens of thousands, though French businessmen did buy up a lot of the prime agricultural real estate. Meanwhile, a sizeable Italian presence persisted with French permission and had about as much impact on the economy.

It is in this political context that Tunisia’s founder was born.

The Founder

One of my favorite parts of learning about random countries is discovering fascinating and weird historical figures. Nigeria has the coup savant Sani Abacha, The Gambia has the witch-hunting Yahya Jammeh, Tajikistan has mysterious “how did this guy get on top?” dictator Emomali Rahmon, Guyana has the “can the CIA help me absorb five other countries to rig this election” blowhard Forbes Burnham, etc.

Modern Tunisia has had eight presidents in its 69 years of independence, but three of those rulers covered 60 years, and at least two of those guys deserve to be in the pantheon of unexpectedly interesting rulers.

After the American War for Independence, George Washington famously could have been king, or at least president for life. Instead, he served two terms and then stepped down from power and retired to private life, thereby establishing the American precedent of democratic and peaceful transfers of power, a quite rare norm at the time and still throughout much of the world today.

But what if instead of stepping down after his second term ended, George Washington was elected president at least five more times. And then a lot of the other Founding Fathers became nervous about him staying in power, but he was such an immensely popular figure with the masses that they couldn’t oppose him directly, so they competed with each other to influence President Washington. But then after about 15 years in power, President Washington began making really weird policy proposals, like trying to merge Mexico and the United States into one country and asking the King of Portugal to abdicate and surrender his country to Spain. And so the Founding Fathers thought that President Washington might literally be demented due to old age since he was getting up in the years. And eventually, after 30 years in power, the Founding Fathers became so worried about President Washington’s mental state and what he might do to the country that they finally launched a “medical coup” against him by getting a bunch of doctors to declare him mentally unwell and quietly shuffled President Washington off to a hospital to live the rest of his years under the watchful eyes of armed guards. But then he unexpectedly lived for another 12 years, so while the country kept chugging along, sometimes the government would bring out old man Washington for a press event to boost the legitimacy of the current president.

That’s more or less the rough outline of the story of Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first president.

Bourguiba was born in 1903 in Monastir to a family of local notables. He was educated in France, did some lawyering but quickly became a consummate politician, and then launched and led Tunisia’s reformist nationalist party in the 1930s. Right before World War II broke out, he was arrested by the French government and held throughout the duration of the war, during which time he correctly predicted an eventual Allied victory and refused suggestions from his advisors to collaborate with the Vichy regime. Bourguiba got out of prison in 1945 and went back to leading the independence movement. In the early 1950s, the French threw him in jail again where he continued to lead the revolution from behind bars through his release in 1954.

Over the next eight years or so, Bourguiba did his best work in terms of pure politicking throughout his very long political career. Based on the Handbook, Bourguiba’s independence movement strategy was to align the local Tunisian elite (primarily French-educated liberals like himself) with the impoverished Tunisian masses through nationalist exaltation while not overly alienating the religious establishment. More radical factions, primarily lefty anti-colonials, were excluded from his coalition and waged a separate political struggle for independence. Once his forces were rallied behind him, Bourguiba escalated tension in Tunisia with peaceful protests and activism while diplomatically appealing to the French for an amicable independence. His pitch was premised on the alleged inevitability of Tunisian independence, that he was a French-educated urbane liberal who would work with the French in the future, and that if political independence wasn’t granted under his leadership, the anti-French radicals were going to burn the place down.

In 1954, while Bourguiba was organizing his big push for Tunisian independence, decades of anti-French sentiment in Algeria finally culminated in a violent revolt for Algerian independence. The French government was no stranger to nationalist revolts and independence movements in their many colonies, but this one was different. It was considered a grave insult to France and its people for its own departments to ungratefully demand secession after a century of cultural and economic investment. In the 1960s, the French government would peacefully let go of the vast majority of its colonies, but before that, it was willing to sacrifice considerable blood (up to 30,000 French dead) and treasure to try to keep Algeria. Almost half a million French soldiers were deployed to Algeria during the peak of the fighting against what took the form of a deeply entrenched insurgency. From the outset of the war, the Algerian resistance used terrorist tactics against both military and civilian targets, while the increasingly frustrated French forces eventually resorted to concentration camps and torture to break the insurgency.

The French had nowhere near the same emotional/cultural attachment with Tunisia as they did with Algeria. Tunisia had only been a French possession since 1881, there was far less direct investment from the mainland, and Italian influence was a major competing factor (there were about as many Italian nationals as French nationals living in Tunisia in the early 20^th century). So when Tunisian nationalists led by Bourguiba began seriously agitating for independence in the mid-1950s, the French government was inclined toward a conciliatory response. More concretely, the French government was willing to cede increased autonomy and eventually political independence in Tunisia in exchange for avoiding a second simultaneous war in North Africa and gaining a regional ally from which the French military could fight Algerian rebels.

To his credit, Bourguiba seemed keenly aware of this political context and played into it skillfully. He was sympathetic to Algerian independence, but not to the point of sabotaging Tunisian independence. At the start of the Algerian war in 1954, the Tunisian colonial government (which was dominated by Bourguiba) renegotiated with France for more local control in exchange for a greater French military presence in Tunisia to be used against Algerian rebels who had started crossing over into Tunisia to escape French forces.

By 1956, Bourguiba’s leverage was great enough to attain full independence for Tunisia with Bourguiba as Prime Minister of the new government complete with some state-building concessions, including preferential trade deals for Tunisian exports and thousands of French civil servants transferred into the new civil service. It wasn’t anywhere near Ivory Coast levels of French colonial continuity, but it was pretty good. In exchange, France got to keep 3,000 soldiers in Tunisia and a guarantee from Bourguiba that the new Tunisian state wouldn’t interfere in military operations against the Algerian rebels.

Having finally achieved Tunisian independence after decades of political struggle, Bourguiba faced three immediate problems. First, those lefty radicals were still around and they happened to be led by Bourguiba’s former top political ally. Now that the French were (mostly) gone, they turned their ire toward Bourguiba’s supposedly collaborationist regime, resulting in street fights breaking out in Tunis and other cities between the two factions. Three months after independence, fighting was so bad that Bourguiba called in the French military to put down a revolt which was done successfully with mass arrests. The leader of the radicals was sentenced to death but fled the country. He bounced around in exile until he was mysteriously assassinated in 1961; no one ever proved who murdered him but… c’mon.

Bourguiba’s second immediate problem at independence was that he still wasn’t technically the leader of the country, the Bey was. Though the Bey’s actual power had become increasingly perfunctory over the last few decades, he was still technically the head of state. But one year after independence, Bourguiba easily did away with the Bey by writing a new Constitution that ended the monarchy and created a French-style government with an especially strong presidency, a position that Bourguiba would of course come to hold after winning a landslide election.

Bourguiba’s third immediate problem was that despite all his promises to the French state, he fundamentally supported the Algerian rebels and didn’t want to abide by the treaties he signed with his former colonial master. Even before independence was formally granted to Tunisia, Bourguiba’s regime was offering covert and not-so-covert support to the rebels, including taking in hundreds of thousands of Algerian refugees, turning a blind eye to 25,000 Algerian fighters setting up secret bases in the remote Tunisian desert, and hosting the Algerian rebel government in Tunis so it could safely conduct its rebellion from abroad.

It took only about a year after independence for the French-Tunisian relationship to break down. In 1957, France ceased all economic and military aid to Tunisia and then, basically without permission from the Tunisian government, the French constructed an elaborate border security system with electrified fences to keep Algerians out. It was a blatant violation of Tunisian sovereignty, but the French were well aware that Tunisia’s paltry military, which had been erected a year earlier entirely with French support, couldn’t throw the French out even if it wanted to.

In 1958, the French ramped the tension up a few more notches by launching an airstrike on a Tunisian town believed to be harboring Algerian rebel forces. This proved to be a step too far as violent protests erupted throughout the country near French military bases. Bourguiba stepped in to renegotiate with the French who were too overstretched to risk a second war and so agreed to greatly reduce their military operations in Tunisia and to not bomb any more Tunisian towns.

For the next few years, French-Tunisian relations were entirely copacetic, but then, yet again, Bourguiba sensed a change in the winds. According to the Handbook, Bourguiba became increasingly convinced that the Algerian rebels would eventually win the war, and so he became increasingly concerned that in the long run Tunisia would be labeled a colonial collaborationist force by other Arab governments for housing French troops throughout the conflict.

In 1961, Bourguiba purposefully escalated a minor policy issue (extending the runways of a bunch of preexisting French airfields in Bizerte) as a pretense for throwing all French forces out of Tunisia. Bourguiba made his announcement but the French refused to leave, so then both sides made escalating retaliatory shows of force – Bourguiba coordinated fake grassroots protests against France throughout the country and arrested a bunch of French nationals for subversion, the French moved troops into their Bizerte military base, Bourguiba ordered the Tunisian military to surround the Bizerte base and ordered a no-fly-zone above it, the French kept flying helicopters and troops into the base regardless, etc.

The Bizerte Crisis came to a head when 800 French paratroopers were delivered to Bizerte in violation of the blockade and no-fly-zone, and the Tunisian forces opened fire on the French base. The French forces fired back, killed 1,000, and then invaded and occupied Bizerte, which today is the seventh-largest city in the country. Elsewhere, both formal and informal Tunisian military forces launched attacks on smaller French bases with little success.

It was the first and only real outbreak of military conflict between Tunisia and France. Bourguiba immediately went to the United Nations to demand a withdrawal of French forces and the UN complied. France defied the UN and continued occupying Bizerte for two years while it lost the war next door and granted Algeria independence. In 1963, French forces withdrew from Bizerte in exchange for a guarantee from Bourguiba’s regime that it would henceforth protect French property, which Bourguiba would completely violate the following year when he nationalized all French land.

It wasn’t easy, but all this stuff ended up working out incredibly well for Bourguiba. By the early 1960s, he had thrown out the French, destroyed his domestic rivals, and placed himself as the powerful president of an independent Tunisian republic. He had carefully navigated the diplomatic situation to placate the French for years and extract concessions while eventually turning on the French and ultimately framing himself as a champion of Arab power. But unlike Algeria, Bourguiba achieved his political goals with fairly little bloodshed and not even that much expenditure. I’ve looked at a lot of these colonial revolutionary leaders by now, and Bourguiba was undoubtedly one of the best on a purely political level.

Getting independence is one thing, but when it came to ruling an independent country, Bourguiba was… meh. Not good, but not terrible, probably slightly better than average by virtue of the low average more than his achievements. If I had to summarize him, I’d say he had the political and ideological inclinations of Ataturk but was far less competent.

First the good – like Ataturk, Bourguiba tried to secularize the Tunisian government and society from the top-down. That meant stripping Islamic doctrine out of the civil law code, abolishing Sharia courts, taking Islam out of public education, and almost entirely knocking the Islamic clerical establishment out of the government. Particularly successful strides were made with women’s rights, including the outlawing of polygamy, legalizing birth control, legalizing abortion, and loosening divorce laws.

