The night Tunisia changed

The night Tunisia changed

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Faisal Edroos
on
Thu, 07/23/2026 - 15:40

President Kais Saied said he was saving the state. But on the night of 25 July 2021, the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring dramatically returned to one-man rule

For more than a decade, Tunisia had been held up as the Arab Spring's lone democratic success.

While revolutions elsewhere descended into civil war, military rule or renewed authoritarianism, Tunisia managed something few thought possible. 

It wrote a new constitution and held competitive elections. 

Governments rose and fell at the ballot box. 

Political Islamists and secularists - despite profound ideological differences - shared power in an uneasy but functioning compromise.

The experiment was messy and parliament became notorious for shouting matches broadcast live on television. 

Despite everything, Tunisia endured.

But things dramatically changed on the night of 25 July 2021.

Leading up to the unrest

Across Tunisia, thousands had already taken to the streets before sunset.

It was Republic Day, commemorating the abolition of the monarchy in 1957, but celebration had given way to anger. 

Demonstrators gathered not only in Tunis, but in Sousse, Sfax, Kairouan, Gafsa and other cities, denouncing a political class many believed had squandered the promise of the 2011 revolution.

Some protesters stormed local offices belonging to Ennahda, the country's largest parliamentary party, which had not officially led the government since 2014.

Windows were smashed. Furniture was dragged into the streets. Police struggled to contain crowds whose frustration had been building for months.

At the time, Tunisia was living through one of the world's worst Covid-19 outbreaks relative to its population. 

Hospitals had reached breaking point with doctors pleading publicly for oxygen supplies. 

The military had been forced to intervene while families searched desperately for hospital beds as only a fraction of the population had received a vaccine.

The economic picture was equally bleak.

Youth unemployment remained stubbornly high, inflation steadily eroded purchasing power, and negotiations with the International Monetary Fund had stalled amid political deadlock.

The revolution that had begun in 2011 with demands for dignity, jobs and accountability increasingly appeared unable to deliver any of them.

For many Tunisians, democracy itself seemed paralysed.

Looking back, former Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi said Tunisia's democratic transition failed to convince ordinary citizens that political freedoms would improve their daily lives.

"The biggest mistake we made was that we didn't give the economic aspects the importance that we should have given them," he told Middle East Eye.

"The citizen would ask: 'What did democracy give me?' 

"Democracy is not prosperity by itself. We had to work on prosperity, on economic issues and social problems."

Years of unstable coalition governments had also undermined confidence in politics. 

Between 2011 and 2021, successive administrations struggled to implement long-delayed economic reforms while trying to preserve an often-fragile democratic consensus.

Saied watched on

From Tunisia's presidential palace on the Mediterranean shoreline, President Kais Saied watched the crisis deepen.

A constitutional law professor before entering politics, Saied had won the presidency in 2019 as an outsider, presenting himself as incorruptible and above Tunisia's partisan battles. 

Speaking in formal Arabic rather than the local Tunisian dialect, he cultivated the image of a reserved academic determined to restore the moral authority of the state.

His popularity rested largely on what he was not. He was not associated with the old regime. He was not part of the parliamentary establishment. He had no political party of his own.

Tunisia's President Kais Saied attends a swearing-in ceremony at the Carthage Palace in Tunis on 27 February 2020 (Fethi Belaid/Reuters)

Instead, he increasingly portrayed parliament as the principal obstacle preventing Tunisia from escaping the crisis.

The irony was that Saied's rise to the presidency had been aided by the very political movement he was seeking to counter. 

In the 2019 presidential run-off, Ennahda declined to back media magnate Nabil Karoui, instead throwing its support behind Saied after its own candidate was eliminated. 

At the time, many within the party viewed Saied as the safer choice, seeing Karoui, a polarising businessman often dubbed Tunisia's "Berlusconi", as too closely associated with the old political establishment.

As Saied's speeches became more confrontational and his references to exceptional constitutional powers more frequent, constitutional scholars warned he appeared increasingly willing to bypass democratic institutions rather than reform them.

