The coffee at the corner cafe in downtown Tunis has grown bitter. It is not because the beans are bad. It is because of what people talk about over the foam, or rather, what they whisper.
Five years ago, the air in this city tasted like electricity. People poured into Habib Bourguiba Avenue, waving flags, shouting themselves hoarse, demanding a future that actually worked. They were tired of the old guards who promised much and delivered empty plates. They wanted dignity. They wanted jobs that paid enough to buy meat more than once a week. They wanted a state that listened instead of crushing.
Then came Kais Saied.
To understand what happened next, you have to look at a hypothetical merchant named Tariq. Let us call him Tariq, though he represents a thousand men standing behind carts laden with bruised tomatoes and dusty lemons. In 2019, Tariq voted with hope swelling in his chest. Saied was an outsider, a constitutional law professor who spoke in classical Arabic, wore simple suits, and refused campaign money. He looked like an ascetic monk of democracy. When Saied suspended parliament in July 2021, sweeping aside the chaotic, corrupt political parties that had bickered for a decade, Tariq cheered. The corrupt elite were finally getting thrown out. The train was finally getting put back on the tracks.
Except the train did not start moving forward. It derailed quietly in the dark.
Slowly, the emergency measures stopped feeling temporary. The parliament was rewritten, stripped of its teeth. Independent judges were fired with the stroke of a pen. Critics, journalists, and opposition figures found themselves dragged into late-night interrogations or slapped with travel bans. The constitutional guardrails built after the 2011 revolution—that fragile, hard-won shield protecting ordinary citizens from the heavy boot of autocracy—were dismantled piece by piece.
And for what? Tariq still stands behind his cart. His lemons are no cheaper. The Tunisian dinar has taken a severe beating against foreign currencies, making basic imports like wheat, sugar, and cooking oil scarce luxuries. Shelves in neighborhood markets empty out for days at a time. People queue for hours just to buy a subsidized baguette, standing in lines that stretch around street corners, their patience wearing as thin as their wallets.
This is the hidden cost of absolute power centralization. When one man takes the wheel, claims all the steering controls, and locks the doors, he also assumes total responsibility for the crash. Yet the machinery of governance did not become efficient. It became paralyzed by fear. Civil servants, terrified of making a wrong move that might draw the wrath of the presidency, stopped making decisions altogether. Stagnation replaced reform.
Grievances did not disappear. They metastasized.
The old demons of the Tunisian state—bureaucratic inertia, police impunity, economic inequality—did not vanish when the politicians were chased from the halls of power. They put on a new uniform. The coastal elites and the interior marginalized populations remain locked in their age-old economic chasm. Young people continue to look toward the Mediterranean Sea not as a body of water, but as an exit wound. They pay smugglers fortunes to board rickety wooden boats bound for Lampedusa, risking death in the dark water because staying home feels like a slow, certain suffocation.
Migration statistics tell a stark story, but numbers are cowards. They hide the trembling hands of a mother watching her nineteen-year-old son pack a single plastic bag. They hide the silence in a living room after the phone call comes in from a rescue ship, or worse, when the phone never rings at all.
Saied’s supporters still point to the fight against corruption as justification. And true enough, sweeping arrests of prominent businessmen and politicians played well to a public exhausted by systemic graft. But anti-corruption campaigns that target only political rivals while the broader economy starves begin to look less like justice and more like consolidation. When bread is missing from the table, a televised arrest does not fill an empty stomach.
History has a cruel way of repeating its rhymes. Tunisia taught the world how an Arab spring could begin with a fruit vendor’s desperate protest against humiliation. Now, the country is teaching a different, heavier lesson. It is showing how quickly a population can trade the messy, frustrating chaos of pluralism for the quiet, suffocating order of autocracy, only to find that the bread does not return and the fear simply changes address.
Sit at that cafe in Tunis long enough and you will see it in the eyes of the young men staring into their empty cups. They are not plotting a revolution today. They are too tired for that. They are calculating odds. They are wondering how long a country can live on memories of hope before the hunger takes over completely. The old grievances have not just resurfaced. They have settled into the bones of the city, waiting for a morning that refuses to break.