This was accomplished through a skillful centralizing of power. Bourguiba was charismatic and an excellent organizer, and he fit into the colonial revolutionary mold of being good at getting a broad coalition of factions to work together not just against their colonial overlords but also after the colonial overlords are gone. The Handbook gives a lot of personal credit to Bourguiba for forming a remarkably coherent state right at the start of independence and energetically directing its resources toward his objectives rather than allowing the new government to be pulled apart by factionalism.

As a result, Tunisia is the most secular country in North Africa today, and arguably the most secular Arab country in the world. You can see and feel it on the streets with the way people dress and behave, and it was doubtlessly a factor in Tunisia being the origin point for the Arab Spring in 2010. To this day, Tunisia is anomalously gender-equal in the Arab world both legally and culturally – it is the only Arab country where polygamy is illegal, it has the most liberal abortion laws in the Arab world, and it is the only Arab state with a woman on its currency. Tunisia isn’t quite Turkey and it’s definitely not as secular as the post-communist Muslim countries (Albania, the Stans, etc.), but the effects of Bourguiba’s secularization project were felt, and for the better.

But then there was the bad – unlike Ataturk and unfortunately like many African colonial leaders, Bourguiba steered the country toward socialism. Newly independent Tunisia immediately launched a welfare state, expanded socialized education and healthcare, began subsidizing key industries, launched new industries with government money, and instituted a wide array of price controls and economic regulations. Bourguiba’s leaning toward socialism wasn’t ideological but a failed attempt at practicality. Not only was socialist economic theory all the rage at the time, but Bourguiba believed that the state needed to be expanded to fill the holes in society left by the extraction of Islam, and socialism offered a far more comprehensive and seemingly innovative societal mortar than the vague Western liberalism of the French exploiters.

To enforce the top-down secular and economic reforms, Bourguiba slowly assumed a more authoritarian leadership style. It never got too out of hand by African standards, but dissenting voices in his administration were marginalized or exiled, and opposition outside his administration was quietly stifled by low-level arrests and threats. Bourguiba himself went a bit megalomaniacal, with the Handbook reporting him commonly ranting about his own importance to his advisors. Sample quote: “There is not a Tunisian who does not owe being a free citizen in an independent country to me.”

As a result, independent Tunisia had a few good economic years from high oil prices (which Tunisia exported) and mostly French foreign investment in the 1950s, but it hit a bad slump in the 1960s. The government factories weren’t productive, the government-regulated key industries faltered (especially with dumb land collectivization policies messing up cash crops), and the foreign currency reserves ran aground. This led to higher prices, higher unemployment, fewer opportunities for all these students being pumped out of new schools, and all that led to increasing dissatisfaction with the government which prompted Bourguiba to become more authoritarian.

A lot of these reforms, particularly the economic stuff, was spearheaded by Bourguiba’s Prime Ministers who mostly consisted of the other Tunisian Founding Fathers. While Bourguiba was always the front-man and held the regime together, his actual day-to-day policy influence waxed and waned depending on the strength of the Prime Minister and how distracted Bourguiba was with diplomatic matters. For instance, the worst of the socialist initiatives were enacted in the 1970s by a more lefty Prime Minister with Bourguiba signing off on it all but not usually taking a direct role in its construction. This Prime Minister, like the others, was eventually destroyed by palace intrigue fomented by competitors and replaced.

Bourguiba was 53 at Tunisian independence and 54 when the monarchy was overthrown. Though not ancient by any means, his health began to deteriorate as he got deeper into his reign. In 1965, at age 62, he had his first heart attack.

By the early 1970s, Bourguiba “seemed to suffer periodic lapses in judgment, during which he made ill-advised departures from his usually levelheaded approach to foreign policy.” In 1973, Bourguiba personally asked King Hussein of Jordan to abdicate and turn Jordan into an extension of the Palestinian state, presumably so it could more effectively fight Israel; King Hussein responded by severing all diplomatic relations with Tunisia. In 1974, Bourguiba met personally with Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi, and against the wishes of basically everyone in his government and the Tunisian people, Bourguiba announced intentions to merge Tunisia and Libya into a single country. The plan seemingly would have gone through if Bourguiba’s ministers hadn’t stepped in and torpedoed it, leading to a breakdown in diplomacy between Tunisia and Libya.

By this point, Bourguiba’s fellow Tunisian Founding Fathers were officially worried about the Dear Leader’s mental state. In 1974, they proposed a bill to the legislature that would trigger new presidential elections if the president died or otherwise became incapacitated, but Bourguiba stood up in front of the legislature, denounced the plan, and wrote his own bill vesting succession in his chosen vice president. The legislature overwhelmingly sided with Bourguiba and passed his bill. In the very same year, Bourguiba was elected president for the fourth time, and then in the following year, the legislature declared him president for life at the age of 72.

In the 1970s, Bourguiba’s new Prime Minister introduced economic liberalization reforms that did away with the worst of the socialist policies but still left the vast majority of the economy under the government’s control. The liberalization combined with high prices for petrol brought some economic levity to the country until falling oil prices in the early 1980s brought it crashing down. You know a modern country isn’t doing well when it has bread riots that result in the deaths of over 100 individuals.

Bourguiba’s popularity evolved, but less than you would think. He always had the diehard loyalty of increasingly older generations that went through the independence movement with him, but younger Tunisians became disillusioned with the bad economy and the government’s slow constriction of civil rights. By the early 1980s, calls for democratic reforms and broader political liberalism grew throughout society, but basically everyone agreed that such reforms shouldn’t be implemented until after Bourguiba was gone. This was partially because he had such a legendary status in the country and partially because he was in his late 70s and presumably wouldn’t live much longer.

However, Bourguiba’s lieutenants had a greater sense of urgency:

“As the 1980s wore on, his behavior grew more erratic. He fired the general manager of a major newspaper only 24 hours after appointing him. He also fired the head of the country’s United Nations delegation only a few days after appointing him, and forgot about a decree he had signed to appoint new ministers.”

The writing of the Handbook was finished in January 1986 and it was published in late 1987. The intro to the Handbook contains an addendum explaining that during that intervening period, Habib Bourguiba was finally removed from power after ruling Tunisia for about 30 years. Historians would later call it the “medical coup.”

In July 1986, Bourguiba fired his Prime Minister and divorced his wife of 24 years, thereby removing two individuals from power who were widely regarded as the most stabilizing forces in his regime. For a year and a half, Bourguiba continued acting erratically and his lieutenants came to believe that his niece was pulling his strings. From a journalist:

“Officially aged 84, Bourguiba fell asleep while receiving a foreign visitor. Influenced by those who coveted the presidency, the next day, he sacked a minister just one day after appointing him. He agreed to his prime minister’s cabinet reshuffle only to retract his agreement a few hours later.”

In November 1987, Bourguiba intervened in a trial of 15 Islamists suspected of plotting against the government that looked like it was going to hand down a mild verdict. Bourguiba ordered that a new trial be held and that 12 of the 15 accused be hanged. It was such a blatant abuse of the president’s constitutional power that some in the regime feared that Bourguiba’s tyranny might provoke a revolt, if not a full-blown civil war, from the still-powerful conservative Islamic forces in Tunisia.

What happened next is a little unclear, but in the following month, Bourguiba’s Prime Minister was suddenly fired and replaced by Abidine Ben Ali, a 51 year old former army general. In retrospect, this maneuver was almost certainly engineered by Ben Ali and his compatriots behind Bourguiba’s back. Prime Minister Ben Ali then got six prominent doctors to sign a report declaring Bourguiba mentally unwell, and then announced this to the Tunisian people over the radio. He declared that Bourguiba was “totally incapable of fulfilling the duties of the presidency,” and stated that he was invoking the Tunisian constitution to depose Bourguiba.

(It’s worth noting that an Italian spook claims that the Italian government helped organize the coup, though as far as I can tell, this has never really been corroborated by others).

Bourguiba (understandably) went down without a fight. He was shipped off to his hometown of Monastir to live in a sort of unofficial house arrest with full-time medical care. Surprisingly, Bourguiba lived for another 12 year years and, despite talking with slurred speech and clearly not being all there, was occasionally trotted out to meet with Tunisian officials or foreign dignitaries. Bourguiba finally died in 2000 of pneumonitis at age 97.

With Bourguiba deposed, Ben Ali assumed the presidency with the support of most of Bourguiba’s regime and the general public. All respected what Bourguiba had been but knew it was time for a change. And while Ben Ali’s assumption of the presidency was not exactly above board, he got off to a good liberal start by loosening restrictions on the press and announcing that elections would proceed as scheduled but now with opposition parties and pluralistic laws respected as had not been the case under Bourguiba for the last 30 years.

And then Ben Ali proceeded to rule Tunisia for 24 years, and not because he was so utterly beloved by the people.

The Thug

Ben Ali was not as interesting as Bourguiba; he was basically a generic opportunistic kleptocratic semi-dictator who operated like a mafia boss, albeit a decently competent one. The promised democratic reforms were discarded at the first election when obtuse electoral laws made it impossible for anyone to run against Ben Ali for president, and so in all three elections after that, he always got more than 95% of the vote. Once entrenched in power, Ben Ali and his extended family looted Tunisia for all it was worth through both official and unofficial corruption that filtered down into every level of society to make an already corrupt developing country into an especially corrupt developing country. For example, Ben Ali’s brother eventually had to flee France due to drug trafficking charges and he was probably assassinated by a rival drug dealer.

Ben Ali’s government was not ideological in its outlook nor in the manner in which it retained power, though like Bourguiba, Ben Ali’s authoritarianism ramped up over time. Tunisians who paid their bribes and didn’t foment dissent were usually left alone, but the police and military became increasingly brutal and intrusive as their corruption remained unchecked by an uncaring administration. By the 2000s, arbitrary arrests, protest crackdowns, torture, and general human rights abuses became commonplace, and NGOs began ranking Tunisia’s government among the worst on earth. I mean, not North Korean levels, but not far off Syria under Assad.

The upside to Ben Ali’s regime was that he was actually pretty sensible on economic questions. Once in office, the new president embarked on a solid economic liberalization campaign and dismantled most of the socialist stuff still lingering from Bourguiba’s early reforms. Productivity grew on the back of insourcing manufacturing with cheap Tunisian labor outcompeting expensive European workers. Foreign investment was invited, tourism was opened up, and Tunisia began reintegrating into the European economic sphere. After extending an IMF loan in 1988, Tunisia didn’t take another for 25 years, which is pretty damn good for such a poor country.

The economy wasn’t perfect, and Tunisia wasn’t launched into the tier of exciting developing economies, but its GDP per capita more than tripled from 1986 to 2008 (World Bank):

Ben Ali’s rule was stifling but given his entrenchment, there was no apparent reason he wouldn’t rule indefinitely, that is until the 2008 Great Recession. Economic growth was the major policy accomplishment that granted him at least some sort of popular support, but as the global economy came crashing down, so did Tunisia’s. Protests, particularly from students, became more common and intense, and even the corrupt underlings in Ben Ali’s government began to sense a shift in the winds.