The crisis was compounded by one institutional failure that many now regard as pivotal: Tunisia had never established the Constitutional Court envisaged under the 2014 constitution.

Without an independent body capable of arbitrating disputes between the presidency and parliament, constitutional disagreements became political confrontations.

Gordon Gray, the former US ambassador to Tunisia, told MEE that the failure to establish the court as one of the most consequential shortcomings of Tunisia's post-revolution transition.

"The inability to establish the constitutional court became far more important following President Said's power grab," he said.

"I can't say that I predicted the power grab, but I certainly see the factors that led to the frustration that in the first case led to President Saied's election, and then in the second case led to the lack of mobilisation against his power grab."

At the time, Saied increasingly argued that Article 80 of the constitution empowered him to intervene whenever the nation faced an "imminent danger".

His critics insisted that invoking Article 80 required consultation with both the prime minister and parliament's speaker, while parliament itself was constitutionally required to remain in continuous session.

The dispute would soon become far more than academic.

The night everything changed

As darkness fell on 25 July, Tunisians gathered around their televisions to watch an extraordinary presidential address.

Standing alongside military commanders and senior security officials, Saied announced he was dismissing Mechichi, suspending parliament for 30 days and assuming executive authority with the assistance of a prime minister he would appoint himself.

Anyone contemplating violence, he warned, would face the armed forces "with bullets".

Saied insisted his decisions were constitutional emergency measures rather than a seizure of power.

Those describing his actions as a coup, he later declared, should "revise your constitutional lessons".

Behind the scenes, however, events unfolded far more dramatically.

Less than an hour before Saied's televised address, Mechichi had been summoned to the presidential palace.

Mechichi told MEE that after he was told he was being removed from his duties, he was effectively held as a "prisoner" inside a room.

"There was no physical assault, but when you lock the prime minister into a room in Carthage, it constitutes an assault," he said.

"Even if it was not a physical assault - what assault could be worse than imprisoning the prime minister in an office and preventing him from leaving there."

Multiple sources, both Tunisian and regional, told MEE that the events were carefully coordinated, stating that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates had spent months encouraging moves to dismantle the country's post-revolution political order.

'We underestimated him. We thought he could do nothing'

- Hichem Mechichi, former Tunisian prime minister

After fighting costly proxy conflicts in Libya and investing heavily to support Egypt's government, Abu Dhabi appeared to have a significant interest in the political trajectory of Tunisia, the sources said.

One source who served in the interior ministry at the time said they should have anticipated what was about to unfold, especially since MEE had reported two months earlier that a coup was on the horizon.

They said that "alarm bells should have also started ringing" when Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, then crown prince of Abu Dhabi and now president of the UAE, spoke with Saied on at least three occasions in the month of July.

According to official phone readouts, Mohammed bin Zayed, also known as MBZ, spoke with Saied by phone two weeks before the president suspended parliament and dismissed the government.

The sources said the calls reflected how eager Abu Dhabi was eager to see an end to Tunisia's post-2011 political experiment, which it viewed as part of a broader Arab Spring project that had empowered Islamist movements and challenged the region's existing power structures.

The sources said that Egyptian officials also held a flurry of calls with their Tunisian counterparts, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi fully supportive of the plan. 

They said that Sisi had reportedly raised his "problem" with the Islamist Ennahda during calls with Saied, while other senior Egyptian officials also discussed related matters with members of the Tunisian military.

At the time, Abu Dhabi was seeking greater alignment with Cairo, as Egypt was locked in disputes with Turkey over competing interests in Libya, where the two countries backed opposing sides in the civil war.

The two governments were also at odds over competing claims and alliances in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly over energy resources and maritime boundaries.

Tunisia had emerged as a key ally of Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose growing influence across the Arab world had long been viewed with suspicion by Emirati leaders.

