Reform from crisis: How Tunisia can use covid-19 as an opportunity

Against this backdrop, covid-19 has exacerbated long-term challenges such as an economic crisis, social and regional inequality, inadequate healthcare, and intensifying political instability. This will test the capacity and unity of the ruling coalition in significant ways. But, critically, it also provides a moment of opportunity to press ahead with much-needed reforms.

Reform from crisis: How Tunisia can use covid-19 as an opportunity, a new policy brief by Thierry Brésillon and Hamza Meddeb, assesses Tunisia’s political and economic challenges and examines how the European Union and its member states can now support these reform efforts. Europe has a key interest in ensuring the success of Tunisia’s democratic transition.

In the short term, the EU can encourage international financial institutions to be flexible in their demands of Tunisia, helping restructure the country’s debt to create political space for the government to implement economic reforms. In the long term, Tunisia and the EU should engage in a strategic dialogue that encompasses not only trade and security but also investment, economic modernisation, the green economy, and digitalisation. These measures can help the EU become the external anchor Tunisia needed to consolidate its democratic transition.

The main findings are:

• Tunisia’s 2019 elections produced a vote against the establishment and a fragmented political landscape.
   
• Parliament is deeply divided and lacks a clear foundation for stable and efficient policymaking, while the new president has neither political experience nor a party to implement his agenda.
   
• The 2019 elections may have finally ended the transactional power-sharing agreement forged by Ennahda and representatives of the old regime, which long ignored major socio-economic challenges.
   
• The government must build on its successful response to the covid-19 pandemic to create a compromise that shares the burden of economic reform between major political actors and interest groups.
   
• If it fails to do so, the resulting rise in economic and social tension could empower anti-democratic forces and destabilise Tunisia.

The EU should help the Tunisian government take the path of reform by launching a strategic dialogue to rethink their priorities and identify their common interests.  

About the authors:

Thierry Brésillon is an analyst who has been based in Tunis since 2011. He is correspondent for various newspapers (including Belgium’s Le Soir) and has written for Le Monde Diplomatique, Orient XXI, and Middle East Eye. He was previously editor-in-chief of Faim et Développement Magazine, published by the NGO CCFD-Terre Solidaire.

Hamza Meddeb is an assistant professor at the South Mediterranean University in Tunis. He is also a Non-Resident Scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center. His research focuses on the political economy of the democratic transition in Tunisia, as well as the political economy of conflicts in North Africa. He is the author of “Tunisia’s Geography of Anger: Regional Inequalities and the Rise of Populism” (Carnegie, 2020) and “Ennahda’s Uneasy Exit from Political Islam” (Carnegie, 2019), and co-author of L’Etat d’injustice au Maghreb. Maroc et Tunisie, Karthala (2015), with Irene Bono, Béatrice Hibou, and Mohamed Tozy.