Ben Ali never did much to inspire love from his people so perhaps it’s not surprising that his downfall was swift and unexpected. It started with Mohamed Bouazizi, a humble 26 year old vegetable salesman in a small town south of Tunis, having his wares confiscated by a (surprisingly female) government agent due to some petty legal issue. He tried to pay the $3 fine, but was refused and then allegedly slapped. Bouazizi, who provided for seven other family members, went to the local police station to complain, but he was refused an audience. So he doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire.

This, along with some recent public revelations about the absurd extent of Ben Ali’s family’s corruption, ignited protests throughout Tunisia. There was no formal coordination, just lots of social media groups filled with mostly young people instigating revolution against the long-standing and long-hated regime inspired by the example of Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Though, somehow, Bouazizi didn’t actually die at first, he just got burns over 90% of his body and fell into a coma for 19 days until he slipped away.

When protests had erupted in the past against Ben Ali, they were quickly crushed by Ben Ali’s enforcers, but by this point, even the police and military were getting sick of the regime, especially when the continuity of their pay was in question with the bad economy. This time, the country was so primed for revolt that Ben Ali only held out against the opposition for 28 days after Bouaziz’s immolation. On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali and his wife got on a plane and fled to Saudi Arabia. He initially thought he was getting out just for his safety and would soon return when the revolts blew over, but his ministers shut the door behind him and declared his presidency defunct. 33 other Ben Ali family members were arrested on corruption charges within days. Ben Ali and his wife were both tried in absentia and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment; he lived in Saudi Arabia until his death in 2019 at age 83 of prostate cancer.

The perpetrators of the Tunisian Revolution had no idea that they were sparking a transnational movement. Similarly inspired and structured revolts against similarly authoritarian leaders spread from Tunisia throughout the Arab World in what was to become known as the Arab Spring:

Looking back on the Arab Spring more than a decade later, most pundits conclude the net-results were a mixed bag. Some terrible dictators were deposed (ex. Gaddafi in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt) and some authoritarian regimes made liberalizing concessions, but most regimes remained firmly in place and the overthrown regimes were replaced by equally incompetent/abusive rulers or civil wars.

Tunisia has generally been considered the exception. From Tunisia’s independence in 1956 to the culmination of the Arab Spring in 2011, Tunisia had experienced only two rulers, both of whom blatantly rigged the electoral process (despite Bourguiba’s legitimate popularity and in spite of Ben Ali’s unpopularity). During the Arab Spring, Tunisia was the one country that overthrew its authoritarian dictator and replaced him with genuinely democratic elections. Though, as expected, this was neither a particularly smooth nor successful process.

https://www.npr.org/2011/12/17/143897126/the-arab-spring-a-year-of-revolution

” data-medium-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/arab-spring.png-2.webp?w=300″ data-large-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/arab-spring.png-2.webp?w=760″ loading=”lazy” src=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/arab-spring.png-2.webp?w=760″ alt width=”760″ height=”429″>

The Chaos

When Ben Ali fled, his Prime Minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, assumed the presidency as per constitutional succession plans. Ghannouchi was not considered quite as corrupt as Ben Ali, but he was also nicknamed “Mr. Oui Oui” for being such a sycophantic yes-man. His presidential bid lasted literally a single day during which time he tried to convince the Tunisian people via radio that he and his lieutenants had “clean hands” despite very recently working for Ben Ali. This didn’t work, the courts quickly rejected the constitutional succession, and Ghannouchi was removed from the presidency but retained his Prime Ministership. That is until February when mounting protests caused him to resign and… vanish. Like, forever. According to Wikipedia: “The current whereabouts of Ghannouchi to this day are unknown, but it is likely Ghannouchi is still residing in Tunisia with his family.” I can’t find anything to contradict this from Googling. It’s crazy that the high-profile Prime Minister and brief president of a country can completely disappear from public life for well over a decade.

Fouad Mebazaa, the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, was installed in Ghannouchi’s place as president, though only for a transitional period of 45-60 days until new elections could be held. At 78 years old, Mebazaa was an old-school member of Bourguiba’s Neo Destour party all the way back to independence, and was distant enough from Ben Ali to not be entirely tainted by association. Despite his official time-limited mandate, Mebazaa stayed in power for a year while various councils and legislative groups figured out how to rewrite the constitution and set up a real democratic structure. In December 2011, Mebazaa resigned from office amicably and retired from politics until his death two months ago as of writing this in May 2025. He seems to be generally fondly remembered as a stabilizer at a key political moment.

Mebazaa’s successor was to be elected by the Constituent Assembly, an interim body elected from the population to set up a new government. Similar bodies were established in many countries during the Arab Spring and they tended to follow a similar trajectory that revealed arguably the greatest systemic political problem in the Arab World. The Arab Spring’s revolts were against bad authoritarian rulers, but the options to replace them weren’t necessarily better. In most cases, the factions that emerged in the power vacuum were leftists supported by the young and Islamists supported by the old.

In Tunisia’s case, Bourguiba’s Neo Destour party was more-or-less disgraced, and in its wake, the Islamists quickly proved to be far better at organizing than the leftists. Ennahada was a political movement and organization founded all the way back in 1981 during the dire final years of Bourguiba’s reign. It tried to be a legitimate opposition party under Bourguiba but was bureaucratically boxed out of elections, then it briefly tried being a militant force under Ben Ali but 25,000 Ennahada members were arrested after a minor revolt, so it mostly hung out in the shadows for a good 20+ years. When the Arab Spring broke out, Ennahada came roaring to the forefront as the largest party in Tunisia. Depending on who you ask, it has either always been a fairly moderate party that just wants to roll back the more extreme secularization policies of Bourguiba, or it has always been a Muslim Brotherhood-inspired party whose leaders have carefully hidden its true Islamist power level.

For as bad as Ben Ali and the rest of the pre-Arab Spring dictators were, they were at least secular, and in many cases, did a very effective job at keeping a lid on Islamism and its potentially terroristic side effects. Thus secular Tunisians were worried about an Islamic takeover of their highly-secular-by-Islamic-standards Tunisian state and tried to organize parties to counter Ennahada.

This did not go well. In the 2011 Constituent Assembly election, Ennahada got 37% of the seats, while the second largest party, the Congress of the Republic, a European-style center-left faction, got 9%. Two months of distinctly democratic chaos followed, during which Ennahada worked with a few minor parties to push through a new constitution. After much wrangling behind closed doors with deals and assurances being made, Moncef Marzouki was proposed to be the next president of Tunisia.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/12/13/former-dissident-becomes-tunisian-president

” data-medium-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/moncef.webp?w=300″ data-large-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/moncef.webp?w=570″ loading=”lazy” src=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/moncef.webp” alt width=”645″ height=”430″>

Back in the day, Marzouki’s father had been a devoted follower of Salah Ben Youssef, the lefty radical who supported and then challenged Bourguiba until his mysterious assassination. Hence, Marzouki grew up in exile and received educations in Morocco and France. He didn’t get into politics until he was in his late 40s in the 1990s, when he established himself as an outspoken critic of Ben Ali’s political and human rights abuses, and tried to form an opposition party. This went about as well as could be expected; Marzouki was thrown in jail, got out, tried forming a new party, and fled to France to run it so he wouldn’t be arrested again. After spending almost another entire decade in exile, Ben Ali was overthrown and Marzouki returned to Tunisia to lead the Congress of the Republic, the party that had come in second place in the 2011 election behind Ennahada.

Ennahada worked out a deal with Marzouki where the latter would become president and the former would get one of their men into the Prime Minister post. The agreement had enough support that Marzouki was overwhelmingly elected by the Constituent Assembly with 153 “yes” votes out of 217. 44 Assembly members cast blank ballots in protest claiming that the new constitution was a sham.

Marzouki was elected as the supposedly moderate and moral candidate who could wisely steer the country until another, more democratic constitution could be written, but the inexperienced politician seemingly became lost in the chaos of an untested political system. Aside from launching a commission to punish Ben Ali’s top collaborators, the most common criticism of Marzouki is that he simply didn’t do anything. Under three years of his leadership, Tunisia didn’t fall apart but it also didn’t make the deep structural, economic, and political reforms needed to bring the country out of stodgy authoritarian mode. The economy built up under decades of Ben Ali took a big hit in 2008 and then another big hit with the revolution as foreign investors were scared off, and Marzouki’s regime did little to right the economic or fiscal ship.

What little initiative Marzouki’s regime had was accomplished at the behest of Ennahada. Tunisia certainly didn’t become ISIS but the government became cozier with other Islamic regimes and more troublingly, there were concerns that the new government was turning a blind eye toward activities by more openly Islamist and even violent groups that had been actively suppressed during Ben Ali and Bourguiba’s times. It didn’t help that Libya was in a full-blown civil war next door that easily flooded over a very difficult to defend desert border.

Late 2010 was the revolution, 2011 was “figuring out what to do now” time under Mebazaa, 2012 was a tense year of rule under Marzouki but really probably mostly Ennahada. There was lots of worry and dissatisfaction and occasional protests, but it wasn’t until 2013 that things started to break down and it briefly looked like Tunisia might be another true Arab Spring basket case like Libya or Syria.

In February 2013, the head of the Tunisian communist party was gunned down by an Islamist militant, which triggered anti-government protests throughout the country that were violently put down by tear gas-wielding police, and were followed by massive pro-Ennahada counter-protests. In June, the Tunisian government took a $1.1 billion IMF loan. In July, yet another party leader was gunned down by Islamists, this time the head of a small secular party with two seats in the Constituent Assembly. The next day, 42 out of the 217 members of the Constituent Assembly resigned and demanded that the entire government be torn down and rebuilt. The funeral for the second assassination victim was held the next day, and more anti-government protests were held in front of the parliament.

For the next six months, Tunisia was a powder keg of protests and counter-protests and mobs and police crackdowns and mass assaults and promises of reform from the top and all the usual democratic chaos, resulting in a few deaths, hundreds of injuries, and uncounted property damage. Ennahada dug in its heels for as long as it could and brought the country pretty close to civil war, but finally gave in and agreed to a new meeting of elected officials to rewrite the constitution.

The 2014 constitution that emerged replaced the Constituent Assembly with a new Parliament that had more power than before, leaving the president relatively weak. In the first Parliamentary election, Ennahada got 28% of the seats, but it lost to Nidaa Tounes, which had been around since 2012 but recently rapidly gained support as it absorbed a bunch of smaller, moderate, secular parties to the point of winning 38% of the vote.

Nidaa Tounes’s leader was not an Islamist nor some new leftist revolutionary who had emerged from the Arab Spring; rather, it was the 88 year old Beji Caid Essebsi. He was a protégée of Bourguiba who stood by the leader through Tunisia’s independence, climbed the government ranks for 30 years, and then jumped ship to Ben Ali’s regime for 23 more years until the Arab Spring. After Ben Ali fled, Essebsi then not so wisely became the first Prime Minister under President Mebazaa, a post which brought lots of undue attention for all of the terrible things he probably did as a Ben Ali lieutenant. When Mebazaa stepped down so the Constituent Assembly could elect the new president, Essebsi stepped down too, laid low for a bit, and then formed his Nidaa Tounes party as one of many minor secular parties, albeit one with a little nostalgia for the good old days of the pre-revolutionary stability. According to BBC, “Tunisians joke that he and his party represent the old regime, but with an injection of Botox.”