Erdogan's relationship with Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's Ennahda movement, became a particular source of concern for Abu Dhabi, an Ennahda official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was still residing in Tunis.

Following the 2011 revolution, Ghannouchi and Erdogan developed close political ties, with Turkey emerging as one of Ennahda's strongest regional partners as the party sought to establish itself within Tunisia’s new democratic system.

The spoilers

Algeria, which has historically viewed Tunisia as falling within its strategic sphere of influence, was also directly involved in the developments, according to three of the sources, as well as Mechichi.

It's unclear how many calls were made between Algiers and Tunis but official records show that Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune spoke with Saied several times in July 2021, including on the day after the coup.

Two sources who served in Tunisia's government until 2022 told MEE that Algeria's military maintained close coordination with Tunisia's armed forces during the period.

They said Algeria's political and military leadership also found a close ally in Tunisia's powerful Brigadier General Mohamed El Ghoul and other senior officials.

"Unfortunately those two [Egypt and Algeria] were the main supporters of Kais Saied," Mechichi said.

"If it wasn't for the Egyptian and Algerian regimes, Kais Saied wouldn't have lasted in power for a month."

'Saied's policy has been to align himself with authoritarian regimes in the region and in Tunisia's neighbourhood'

- Moncef Marzouki, former Tunisian President

Former President Moncef Marzouki echoed this view saying the coup was the culmination of a counter-revolution against the democratic gains of 2011, and that Tunisia's institutions had been systematically dismantled by external actors.

"Saied's policy has been to align himself with authoritarian regimes in the region and in Tunisia's neighbourhood," he told MEE.

"All of these regimes feared that the Arab Spring might spread to them, and suppressing the Arab Spring in its birthplace carries immense symbolic importance," he said.

"That is why Saied is so important to these regimes," he added.

For Mechichi, the warning signs had existed long before that evening.

Reflecting on his time in office, he said Tunisia's political class fundamentally underestimated Saied.

"We thought democracy could not go backwards," he said.

"We didn't protect democracy as we should have done."

When Saied repeatedly spoke of using what he called "constitutional missiles" against his political opponents, many dismissed the rhetoric.

"We underestimated him," Mechichi said. "We thought he could do nothing."

Inside Ennahda

Inside Ennahda, Saied's announcement landed like a political earthquake.

For a decade, the Islamist-inspired party had been the dominant force in Tunisia's coalition politics. 

Its leader, Ghannouchi, had become one of the defining figures of the post-revolutionary order, presiding over a political system built on compromise between ideological rivals.

Ennahda had led the "Troika" coalition government from 2011 to 2014 and later joined the secular-led coalition government headed by Nidaa Tounes after the 2014 elections.

Despite growing tensions with the presidency, few within the movement believed Tunisia's democratic institutions could be dismantled overnight.

Ahmed Gaaloul, a senior Ennahda official and former government minister, now says many leaders failed to appreciate the seriousness of the warning signs.

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"We were in a state of denial," he told MEE. "We read the report in MEE and we knew change was coming. But psychologically, we did not think a coup could happen."

Weeks earlier, many of the events that would unfold on 25 July had already been set out in a confidential document obtained by MEE. 

The document, authored by one of Saied's advisers, outlined what it described as a "constitutional coup" that would allow the president to invoke emergency powers, dismiss the prime minister, suspend parliament and place senior political figures under effective house arrest while security forces took control of key state institutions. 

It also proposed summoning Mechichi, Ghannouchi and other senior officials to the presidential palace, where they would be prevented from leaving as the plan was put into motion.

The report was fiercely contested when it was published with opposition politicians and commentators dismissing it as fabricated.

The document's authenticity, however, was later strengthened when Saied himself acknowledged its existence, saying it was merely one of several proposals that had crossed his desk. 

Gaaloul said the presidency had steadily hollowed out Tunisia's institutions long before the coup, paralysing parliament and government while cultivating public hostility towards elected politicians.

"Everything was leading towards 25 July, but we failed to believe someone could simply dismantle the democratic system."

'It was a coup'

Before dawn, Ghannouchi drove to parliament expecting lawmakers to convene.

Instead, military vehicles blocked every entrance.

Soldiers prevented the parliamentary speaker and dozens of elected deputies from entering the building.

Images of the 80-year-old politician standing outside locked gates quickly spread around the world.

"There has been a coup against the revolution and the constitution," Ghannouchi declared.

Rached Ghannouchi speaks to journalists outside Tunisia's parliament in the early hours of 26 July 2021 following President Kais Saied's power grab (Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters)

The contrast with coups elsewhere in the Arab world was striking.

There were no fighter jets overhead. No heavily armed forces rolling through city centres and no declaration of martial law.

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But pointing to the presence of the tanks outside parliament, two Ennahda figures, who MEE is not naming to protect their identities, said the military was "hand in glove" with the president.

Under the post-revolution 2014 Constitution, Tunisia operated under a split executive system where power was shared between the president and the parliament.

However, the constitution explicitly designated the president of the republic as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, granting the office direct responsibility over national defence and foreign affairs.

"It was a coup," Mechichi said, rejecting suggestions that what unfolded was a constitutional process.

"No constitution on earth allows you to put tanks in front of parliament."

Gaaloul said the apparent normality of what unfolded made it hard for many foreign governments to grasp what was unfolding.

The world watched on and did nothing

By the morning of 26 July, foreign capitals were wrestling with a deceptively simple question: what had actually happened?

Had Saied legitimately invoked constitutional emergency powers, or had the Arab world's only democracy just experienced a coup?

The distinction mattered.

Under US law, formally designating an event as a military coup can trigger restrictions on assistance and fundamentally alter diplomatic engagement.

Rather than immediately passing judgment, Washington adopted a cautious approach.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the US was "concerned" by the developments and urged all parties to move forward in accordance with democratic principles, declining to characterise Saied's actions as a coup while legal assessments continued.

Behind the scenes, however, American officials were pressing the Tunisian presidency for a roadmap back to constitutional rule.

'I would have liked to have seen a more robust response from Washington'

- Gordan Gray, former US ambassador to Tunisia

Joey Hood, the former US ambassador to Tunisia and former acting US assistant secretary of state who oversaw American policy towards Tunisia, said the Biden administration was grappling with the idea of whether it was a coup and that Washington expected the emergency measures to remain temporary.

"When something like this happens, we have lawyers whose very job is to look carefully at the context and tell us whether this fits the legal definition of a coup because if it does, then we have certain laws that come into effect," he told MEE.

"And they said this did not fit the legal definition of a coup, which is why we didn't use the word," he added.

As Saied steadily accumulated power, Hood said Tunisia experienced a marked deterioration in political freedoms, warning that restrictions on expression, opposition parties and civil society had become increasingly severe while governance itself had failed to improve.

"I met him [Saied] alongside [Deputy National Security Adviser] Jon Finer and we essentially asked him: What are you doing? What is your plan here? We understand the Tunisians were greatly frustrated. We understand that they elected you to bring about change. But what exactly is it that you're planning to do? 

"And he [Saied] avoided answering the question directly."

Former ambassador Gray has since argued that Washington should have responded far more forcefully.

He told MEE that the Biden administration misjudged both Saied's intentions and the speed with which democratic institutions would be dismantled.

"I would have liked to have seen a more robust response from Washington," he said. "I think it missed the boat."

Europe backs Saied

European governments also faced a different dilemma.

Tunisia sits barely 150km from the Italian coast and remains a critical partner on migration, trade and counterterrorism.

European leaders feared that political collapse - or widespread instability - could reverberate across the Mediterranean.

Brussels therefore urged respect for Tunisia's constitution while carefully avoiding the language of a coup.

Germany likewise expressed concern while calling for a rapid return to constitutional order.

France, Tunisia's former colonial power and one of its closest partners, struck a similarly cautious tone, stressing the need for dialogue and stability rather than directly criticising Saied's actions.