In the presidential election, Essebsi challenged Marzouki and won with a solid 55% of the vote. However, Tunisia wasn’t entirely under new management. To the credit of party elites, Nidaa Tounes and Ennahada came together and formed a grand ruling Parliamentary coalition that would do most of the actual running of the country under the elder statesman of Essebi. It was a grubby back-room political deal, but it probably stopped the country from falling apart.

Pros of the Essebi years – Despite occasional protests, Tunisia was basically stable. A president and Parliament had been elected democratically, they put together a government with both left-secular and right-Islamic influence, and it ran things without blowing up. Essebi passed a big law to equalize inheritance rights between men and women. He also made some tweaks to election law and was seen to have solidified Tunisia as a genuine democratic country, thereby making it arguably the greatest success of the Arab Spring.

Cons of the Essebi years (2014-2019) –

The economy was shit. Exports were down, foreign investment was down, tourism was down, corruption was up, and the government neared bankruptcy until it took its second IMF loan (this time for almost $2 billion) in three years. Obviously this wasn’t all the regime’s fault, but the regime wasn’t helping the situation.

Beyond economic policies, there was a general sense in Tunisia that the government just kind of sucked. It wasn’t tyrannical like in the Ben Ali days, but it wasn’t doing any good either. Part of the problem was that the grand left-right coalition led the country without a clear direction, with any particular group of policy decisions being opposed by one wing of the party or the other. There was so much hype and excitement to overthrow the dictatorship and bring democracy to Tunisia, but what was the actual, on the ground, policy result? It was more protests, more street violence, a cratering economy, more corruption, and seemingly incompetent leaders. A new form of dissatisfaction was brewing in many Tunisian people, particularly young ones. They didn’t want to go back to the old days of dictatorship, but they wanted new reform and effective governance.

Early in 2019, his last year in office, the 92 year old President Essebi (the oldest sitting president on earth) announced that he wouldn’t run again. Three months later, on July 25^th, he unexpectedly died of some sort of mysteriously undisclosed illness (some people think he was poisoned) four months before his term was supposed to end.

This caused a strange little constitutional crisis that had massive ramifications on the future of Tunisia. The presidential and Parliamentary elections were scheduled for November, but the Tunisian constitution said that in the event of the president leaving office early, a new president had to be chosen within 90 days. So with Essebi dying unexpectedly in July, the government had to put together new special elections for September. Meanwhile, Assembly Speaker Mohamed Ennaceur was named acting president as a placeholder until the election.

So President Essebi’s early death inadvertently triggered a mad dash by the political establishment to put up candidates and build a campaign months earlier than expected. To make the timeline even more intense, Tunisian election law prohibited candidates from declaring their intent to run or campaign at all until 5.5 weeks before election day, and once that campaigning period started, opinion polling was illegal for some reason (I’m not clear if this is normal or due to the special early election).

The Carnegie Endowment had a really good primer on the Tunisian 2019 presidential election. In the “Key Players” section, it listed the four candidates projected to be most likely to win, which consisted of the Prime Minister, the Minister of National Defense, the main candidate of Ennahada, and the leader of another emerging party who also happened to own Tunisia’s largest television station.

In the “Other Candidates” section, it listed five people: a gay guy who eventually had his candidacy rejected, a former prime minister, ex-president Moncef Marzouki, and the (incidentally female) leader of what’s left of Bourguiba and Ben Ali’s old Neo Destour party. Also, there was Kais Saied, whose blurb described him as “a constitutional law professor who has no political party and ran no campaign; he is very conservative and has vowed to bring back the death penalty.”

He’s the one who ended up winning the presidency.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/tunisian-president-denies-claims-he-made-anti-semitic-remarks/

” data-medium-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ks.webp?w=300″ data-large-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ks.webp?w=640″ loading=”lazy” src=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ks.webp” alt width=”758″ height=”474″>

The Robot

On my plane ride back to America, I watched the movie, Sound of Freedom, and I tried to imagine how difficult it would be to explain the controversy surrounding the film to someone from the past or future or a non-Western country who doesn’t have a fairly intricate grasp of the bizarre permutations of the American culture war.

It’s a movie about an American guy who rescues children who have been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. It was made on a $14.5 million budget, but ended up making almost $250 million globally because a significant portion of conservative (and mostly Christian) Americans fell in love with the movie not just because of the film’s quality or because the subject matter resonated with them, but because there’s a vague notion on the conservative side of the American culture war that the political left tries to sexualize children too much and/or doesn’t care enough about the sexualization of children. On the most extreme end of the political right, there are loony radicals like Qanon who believe that there are secret child sex ring cabals in the highest office of American politics being protected by corrupt (mostly left wing) politicians. In turn, the left wing of the culture war was inherently suspicious of Sound of Freedom because even though the film’s self-contained message (ie. society should stop children from being sold into sex slavery) is unambiguously good and universally supported by polite society, that message is wielded by the right wing of the culture war, sometimes to truly absurd degrees like Qanon conspiracy theories. Therefore, left wing pundits wrote dozens of articles about how bad and stupid the movie is filled with lots of  criticisms of the message (like how the movie is about children being kidnapped by strangers to be sold into slavery, but in real life, children are more often sold into slavery by their own relatives, so the film is spreading misleading ideas). Also, the real life guy that the film is based on seems to have committed his own sexual transgressions, possibly against kids. Also the actor who plays the guy in the movie is a hardcore Christian and said some pro-Qanon stuff. As a result of all that, it’s surprisingly difficult to find objective, legitimate analysis and criticism of the film, because everything in America is consumed by the cultural war, so every pundit’s opinion on Sound of Freedom is actually just an expression of their cultural values.

The point is that understanding how Kais Saied (roughly pronounced “Ky-ees Sy-eed”) got elected is probably about as confusing to outsiders as understanding how Sound of Freedom became so loved/hated. It’s seemingly impossible to find a good consolidated explanation for the former, so my understanding is derived from dozens of online articles, including from Wikipedia, Africa Center (really good), Middle East Eye, another Middle East Eye, another Middle Easy Eye, Al-Monitor, Marianne, Orient XXI, the Carnegie Endowment, another Carnegie Endowment, Reuters, another Reuters, the Africa Report, Al Jazeera, the Brussels International Center, BBC, another BBC, and another BBC, lots of other random articles, and lots of Reddit posts. Despite all this reading, I still don’t feel like I have a great grasp of the man or his political trajectory, so, as always, I welcome any commenters to tell me where I’m wrong or what I’m missing.

Kais Saied was born near Cap Bon not far from Tunis in 1958, shortly after Tunisian independence. His family was educated and middle-class, but nothing out of the ordinary. Saied had a successful career as a constitutional lawyer in academia, and he was briefly hired by the Arab League for his legal expertise. He married a judge, and portending his future success, he was well-liked by university students as a teacher.

Saied’s political ambitions appear to have been activated by the 2011 revolution and overthrow of Ben Ali. In the aftermath, he started publishing political commentary and appearing on Tunisian news channels as a talking head, and “began spreading his ideas by traveling the country through a network of young people. A campaign conducted in coffee shops, close to Tunisians. If there’s a secret to his popularity, it must first be found in this patient fieldwork, based on proximity to social movements and ideas.” I have yet to find an explanation for how Saied went from “random college professor” to “impromptu coffee shop discussion group activist circuit runner.”

As a guy in his mid-50s, Saied’s primary thrust at the time was that the revolution wasn’t deep or comprehensive enough. It was good that Ben Ali had been thrown out of power, but the political restructuring in his wake was too timid and left most of the old political figures and factions in power. Saied pushed for rewriting the constitution and reforming the state to make it more liberal, more democratic, more decentralized, and designed to usher in a new, younger generation of Tunisian politicians. This, unsurprisingly, resonated with the young Tunisians he met at all those coffee shops.

Most articles frame this period as one of anodyne excitement with Saied emerging as a peripheral political figure out of sheer enthusiasm for the revolution. But the Orient XXI article portrays Saied as more calculating and ambitious: “In 2013, Saied and his friends took part in rather confidential political meetings, attended by young people convinced they had been defrauded of their revolution. This little group believed in Saied. Like him, they hated political parties, did not believe in intermediary bodies, and were firmly convinced that their movement would overcome, that it was only a matter of time.”

In 2014, with the forming of the new constitution and the election of President Essebi, Saied’s public profile mysteriously dropped as he stopped publishing and appearing on tv. However, Saied was likely working behind the scenes to build more support for his ideas. By 2016, he was said to be leading a “movement” called “Mouassissoun” that amassed support throughout the country and especially online.

In July 2019, President Essebi unexpectedly died and early elections were triggered along with chaotic scrambling by all the parties to find viable candidates. Essebi’s Nidaa Tounes party was always kind of a rickety coalition of moderate anti-Islamists, so without Essebi, it quickly fractured into multiple new smaller parties. This left Ennahada, the conservative Islamist party, as by far the most cohesive faction and early front-runner in the election. But despite its consistent and widespread support, Ennahada’s popularity never came close to a majority of the country, and young Tunisians in particular were highly hostile to Ennahada’s cultural and political leanings. On top of all, given the terrible economy, worsening corruption, and general dissatisfaction with Tunisia’s governance since the Arab Spring, all major parties were polling terribly.

Hence it was a perfect situation for independent outsider candidates to make their marks. Tunisia was primed for its Nayib Bukele, someone who wasn’t just outside the political system, but openly opposed to it, who could sweep away the rot and bring true representation to the people. Hopefully.

Of course, Kais Saied found his footing in this environment, but he was not alone. In fact, for much of the election period, Saied was considered a weird sideshow by most of the Tunisian media and political sphere while a different outsider came to the forefront. Out of the 33 approved candidates in the 2019 Tunisian presidential election, the top candidate to emerge early on was not Essebi’s Prime Minister, or ex-president Marzouki, or Ennahada’s guy, but Nabil Karoui.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nabil-karoui-set-become-tunisias-first-prisoner-president

” data-medium-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/karoui-2.jpg?w=300″ data-large-file=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/karoui-2.jpg?w=760″ loading=”lazy” src=”https://mattlakeman.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/karoui-2.jpg?w=760″ alt width=”760″ height=”530″>

Karoui was the 56 year old head of Tunisia’s largest television station, and he had a pretty good pitch to the Tunisian people. He was rich! He was a self-made businessman! The Tunisian economy was in the toilet, and he was going to fix it with pro-market, liberalizing reforms! He was a full-fledged secularist too, a modern, Western-oriented figure who could pull the country away from Ennehada and backward Islamism. During the Arab Spring, he had even gotten into trouble with the government for showing Persepolis on one of his tv stations, for which he was charged with “violating sacred values” and “disturbing the public order,” and was fined.

Plus, Karoui was smooth and handsome and charming in interviews. And he was suddenly using his ample wealth to conspicuously go on a massive charitable spending spree, to the point of distributing truck-fulls of food to impoverished rural voters Tunisians. Granted, he had never actually held political office before, but he had been an important back-room wheeling-and-dealing guy during the aftermath of the revolution. He helped set up the Nidaa Tounes party, and in 2023, he was supposedly responsible for setting the meeting between Ennahada and Nidaa Tounes that made the left-right grand coalition that diffused a near-civil war. He was a smart, telegenic, successful outsider, and not a bad candidate.