Privately, however, sources told MEE that several European governments viewed Saied's consolidation of power favourably, believing a strong central authority offered the best chance of stemming illegal migration across the Mediterranean.

A serving European diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said he recalled officials welcoming Saied's moves after receiving assurances that Tunis would adopt a tougher approach towards illegal migration by both Tunisians and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

Europe has since become Tunisia's largest external financial backer.

Since 2021, the European Union and its member states have committed billions of euros in grants, loans and macro-financial assistance, while a landmark migration agreement signed in 2023 unlocked additional funding in exchange for greater cooperation on border management and efforts to curb departures across the Mediterranean. 

'They [EU states] wanted stability. But stability without legitimacy cannot last'

Hichem Mechichi, former Tunisian prime minister

Rights groups have criticised the approach, arguing that European governments have prioritised migration control over concerns about Tunisia's democratic backsliding.

Gaaloul argues that much of the international community prioritised short-term stability over democratic principles.

"The arguments used to justify silence in Tunisia would never have been accepted if similar events had taken place in Europe," he said.

The African Union (AU) and the United Nations also adopted restrained responses, stopping short of describing Saied's actions as a coup.

An AU official told MEE at the time that the organisation was not in a position to condemn the takeover, reflecting what they described as the AU's diminished political influence and the difficulty of securing consensus among member states.

The AU has previously suspended member states following military takeovers, including Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger and Gabon, in line with its rules against unconstitutional changes of government. 

Those suspensions are typically accompanied by calls for a swift return to constitutional order and civilian rule. In Tunisia's case, however, the organisation refrained from taking similar action.

For many Tunisians, the muted international response was deeply disappointing.

Mechichi believes geopolitical interests ultimately outweighed democratic concerns.

European governments, he argued, increasingly viewed Tunisia through the prism of migration rather than democratic consolidation.

"They wanted stability," he said. "But stability without legitimacy cannot last."

From emergency rule to one-man government

The 30-day suspension of parliament did not end after one month. Instead, Saied repeatedly extended the emergency measures.

By September 2021, he was governing by decree, suspending large parts of the constitution and concentrating executive and legislative authority in the presidency.

His supporters continued to argue that the extraordinary powers were necessary to dismantle what they described as a corrupt political elite that had failed ordinary Tunisians for more than a decade.

Critics, however, saw something very different.

Within months, opposition leaders, judges, lawyers, journalists and civil society activists increasingly found themselves facing prosecution or imprisonment.

Ennahda's senior leadership was systematically dismantled, with Ghannouchi and other prominent figures jailed in a sweeping crackdown that rights organisations say criminalised legitimate political opposition.

'What is happening in regard to migration is a total crime against humanity'

- Ahmed Gaaloul, former  Ennahda minister

Meanwhile, dozens of independent judges were dismissed, the powers of electoral bodies were curtailed and the space for dissent continued to shrink.

Hood said one of the starkest changes was the erosion of freedoms many Tunisians believed had become irreversible after the 2011 revolution.

"When I met with civil society in April 2021, people told me that whatever happened, they would never give up their right to express themselves freely," Hood recalled.

"By the time I arrived as ambassador in 2023, that was no longer true."

He said Tunisians could still protest peacefully, but those who criticised the president publicly, appeared on television or posted online increasingly risked arrest under laws criminalising insults against the head of state.

Saied also cycled through a succession of prime ministers, with many having little political experience and limited public profiles.

Among them was Ahmed Hachani, a little-known former central bank official appointed in 2023.

Before taking office, Hachani's now-deleted Facebook account described himself as "an ultra-conservative, far-center Liberal, anarcho-leftist, clerical-secularist with a union-integralist tendency", as well as "a monarchist and in favour of the restoration of the caliphate". 

The account also shared conspiracy theories alleging a Zionist "Illuminati" takeover of Africa and bizarre claims about human–animal marriages in Norway. 