On the candidacy downside, Karoui was a rich guy in an impoverished country. Most other impoverished countries end up being run by rich guys and it usually doesn’t work out too well. That’s because rich guys in impoverished countries don’t get rich unless they are corrupt, and Karoui didn’t seem to be an exception since he was trailing a long line of bribery, money laundering, and tax evasion charges. This perception was not helped when his television station began blasting pro-Karoui media all day and night, which, while probably not illegal, made him seem a bit slimy.

Still, before the formal candidacy period, Karoui was polling very well with middle class and professional voters, and he was pulling decently with some of those impoverished rural areas that had been getting free food from his charities for a few years. Meanwhile, Karoui’s emerging biggest opponent, Kais Saied, had overwhelming support from Tunisia’s young voters, particularly university students.

In July 2019, two months before the election, Karoui and his brother were hit with fresh money laundering charges from the government’s main anti-corruption unit, as well as new charges claiming he hired an American lobbying firm to lobby the US, Russian, and European Union governments to help him get elected as President of Tunisia. I’m not exactly sure how that would work, but despite his assets being frozen and him being forbidden from leaving the country, Karoui’s popularity not only seemed to hold, but may have been boosted. He denied the charges and said the political establishment was making them up to take him down so he couldn’t get into power and drain the swamp.

Then in August, a month before the election, Karoui was formally arrested. He remained in jail until after the first round of voting, thereby stopping him from campaigning throughout the entire crucial run-up to the election. Again, Karoui railed against the establishment and blamed his charges on a conspiracy by Ennehada to stop his candidacy.

The thing is… he was probably right. There’s nothing close to a smoking gun, but there is circumstantial evidence that Ennehada had given up on its own candidate and was hoping that out of the top two outsider candidates, Kais Saied would defeat Nabil Karoui, so the party leaned on its political appointees in the anti-corruption unit to crack down on the latter.

This prompts the riddle of Kais Saied. How was he simultaneously the chosen candidate of young, revolutionary Tunisians who wanted to completely transform the political system to complete the Arab Spring Revolution, AND eventually the preferred candidate of the stodgy, conservative, Islamist party that represented the largest political opposition to reform? How was Saied simultaneously Tunisia’s Barrack Obama and… Mitch McConnell? I can’t think of a good American analog.

I am not alone in the confusion, but Africa Center probably had the best summary:

“Several labels are already being tossed around to try to pin [Saied] down politically and ideologically. Some suspect him of being an Islamist wolf in sheep’s clothing, while others paint him as a radical Arab nationalist, Marxist, or anarchist. The reality is far more complex and nuanced. Saied’s politics and ideology defy easy categorization.”

Let’s start with the most basic aspect of his presidential candidacy: his appearance.

Charitably, Kais Saied is a striking figure. Uncharitably, he is extremely weird looking. I don’t think it’s excessive to call him ghoulish:

This is not a cherry-picked photo. He always looks exactly like this:

His wife, Ichraf Saied, is certainly more vibrant in appearance:

But in some photos they seem cut from the same cloth:

Saied’s mannerisms, speech, and personality are exactly what you’d expect based on how he looks. One source says “he expresses himself in an extremely formal, almost robotic manner.” His “character is straight, simple, commanding respect through his appearance, his height[,] but also through a modesty which naturally emanates from him.” He is known for his “rigidity, his no nonsense attitude, and his unflexibility.” He “has a stiff demeanour and no social media account.” He has a penchant for going on extremely lengthy speeches about constitutional and legal matters. His well-publicized (and extremely boring) hobbies are making traditional Arabic calligraphy and listening to traditional Arabic music. He is “a self-confessed loner.” One French magazine described him as “Robespierre, but without the guillotines.”

Saied has “an awkward public manner and a preference for an ultra-formal speaking style of classical Arabic.” This is a fun detail I had trouble wrapping my head around. The “Arabic” language has dozens (hundreds?) of permutations of varying levels of mutual comprehensibility, like “Syrian Arabic” or “Tunisian Arabic.” Saied often speaks in “Classical Arabic,” which is how Muhammad spoke back in 7th century Arabia. It’s a dialect that the vast majority of educated Muslims are familiar with, but not intimately, especially outside of a religious context where it’s used to recite the Koran and is associated with piety and high education. So a professor or politician randomly speaking in Classical Arabic is a bit like… maybe an American professor or politician speaking Shakespearean English? Regular people aren’t going to understand it all, but it will definitely make him sound smart.

All of the above combined to give Saied a nickname during his presidential campaign – “Robot.” Or sometimes, due to his background and emphasis on legal reform, “Robocop.”

All of this seems anti-conducive to an outsider candidate being swept into office on a wave of wild enthusiasm from young voters. But Saied’s appearance, mannerisms, and personality imbued him with an odd charisma. The Brussels International Center describes him as “a puzzling character. He seems to represent the traditional ‘professor figure’ in the popular psyche, leading what could be qualified as a ‘banal’ lifestyle, similar to that of an average Tunisian.”

Perhaps most importantly, being an old, boring robot amplified Saied’s perception of being incorruptible. Most of the presidential candidates were establishment assholes, and Karoui was a too-rich, too-smooth, probably crooked businessman, while Saied was a homely university professor who had spent almost a decade banging on about legal statutes. What he lacked in youthful exuberance he made up in apparent wisdom and consistency.

But what were Saied’s policies? For all his faults, Karoui the businessman had a policy-oriented pitch for the Tunisian people with concrete goals, mostly concerning the economy. And while Ennehada tended to be less direct about its intentions, it was popularly understood that the party wanted to revert some of Tunisia’s longstanding secular reforms and bring the country closer to its more traditional Arab neighbors. What did Saied offer as an alternative?

The answer was… not much. In yet another Bukele parallel, Saied’s presidential campaign was famously light on either ideological statements or concrete policy positions. Instead, his default stance was to invoke what “the people want,” a reference to a popular slogan during the Arab Spring calling for political reform. Any attempt to drill down on what that actually meant ran into vague generalizations about legal and political structure reform to remove the old guard and usher in a new generation. He only got into specifics when talking about tweaking constitutional provisions or electoral law, and he could talk on these issues in great pedantic detail indefinitely. His most well-defined policy proposal was a plan to decentralize much of Parliament’s power to regional bodies elected locally, a plan Saied had been circulating for years. But how that would actually impact a random person’s economic fortunes or taxes or lifestyle was left to the imagination.

In what was to become a running theme of Saied’s political career, it’s still not clear whether the vagueness of his platform was a product of vapidity or a 5D chess move. The Orient XXI article makes an intriguing case for the latter:

“With no program to defend, no party to promote, they had only a plain leaflet with a portrait of Kais Saied and his famous slogan: “The people want”. What they put forward was their candidate’s promise of change, with no precise timetable. But what kind of change? In Saied’s mind, the important thing was to change people’s awareness, as individuals. And the young people campaigning for him stressed what seemed to them most important about this man: his honesty, his probity, his integrity, and the consistency of his convictions since 2011. However vague his proposals, Saied had succeeded in establishing a bond of trust with his supporters who had come to believe there was nothing utopian about his promises. This mutual trust was facilitated by the fact that Saied had put his finger on the ways the transition had misfired. Indeed, his speeches all revolved around the need to fight corruption, to denounce the violation of constitutional laws and to place the people and especially the young at the centre of the country’s political life. He also emphasised the need to neutralise the political class and restore the power of the State, to be led by a president embodying the will of the people.”

However, under questioning from journalists and background checks, some of Saied’s policy positions were eventually identified, and they were not particularly encouraging. The death penalty was technically legal in Tunisia but hadn’t been carried out since 1991 when Ben Ali started preferring life imprisonment; but in a June 2019 interview, Saied said he wanted to start executing people again. He was also anti-homosexual, seemingly wanted to keep it illegal in Tunisia, and suggested that foreigners were spreading homosexuality in Tunisia. On religious grounds, he opposed the recently passed law equalizing inheritance rights between men and women. Also, he was extremely anti-Israel.

Regardless of some controversial policy stances, Saied ran his political campaign with the same aesthetic of his appearance and personality – low-key, calm, restrained, sometimes nonexistent. He had no political party, almost no campaign structure, and basically no money. Once campaign season kicked off, Saied purchased no advertisements and made no television or radio appearances, just an occasional written press interview and sometimes he showed up on Facebook videos to make dry, extended speeches on Tunisian law. Meanwhile, a growing army of volunteers was enthusiastically spreading the word of Saied both in public street rallies and online. This combination of extremely passive direct campaigning and extremely active indirect campaigning created a “mystification surrounding his persona” which soon pushed Saied ahead of all the establishment candidates and in closest competition with Karoui.

The Tunisian presidential election is determined by two rounds of voting. In the first, voters can select from all candidates (33 ran in 2019); in the second round, the top two candidates have a run-off. Again, no polling was legally allowed in the two weeks leading up to the election, so a fog of war descended over Tunisia’s politics. But given that the television and radio waves were constantly covering Karoui, Ennehada’s candidate, and a handful of candidates descended from Nidaa Tounes, Saied was generally considered a sideshow by the Tunisian establishment and much of the population. But then the votes were counted after the first round:

Saied won. Karoui came in second, and Safi Said, the guy who coined the term “Arab Spring,” came in sixth. Combined, these three outsider candidates got about 30% of the vote. That still left almost 70% of the vote for Ennahada and the other mainstream parties, but only the top two candidates would be eligible for the second round. It was the weird, ideologically vague, almost campaignless professor Saied vs. the flashy, rich, smooth, still-imprisoned, probably corrupt Karoui.

The post-vote polling was interesting too. Saied got 37% of the 18-25 year old vote, compared to Karoui’s 9%. But Karoui got 20% of 46-60 year old voters compared to Saied’s 10%, and Karoui carried 25% of 60+ voters. But Karoui’s biggest demographic advantage was education… or lack thereof. Among voters with no schooling, he got 41% compared to Saied’s 8%. But among university-educated voters, Saied got 25% while Karoui got negligible support.

The optimistic take on Karoui’s numbers was that he got the solid support of the middle classes, particularly older people who wanted a return to economic stability, along with Tunisia’s poorest looking for economic opportunity. The cynical take on Karoui’s numbers was that he brainwashed all the old people who overwhelmingly watched his news stations and he bought the votes of a mass of impoverished people by giving them free food. Meanwhile, Saied’s numbers seemed more clearly the product of his odd campaign finding such strong traction in a particular demographic that it drove huge turnout in a narrow band and won him the election.

There was more bad news for Kairouan – he was still in jail. Having survived the first election round, he was now in a 1v1 election campaign against Saied, but Karoui couldn’t actually do any campaigning while locked behind bars. Saied’s response to this issue was another “is he really smart or really stupid?” moment – Saied promised the public that he also wouldn’t do any campaigning. He claimed this would ensure democratic fairness. If he campaigned against a non-campaigning Karoui, then he wouldn’t be a legitimate winner, but if they both didn’t campaign, then it would all be on the level.

True to his word, Saied officially did nothing for the next month, though of course his mass of supporters took to the streets to campaign on his behalf. Meanwhile, Karoui did his best to get out of jail, and combined with increasing public pressure against the Tunisian government to let the guy who might be the next president go free, he was eventually successful. On October 9, four days before the second election round, Karoui was released from prison. On October 11, Karoui and Saied had their single televised debate:

On October 14, the second voting round was held and Saied massacred Karoui, 73% to 27%. The landslide win was the culmination of Saied’s strange, needle-threading candidacy.

After the first presidential election round, Ennehada was knocked out of the presidential race, but in the October Parliamentary election, Ennehada got 20% of the seats, the most of any party, while Karoui’s Heart of Tunisia party got 15%, the second-most. Saied didn’t have a party, so he had no official backing in the Parliament at all. So this left Ennehada and the other smaller conservative parties with an opportunity. Without their guy in the second presidential race, they could either throw their weight behind Karoui or Saied in the second round, and since Saied didn’t have his own Parliamentary base and appeared to have some conservative Islamist sympathies, he was the natural choice.

Hence, Kais Saied, with absolutely no official political experience, no party, and no money, rode to the presidency on the back of a makeshift coalition of passionate liberal university students and older conservative moderate Islamists from the political establishment.

Once in power, the Kais Saied regime got off to a rough start.

As per the constitution that he knew so well, Saied’s first task was to appoint a Prime Minister to form a government out of a coalition of Parliamentary representatives. Due to whatever back-door deals had been made, Saied chose Ennehada’s guy for the role. But after almost two months of negotiations, Ennehada couldn’t get the parties to agree to a coalition. So Saied replaced him with a new guy, the former minister of finance and tourism from a relatively neutral party, and a month later a coalition government was accepted, albeit without support from Karoui’s Heart of Tunisia nor the slightly resurgent old party of Ben Ali and Bourguiba.

That lasted three months. Then, in June 2020, an Al Jazeera investigative journalist revealed that the Prime Minster’s company had just received a plushy government contract. Was it corruption or coincidence? It didn’t matter; the anti-corruption regime of Saied sacked him and brought in yet another Prime Minister to make yet another government.

Hichem Mechichi, an independent, was slid into the role from the Ministry of the Interior in September and he quickly put together a government that managed to last more than three months, but it wasn’t exactly a stable configuration. After so much bickering from the parties, Saied and Mechichi’s cabinet consisted of mostly independents with no party affiliation, and Ennahada’s arm really had to be twisted to go along with it. Plus, for reasons I’ve never seen entirely explained, Saied and Mechichi’s relationship fell apart as quickly as it began. The government was running, but just barely.

After this point is where it gets hard for me to find objective analysis, but here is my understanding of the events that lead up to Kais Saied’s quasi-coup.

While Saied was trying to put his government together and dealing with all the cabinets and Parliamentary coalitions, the COVID-19 pandemic was breaking out. Tunisia, as a rather poor country with a bad health care system to begin with, was getting slammed with one of the highest per capita death rates in Africa and the already terrible economy fell into a deep recession. Whether rightly or wrongly, blame for the pandemic response and the economy was increasingly directed toward the government, which indeed was corrupt and inefficient. It especially didn’t help that most of the cabinet ministers were independents and had trouble convincing Parliament to do anything, leaving much of the high government in a state of perpetual deadlock.

However, though many Tunisian people blamed the government, it was ambiguous exactly which part of the government was responsible for their woes. Was it newly elected President Saied mishandling levers of power due to inexperience? Was it Mechichi, who was maybe yet another incompetent Prime Minister? Was it Ennehada (the largest party in Parliament) and its backward proclivities? Was it the other parties in Parliament dragging their feet? Different people had different opinions of who was at fault, but everyone agreed that the government was a giant mess.

In mid-January 2021, protests hit a new local peak across the country. Prime Minister Mechichi went on tv and promised that reforms would be made. He then proposed a cabinet shake-up to Parliament allegedly designed to bring in more party members to break the deadlock. Mechichi’s proposal passed Parliament but then was surprisingly rejected by President Saied. From Reuters: “Kais Saied said the reshuffle would be unconstitutional on procedural grounds, condemned the absence of women among the prospective new ministers and said some likely new cabinet members may have conflicts of interest, without giving details.” Another source says that the above was a not-so-veiled allusion to calling these ministers corrupt. I also found a very anti-Ennehada Reddit comment claiming that some of the new appointees were criminals. I don’t know.

For the next two months, nothing officially happened in the government while protests raged throughout Tunisia. Both Saied and Mechichi waited for the other to do something – a resignation, a firing, a call for new elections, a new proposed cabinet… anything. But nothing happened and the “cold war” continued. But behind the scenes, the President, the Prime Minister, and the Parliament were engaging in exciting, nail-biting, fateful legal arguments about who had what powers to do what things.

I guess this is an area where Saied diverges from Bukele. The latter’s first coupish action was marching the military into the legislature and making veiled threats to force the approval of a $100+ million loan to buy new military equipment to fight street gangs. His later coupish activity was winning massive landslide elections and then immediately firing everyone he didn’t like.

But Saied’s coupish preamble was a lot more boring. I couldn’t describe it better than Al Jazeera:

“The crisis that has paralysed governance in Tunisia is multidimensional. The latest episode was set off by Mechichi’s decision to dismiss ministers seen as friendly to the president. But more fundamentally, he and Saied are at loggerheads over their different conceptions of the function of the prime minister’s office and the limits of his authority and the limits of presidential interference in the operation of government. Complicating matters further is the tense relationship between the president and Parliament, both of which also have incompatible interpretations of their constitutional prerogatives. In the absence of a constitutional court, which has yet to be appointed, there is no final arbiter to definitively resolve these disagreements. Moreover, the mutual distrust and antipathy between the president and Parliament precludes hammering out a solution to basic political questions like the appointment of Cabinet personnel; instead, what are essentially political disagreements snowball into constitutional arguments.”

In March 2021, President Saied asked Prime Minister Mechichi to resign, but the latter refused. I wasn’t aware that this was a thing that could happen, but it can. The President asked the Prime Minister to leave, but he didn’t, so they ostensibly continued working together.

According to Middle East Eye, in May, the outlet received a leaked document outlining a plan written by Saied’s top advisor for launching a coup against his political opponents by luring them to the presidential palace on the pretense of a national security crisis, then declaring emergency powers for the presidential office, and then arresting anyone who disagreed.

In early July, the health ministry rolled out the first round of COVID-19 vaccines and it was, by all accounts, a disaster. Without consulting Mechichi, Saied declared that all health matters would be removed from the Health Ministry and be turned over to the military.

On July 25, Saied finally struck by declaring a state of emergency. He announced that Prime Minister Mechichi was unilaterally fired, that Parliament was closed for 30 days, that all members of Parliament had their prosecutorial immunity revoked (thereby permitting their arrest if they refused the president’s orders), and for good measure, Saied ordered the police to surround and lock down the Parliament building. Also, Saied declared himself to be his own attorney general with full prosecutorial powers. In effect, Saied placed the executive and judicial branches under his direct control while at least temporarily knocking the legislative branch offline and subjugating it through the implicit threat of arrests.

Of course, Saied declared all this to be within his lawful constitutional powers as president, and as a constitutional expert, he had lengthy justifications at the ready. The basic idea is that Article 80 of the Tunisian constitution permits the president to assume enhanced executive powers in the face of an imminent threat to the country. And to be fair to Saied, what constitutes enhanced powers and an imminent threat are not well defined, and so maybe he could plausibly claim that the COVID-19 pandemic and the lackluster government response thus far was the threat, and any expansion of the president’s power could be justified to combat it.

However, Article 80 also states that before invoking the Article, the President must consult with his Prime Minister and the Speaker of the Assembly, and at his announcement, Saied claimed he had indeed consulted with them. But… that was news to Prime Minister Mechichi and Speaker Rached Ghannouchi (of Ennehada), both of whom publicly stated after the fact that they had no prior knowledge of Saied’s maneuver. Thus, even if you buy the emergency powers claims, most experts on the subject believe Saied blatantly overstepped his presidential authority and consider his actions to be a “self-coup,” or a coup directed by a leader at his own government to enhance his personal powers.

How did everyone respond to President Saied’s declaration?

The day after, Prime Minister Mechichi announced that he would resign from office. The Middle East Eye claims that he was literally beaten into submission and had physical signs of assault, but Mechichi denies this.

Speaker Ghannouchi, fresh from a stint in the hospital due to COVID-19, declared the occurrence of a coup and marched on parliament with his supporters. When they were barred from entering, they staged a sit-in.

Heart of Tunisia (Karoui’s party) and the Dignity Coalition (the more hardcore Islamist party) also denounced Saied’s declaration as a coup. Many of the smaller parties followed suit a few days later.

So Saied lost the support of almost the whole government, but he kept one key faction – the guys with the guns. The Tunisian military, having apparently been briefed in advance and chosen its side, followed Saied’s orders and took up advanced security positions at the Presidential Palace, Parliament, and throughout the country. I have not seen any explanations for how Saied, as a political outsider with no party and no prior experience, was able to create such a strong alliance with the military after only 1.5 years in office.

The response from the Tunisian masses was more mixed. Protests and counter-protests erupted throughout the country, with most of the former being led by Ennehada supporters. There were occasional violent clashes between the two but nothing too extreme as the police and military kept the peace. There was no clear popular consensus about Saied’s actions from the people.

While I am nowhere near as sympathetic to Saied’s coup as Nayib Bukele’s in El Salvador, I’ll try to give Kais Saied his due. What’s the most charitable take on why he decided to take over the Tunisian government?

Like El Salvador, Tunisia was dealing with a massive systemic problem that undermined the basic functionality of the government (gangs in the former case, COVID-19 and economic collapse in the latter). And like in El Salvador, Tunisia’s government was hopelessly corrupt and inefficient. Some combination of a bad legal structure and weak cooperative norms had left the state borderline-defunct in the face of crisis. Both Bukele and Saied recognized this reality and invoked means of highly questionable legality (though not blatant violence) to clear the deadlock and enact policies to confront the challenge. Plus, once they had enhanced power, they could enact structural reforms to prevent future deadlock.

Or in other words, yes, democracy is ideal, but in a fundamentally broken political system, indefinitely relying on democracy can perpetuate the system’s failings. Maybe Bukele and Saied could have called some sort of constitutional convention to fix the structural problems, but that would have taken forever, would have let the country continue to decay in the face of its imminent threat, and the product of the convention would be compromised in 500 different directions by petty political parties and factions all trying to extract value from the state and the people for their own benefit. So it was better to just seize power in a moment of bloodless declaration with the help of a loyal military, and then set things right with fast, efficient, top-down methods. And all this can go especially well if the will of the people is genuinely behind the will of the leader, as was definitely the case with Bukele, and to a far lesser degree with Saied.