Foreign relations sour

Tunisia's international standing also deteriorated.

Saied's February 2023 remarks alleging a conspiracy to alter Tunisia's demographic identity through migration from sub-Saharan Africa triggered a wave of anti-Black violence and arbitrary arrests that drew condemnation from African governments and international rights groups.

Hundreds of migrants were later expelled or abandoned in remote desert areas along Tunisia's borders with Libya and Algeria, prompting accusations of serious human rights abuses.

Gaaloul described the government's treatment of Black African migrants as unprecedented in modern Tunisia.

"What is happening in regard to migration is a total crime against humanity," he said. "People are being targeted because of the colour of their skin. This has never happened in Tunisia's history."

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Gaaloul argued the migration crisis had become political leverage, allowing Tunis to strengthen its relationship with Europe by presenting itself as a gatekeeper for migration across the Mediterranean.

Relations with Washington also became increasingly strained.

While security cooperation continued, successive US administrations voiced growing concern over Tunisia's democratic backsliding and what they described as an accelerating erosion of political freedoms.

The widening distance between the two countries was perhaps best illustrated in June 2025, when Saied received Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump's senior adviser for Africa.

Rather than focus on bilateral ties, Saied spent much of the meeting delivering a lengthy lecture on Israel's war on Gaza, displaying photographs of wounded Palestinian children and accusing the international community of failing to stop the bloodshed. 

The encounter frustrated US officials and underscored how far Tunisia's diplomacy had shifted towards Saied's increasingly personalised style of foreign policy.

For Hood, however, this was all happening as Tunisia had slipped down Washington's list of strategic priorities.

"The Arab Spring is a long time ago now," he said, adding that while the US should have remained engaged through security cooperation and economic investment, Tunisia no longer occupied the central place in US regional policy that it once did.

'We were wrong'

The country's economy also continued to deteriorate.

Foreign direct investment fell sharply as political uncertainty deterred investors, while negotiations over a multibillion-dollar International Monetary Fund bailout repeatedly stalled. 

Economic growth also remained sluggish, with inflation continuing to squeeze household incomes and shortages of medicines and other essential goods becoming increasingly common, deepening public frustration.

Mechichi said Tunisia's economic crisis had worsened because of Saied dismantling existing institutions without offering a credible alternative.

"Saied is totally opposed to international donors, but he doesn't give any alternative," he said. "He has populist ideas, but they have no impact on the ground."

In recent weeks, electricity cuts, deteriorating public services and mounting water shortages have fuelled public frustration, while this summer's extreme heatwave once again exposed the fragility of the country's ageing infrastructure.

Looking back on his tenure, Hood said the decline in public services was impossible to ignore.

"When I arrived, the water was perfectly drinkable. By the time I left, it wasn't," he said. "There had been a nationwide blackout. The government couldn't even pick up the rubbish. It's a sign of how much the state has given up on its own people."

'The resistance has grown quieter. But it will return'

- Maher Madhioub, former member of parliament

Radwan Masmoudi, the president of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, said the economic malaise had steadily undermined Saied's popularity and many of the promises that helped propel him to power went unfulfilled.

"Saied has lost all his popularity and credibility," he told MEE.

"Most Tunisians are really tired of him and his inability to solve any of Tunisia's political, economic or social problems."

Maher Madhioub, a former Ennahda member of parliament, agreed and said Tunisia had experienced not only democratic backsliding but a systematic assault on the institutions created after the revolution.

"What we are witnessing is not only restrictions on liberties and dangerous human rights abuses," he said. "It is also a systematic plan to undermine the institutions of the Tunisian state."

Madhioub said opposition protests had been met with arrests, prosecutions and heavy prison sentences but insisted resistance had not disappeared.

"The resistance has grown quieter," he said.

"But it will return."

Looking back five years later, Mechichi said Tunisia's greatest mistake was believing democracy had become irreversible.

"We thought it couldn't go backwards," he said.

"We were wrong."

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