The most important risk factor in a dictatorship gambit is that success and failure are concentrated in a single individual. I don’t think Bukele is some sort of historically great genius, but I’m still net-positive on my assessment of his usurpation of power in El Salvador because his opposition was genuinely paralyzing the state for no good reason and Bukele is a sharp guy who had an actual plan for fixing El Salvador and has since demonstrated decisive and generally good decision-making. At least thus far, the erosion of democratic institutions has paid off for El Salvador by bringing the country better policies and governance, most obviously in the annihilation of the gangs with a police state-style crime crackdown.

Or to put it more simply, El Salvador had a gang problem, Bukele proposed a big viable plan for fighting the gangs (the Territorial Control Plan and later the crackdown), the democratic institutions dragged their feet, so Bukele concentrated power in himself to enact his plan, which has been accomplished successfully.

In contrast, the problem with Saied’s grasp for power is that he didn’t actually propose an alternative vision for how to govern Tunisia. It’s never been clear what it is that he stands for aside from opposing the political establishment. And sure, Tunisia’s political establishment is largely corrupt and useless, but there are many possible leaders and policy slates that are just as bad or worse than corrupt and useless. Saied had no master plan for dealing with COVID-19 or the economy or corruption, at least not a significant one he ever unveiled to the world. He just kept insisting that the political establishment constantly got in his way of doing… whatever it was that he intended to do.

This wraps back around to my initial confusion over Kais Saied. It’s baffling that such a political non-entity managed to achieve so much political power in so little time. He looks weird, he sounds weird, he has no money, he has no political party, and he has few-to-no major concrete policy plans concerning the economy, corruption, foreign affairs, or any of the other issues that actually impact Tunisians on a day-to-day basis. What few political ideas he does have (anti-gay, pro-death penalty, very religious) should have alienated his enthusiastic youthful supporters, and his general anti-establishment stance should have alienated his Ennehada backers, but somehow both fell in line behind him for a time. Then once in power, he fumbled around for 1.5 years constantly fighting with his colleagues and other major political players until he barely had a functioning government. Then he basically launched a coup with legal declarations and barely held on to power due to the support of the military and the continued disgust of a significant portion of the Tunisian population with the pre-existing political establishment.

And so, over the course of about two years, a college professor with no political experience became the semi-dictator of a country.

In July 2021, President Kais Saied had knocked down the political establishment and his opponents, but he still needed to consolidate control over Tunisia.

First, he appointed a new far-more-loyal Prime Minister (a woman, the first in Tunisia’s history) and began building a new government that would do his bidding without the factionalism that had plagued his regime since day one. In September, Saied made a new slate of announcements, including that he would rule by decree as the head of the executive, that members of Parliament would no longer receive salaries, and that he was putting together a commission to rewrite the obviously now broken constitution.

In July and August, Saied used some of his new powers to place 70 judges and members of Parliament under arrest for speaking out against his decrees, while many others were placed under surveillance. Most were held under house arrest for a few months, some were put in jail for a year or two.

Saied then embarked on the classic poor country anti-corruption campaign template. That is, he closed all the pre-existing anti-corruption agencies and set up his own with a mandate to arrest high-level officials on the grounds of corruption or other charges like terrorism or conspiracy. The problem is, to observers like myself and the Tunisian public, it’s impossible to tell whether the charges are true or not. Because, on the one hand, Saied is obviously motivated by power politics to arrest these individuals for opposing his regime, and given that Saied’s regime often operates outside the law, it’s entirely plausible that all the charges are made up or exaggerated. On the other hand, these high-level officials are all rich people working in government in an impoverished country, so there is a roughly 99.9% chance that they really are corrupt. So maybe it’s a good thing they were arrested? But they were arrested for opportunistic reasons to support an authoritarian regime, so maybe it was a bad thing they were arrested? I don’t know, it could go either way. Periodic arrests in this vein have continued intermittently for the past four years since Saied’s power grab.

Some “anti-corruption” highlights:

• In December 2021, the deputy head of Ennehada was arrested on terrorism charges, released a few months later due to international pressure, and then rearrested in 2023.
• Karoui, Saied’s top competitor in the 2019 election, was arrested in December 2020 (before the coup) for tax evasion and money laundering, released in June 2021 (with the help of a hunger strike), and then arrested a month later in Algeria after fleeing Tunisia for illegally crossing the border. He has since been tried in absentia in Tunisia and given longer sentences, but no one officially knows where he is. Presumably, he’s either rotting in an Algerian prison or has bribed his way to a quiet life in a country with no Tunisian extradition treaty, which is most of them.
• In October 2023, the head of the reformed party of Ben Ali and Bourguiba was arrested and has been held in a women’s prison ever since.
• In January 2024, the head of the National Salvation Front was charged with corruption for soliciting funds from foreign sources, including Henry Kissinger, who had died a few months earlier.
• Rached Ghannouchi, the head of Ennehada and the Speaker of the Assembly who was clearly not consulted during the coup, was questioned numerous times on various corruption charges and finally arrested and sentenced to three years imprisonment in February 2024.
• In February 2025, Saied launched the biggest crackdown of his political career since the coup by sentencing 41 individuals to fines and prison for allegedly “conspiring against state security.” Saied’s former Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi was sentenced to 35 years, as was Ghannouchi’s son. A bunch of journalists got multi-decade sentences too.

Saied’s final consolidation of power came from restricting the media. Most of it was standard authoritarian stuff – pronouncements of off-limit topics, limiting licensing, declaring more state issues to be related to national security so the press would be blocked from investigating, etc. But on the more extreme level, Al Jazeera’s Tunisia office was raided within weeks of Saied’s declaration for harshly criticizing his actions. Then, in September 2022, Saied passed “Decree Law 54” which criminalized spreading misinformation online with a penalty of up to five years imprisonment and a fine of up to 50,000 dinars (about $16,400). Of course, not every Tunisian shit poster has been thrown in jail yet, but there have been maybe a few dozen high-profile cases of Decree Law 54 arrests that have undoubtedly had a chilling effect on anti-Saied sentiment.

So the process of President Saied taking over Tunisia was not instantaneous, but over the course of a few years, his top political rivals were arrested, the constitution and political structures were reformed to his liking, and the press was curtailed. He faced resistance in the form of international condemnation and plenty of public protests, but with military backing and enough of the Tunisian people on his side, he had taken power with relative ease. But once Kais Saied had his own country, what did he do with it?

The most pressing issue for most Tunisians was the economy, a topic Saied barely discussed during his 2019 presidential campaign, in contrast to Karoui. And to be fair, there have been major economic reforms since Saied broke the gridlock and took expanded power in July 2021. Unfortunately, none of them have been good; he has essentially launched a speed run to turn Tunisia into a typical Sub-Saharan economic basket case.

Saied’s signature economic effort has been giving people free money. In 2018, government transfer payments and subsidies were 6% of GDP; by 2023, they had reached 12% under Saied, mostly taking the form of government-paid subsidies for fuel, electricity, gas, and grains through government-owned corporations. Unsurprisingly, Tunisia, a country with a GDP per capita under $4,000, was already in terrible fiscal shape before this spending spree, but under Saied, Tunisia quickly hit an annual GDP fiscal deficit of 8%.

This has thrust Tunisia into the early stages of a classic third world economic death spiral. Subsidies bring short-term economic relief to the poor and middle classes, but there isn’t enough tax revenue to pay for these subsidies and they crowd out productive economic activity, which further hinders tax revenue, thereby leading to unsustainable deficits. The natural solution is to cut the subsidies, but as with all government programs, it’s a million times easier for the government to give people free money than to take it away. So to avoid political upheaval, the state resorts to borrowing and money printing along with various economic regulations (like price and import controls) just to maintain status quo levels of consumption. But that can only last for so long until either the state needs to make the painful real cuts or declare bankruptcy. Either way, the reality that a nation cannot consume what it has not produced is inevitably felt by the state and people.

In Tunisia’s case, the post-coup Saied regime began to feel the unsustainability of the costs of its new subsidy programs within only a year of its implementation when the debt-to-GDP ratio hit almost 80%. So it began to tepidly limit some subsidies to some regions, but this triggered a bunch of regional protests, and given Saied’s tenuous control over the state, these cuts were largely reversed.

With the sensible option blocked off, the regime looked into less sensible options. Most of these transfer programs subsidize the purchase of basic goods for normal Tunisians, like grains and sugars, and with domestic demand fully saturated, this means the subsidies help Tunisians import these goods from abroad. But encouraging such imports had rapidly drained the foreign currency reserves, so one of the regime’s stop-gap measures has been to establish import ceilings on these goods. In other words… the Saied regime gives Tunisians money to import goods, and then establishes regulations to stop them from importing these goods. The end result is effectively the rationing of basic goods – in 2023 and 2024, for the first time in decades, Tunisia faced shortages of flour, cooking oil, rice, and sugar.

In early 2023, the IMF tried to come to the rescue with the usual offer – it would give Tunisia basically free money (a $1.9 billion low-interest loan) if the Tunisian government would stop doing all the stupid stuff that rendered it nearly bankrupt in the first place, especially the food and energy subsidies. Saied rejected the offer, calling the terms, “diktats,” and pledging that Tunisia could find its own way in the world without being controlled by Western bankers.

So to avoid bankruptcy and keep the subsidies going for a moment longer, Saied turned up the printing press to internally monetize debt at the cost of driving the Tunisian dinar to a 2023 inflation rate of 9.3%, and 2024 rate of 7%, which was terrible for the Tunisian economy, particularly middle class Tunisians who had domestically saved their wealth. But the inflation did have the silver lining of making my 2025 trip to Tunisia really really cheap. And to be fair, it did actually put a big dent in the debt problem:

Also legitimately to his credit, Saied really did try to tackle one economic Gordion knot. Like every other third world country, Tunisia has a massively overstuffed public sector that drags down the rest of the economy. In 2020, over 16% of GDP went to paying the public sector workforce, including 97% of the Education Ministry’s budget. After the coup, Saied launched a panel to figure out how to systematically slash government jobs without causing half the country to revolt, but it didn’t really find a solution. Saied went through with it anyway, cutting public sector workforce expenditure down to 13.6% of GDP by 2024 and replacing a huge portion of the education workforce with a horde of substitute teachers.

The Carnegie Endowment summarized the current economic situation:

“Saied’s economic improvisation, based on rejection of reforms and heavy reliance on domestic debt (given the scarcity of external debt sources), has sacrificed productive investments in favor of preserving a costly status quo. Investment has been in steady decline since 2011 and has not recovered from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic, falling from 26 percent of GDP in 2011 to 14 percent in 2023, with a record low of 13 percent in 2020, with dramatic consequences in terms of unemployment and poverty. Unemployment has risen sharply, with youth unemployment reaching 39 percent and university graduate unemployment reaching 24 percent in 2023. Seventeen percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and regional disparities mean that poverty reaches 37 percent in the center-west region.”

You would expect a tremendous amount of popular backlash to these economic policies and their results, and indeed there have been periodic protests and a general sentiment that the economy is worse than ever. But Saied has managed to deflect at least some of the blame coming his way.

First, he has relied on increasingly nationalistic rhetoric to rally the support of older Tunisians and scapegoat foreigners. This was not only the basis of rejecting IMF support but Saied also claimed that rising food prices and inflation in general have been driven by nefarious foreign speculators trying to profit off Tunisia’s misfortune. Though net-negative on Saied, this 2024 African Report article describes him as having “shattered the image of a Tunisia dependent on the IMF” and having supposedly broken the nation away from the exploitative global trade community.

Second, Saied came up with a deficit reduction method more designed to curry favor with the masses than actually make money for the state. He launched a “criminal reconciliation committee” tasked with confronting Tunisians who got rich under the Ben Ali regime, charging them with a bunch of crimes, and then offering to reduce or eliminate their sentences if they repay the government for their transgressions, with the ultimate goal of recovering 13.5 billion dinars ($4.5 billion). In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince MBS tried something similar where he locked most of the wealthiest Saudis in a luxury hotel and then may-or-may-not have tortured them into surrendering the assets, and it turned out to be extremely popular with the Saudi people. As of writing this, there have been no significant reports of assets recovered by Saied’s goon squad.

Third, Saied’s regime has set up more than 100 local state-owned enterprises throughout Tunisia, particularly in rural areas, ostensibly to combat unemployment. But the Carnegie Endowment is almost certainly right that these are really attempts at initiating Saied-branded “clientism” by creating a whole new contingent of quasi-government workers whose paychecks are directly reliant on the Saied regime.

There are really only two more policies of note to come out of President Saied’s regime since the coup.

First, foreign policy-wise, Saied has leaned anti-Western, a bit more pro-China, substantially more pro-Arab, and he has made especially sure that everyone in Tunisia and around the world knows that he really, really hates Israel. Not that this was a surprise to anyone; in the previously posted presidential debate between Saied and Karoui, Saied said that it was treasonous for any Tunisian to want to normalize relations with Israel. Since becoming president, he has condemned Israel at every opportunity; shortly after the October 7, 2023 attack, Saied introduced a bill that would basically make it illegal for any Tunisian to go to Israel or do anything with any official Israeli organization or company.

In September 2023, Tunisia and much of the Mediterranean was hit by Storm Daniel, a cyclone that caused substantial property damage. In a video released the following month, Saied brought up the name of the storm and questioned why it was named after…

“A Hebrew prophet. And of course this name was chosen by the party that chooses the names of hurricanes. And why did no one question this name Daniel? Because the Zionist movement has penetrated and almost completely plunged the mind and thought into a state of intellectual coma! Yes, from Abraham to Daniel, it’s very clear.”

Obviously it’s all a bit unclear and out of context and translated, but President Saied appears to believe that Zionists influenced the Hellenic National Meteorological Service to name the storm, “Storm Daniel” after Daniel, a prominent character in the Torah, perhaps to strike fear in the hearts of anti-Zionists by conflating Judaism with the power of destructive weather. I don’t know.

Also, I have to confess that I spent about 10 minutes trying to brainstorm a joke that would conflate something like “President Saied is annoyed by Storm Daniel” with “President Trump is annoyed by Stormy Daniels,” probably using strikethroughs in some manner, but I just couldn’t think of anything. Commenters are welcome to try to write a paragraph on this topic and I may edit it into the essay.

President Saied’s only other major post-coup policy was finally getting to reform the government to his particular specifications. This was ostensibly the culmination of all his monotone legal lectures over the past two decades, and the result was a new constitution that created a more powerful president presiding over a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary. So, the Tunisian government sort of shifted from a more British model to a more American model. The new constitution was approved by a referendum in July 2022 with 95% of the vote, but the referendum was boycotted by the opposition and the voting was based on a 31% turnout.

Does this new political structure work better than the old one? Who knows? Maybe it really does prevent gridlock and permit more executive dynamism, but it’s impossible to say because Saied is the president, and all of his political opposition is either in jail or cowed into submission.

In October 2024, Saied won reelection to the presidency in a single round with 91% of the votes, defeating only two competitors. Including Saied, 11 candidates officially applied to run and many more unofficially announced they were running, but nearly all were disqualified due to various new regulatory adjustments introduced by the regime, like raising the minimum age to 40. One odd bureaucratic hurdle was that the election commission required candidates to submit a criminal record, but the government body responsible for giving out the official record kept refusing to do so. This hindered multiple imprisoned former party leaders from running, as well as Tunisian rapper K2Rhym, who not only disqualified, but then banned from political life indefinitely and thrown in jail for a year for alleged signature buying. Even one of the two guys who passed through the process and became an official candidate on the ballot was then imprisoned for 20 months on multiple bureaucratic charges (like “falsifying documents”), thus prompting this fun chart from the Carnegie Endowment:

While almost all of my commentary above on Saied has been negative, I want to state one legitimate point in his favor.

For all his shortcomings, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that Kais Saied is personally corrupt. There are no reports of him buying up properties or stashing funds in an off-shore bank account or otherwise enriching himself beyond his presidential salary (about $70,000 annually). Maybe Saied is just really good at hiding his corruption, otherwise his non-corruption is a genuine rarity among Arab and third world leaders.

When taken in light of his authoritarian maneuverings, Kais’s incorruptibility seems to indicate that he’s either megalomaniacally focused on the pursuit of pure political power, or maybe he really is a crusading moralist reformer who is dealing with a political situation so opaque and complex that no one outside his immediate orbit can grasp the validity of his actions thus far. I take the latter as an unlikely but serious consideration. Politics is hard. Running countries is hard. Navigating political power structures, particularly byzantine ones in impoverished corrupt countries is really hard. Maybe Saied is just a weird guy in a tough situation doing his best in a manner that looks bad from the outside but is reasonable from the inside. Maybe his failings are more of competence than morality. I don’t know.

Dictatorship, Democracy, and Great Expectations

That pretty much brings the political story of Tunisia up to the present. Kais Saied is still president, he’s not popular, but he doesn’t seem unpopular enough to provoke a big enough backlash to overthrow him. The economy is terrible and getting worse, but the regime seems to have done just enough to slow down the march toward complete fiscal disintegration, so Saied has probably bought a few more years before he either has to go crawling back to the IMF, crank the money printers to high/hyper-inflation territory, or possibly trigger a real mass revolt by removing the subsidies.

I haven’t seen any official data to back this up, but my sense is that there has been a strange inversion in his core support. He first rose to prominence with the overwhelming backing of Tunisia’s young, educated university students, but based on reading a lot of Reddit posts (example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, etc.) and talking to a few people in the country, young Tunisians now hate Kais Saied. He’s seen as a disaster, and not just because he’s revealed himself to be an authoritarian, but because he appears to be an incompetent authoritarian who is sort of improvising his way through running a country without any real goal or principle beyond maximizing the power of his own presidency. In contrast, older Tunisians, particularly the poorer and less educated, have emerged as Saied’s new power base since he has positioned himself as a strong, nationalistic bulwark against shady international forces (including the literal Jews).

In those Reddit threads, I found remarkably similar patterns to those in many of the conversations I had in Nigeria and The Gambia. In all three cases, there was a certain… nostalgia for the old dictatorships. There was a sense that Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, and The Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh were not good people, but they got things done. In all three cases, human rights abuses were far worse under the old dictators, but the economy was somewhere between slightly and definitely better compared to the democratic eras. Even corruption was arguably lower under the dictators, at least in the sense that there was one de facto mafia boss who cowed all the other aspiring mafia bosses into submissions, so the corruption was smooth and consistent; in contrast, the multi-factional pull of democracy can seem like it merely legalizes corruption in a hundred different directions while hindering the productive dynamism of a state.

Perhaps that explains a bit of the mystery of how Kais Saied came to power. I still find it baffling that a guy of such little experience, backing, and ideological substance managed to take over Tunisia just by announcing he was doing so on tv and then arresting everyone who seemed like they might oppose him. I wish I had talked to more Tunisians about this, but my sense is that there are a great deal many who wish the country still had the order and economic growth provided by 20+ years of Ben Ali’s rule, and who kinda regretted this whole post-Arab Spring democracy experiment, and so they hoped Kais Saied could recapture a little bit of that authoritarian economy magic without going too far overboard into death squad territory.

One of my big takeaways from learning about Tunisian political history is the power of political expectations. It can’t be overstated how strong of a factor expectations can be in breaking a regime or launching a new one. Again, Ben Ali was in power for 23 years, and though the 2008 global recession hit Tunisia hard, there was no particular weakness in the regime’s repressive capabilities or his management as an authoritarian dictator. Of course he was insanely corrupt and his jackbooted thugs hurt lots of people, but all that corruption and oppression was done in a skillful enough way to keep Ben Ali in power and the Tunisian people placated for over two decades.

But then, in the early 2010s, suddenly the masses of Tunisian people had higher expectations for their government. They expected liberal reforms, democratic representation, and an end to the human rights abuses, and in a matter of months, there was such an outburst of public reaction that Ben Ali fled the country and abdicated. Where did those expectations come from? I think that social media increasingly integrated Tunisia (particularly young Tunisians) into the Western political culture, and so they became inculcated with basic Western political norms and activist values, and after a few years of that pressure being pent up, it burst out onto a stodgy old-timey authoritarian regime that wasn’t ready to deal with it.

Almost a decade later, it was expectations that threw aside the democratic political establishment and brought Kais Saied his first election win. The Tunisian people had sky-high expectations for what democracy was supposed to bring them – personal freedoms, economic prosperity, political representation, etc. – but they only got eight years of grubby, corrupt power politics ruled over by Tunisia’s elite. So they brought in an outsider in the form of Saied to deliver to the Tunisian people what the Arab Spring promised.

Now, five years later, the Tunisian revolution’s expectations appear to have been trounced yet again. The man of the people turned out to be another authoritarian dictator. He positioned himself as a Bukele who could clear away the old system to get things done, or a bit like a Napoleon who could overthrow corrupt democracy to bring people true democracy, but thus far he seems to be bumbling along, just trying to figure out how to survive the next year ahead of him.

Either Saied really is some sort of mysterious 5D chess genius who can break the power of Tunisia’s expectations and rule indefinitely over a stagnant economy and disgruntled populace, or the power of expectations will come roaring back and he’ll be overthrown when the next serious political and/or economic crisis hits.

If I had to guess, I’d bet Saied will last in power for another few years until the state hits its next fiscal cliff and can’t pay the bills, and then he either tries to scale back the subsidies or dangerously inflates the currency, and that will provoke a huge backlash while eroding his conservative base. A more competent modern authoritarian like Turkey’s Erdogan could survive that (and he has been with Turnkey’s crazy inflation) but I don’t think Saied has it in him.

Miscellaneous

• In 2017, a British DJ was charged in Tunisia for making a (probably dope) remix of the Islamic call to prayer and playing it in a night club. He received a one year sentence but wisely fled the country before being arrested.
• Despite its relative liberalism, homosexuality is illegal in Tunisia. During the Tunisian 2019 elections, Mounir Baatour tried to become the first openly gay presidential candidate in an Arab country, but his candidacy was rejected allegedly because he had a sexual harassment charge against him. He had also been imprisoned earlier for sodomy.
• I stayed in El Kef for two nights, and the entire city’s water system went offline. No showers, no tap water anywhere.
• A taxi driver pointed to a truck with a big “L” sticker on it and he said it was from Libya.
• There’s a small Hannibal-themed amusement park in Tozeur: