As Tunisia holds elections this weekend, human rights observers and activists decry President Saied’s autocratic rule, question the validity of the polls, and examine how Saied gained so much power.
Tunisian political scientist Nadia Marzouki, a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, has condemned President Kais Saied’s defunct anti-imperialistic and nativist ideology and blamed activists and leftist groups for turning a blind eye to increasing autocracy under Saied’s rule.
Sharing her voice in a gripping new piece in the Open Society Foundations’ Ideas Newsletter, “Tunisia: When obsolete anti-imperialism kills democracy, she examines how a country once seen as the poster child of democratisation in the Arab world sunk into such an abyss of authoritarianism? She adds that “a question that has attracted less interest is: why and how so many of the intellectuals and civil society activists on the left, who had been so intransigent with Ennahda’s democratic attitude, have been so willfully blind to the dangers of Kais Saied?”
She remembers, “I had always known that many of my friends and acquaintances on the left resented the Tunisian Revolution of 2011 for offering their arch enemy, the Islamist party Ennahda, a seat at the table. What I hadn’t anticipated was how quickly this deeply rooted hatred of Ennahda would push some of them to turn a blind eye to Saied’s authoritarian turn.”
She explains how the intellectuals and academics bought into Saied’s nativistic, anti-imperialistic ideology.
She argues that it is important to reflect upon the role of a segment of intellectuals and organizers from the urban middle class who perceived themselves as under-appreciated, side-lined and betrayed by the post-2011 coalitions. “Some of these intellectuals and activists have given Saied’s anti-democratism a free pass under the pretext that Saied was a herald of anti-imperialism, and would turn Tunisia into a beacon of the non-aligned world.
A similar phenomenon of appropriation of the anti-imperialist lexicon into anti-democracy justification has occurred in countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Venezuela.
In Tunisia, the rapidity with which some opinion makers and political leaders have rallied to this narrative in service of a nativist, xenophobic and authoritarian platform has had dramatic effects on individual and public freedoms.”
Marzouki makes clear that Saied benefited from a collective sentiment of deep frustration with how little the years 2011-2019 had delivered in terms of economic prosperity and political stability.
In the piece, she unpacks what enabled the hijacking, distortion, and simplification of important and legitimate trends of organizing and debate around dignity, accountability and social justice, at heart of decolonisation, into weapons for authoritarian return.
Calling out the hypocritical, anti-imperialist narrative by President Saied, she reasons, “In its nativist and nationalist iteration, the anti-imperialist narrative that has enabled Saiedist supporters is not just anti-democratic. It is obsolete. It situates the locus of anti-imperialist struggles solely at the level of the nation-state at a time when a significant part of today’s decolonial political debates, despite all their internal diversity, revolve around centering peoples and communities rather than states, and when ideas such as diasporism, exile, transnational solidarities are key to the thinking of non or post Zionism and post supremacism.
The silence of ‘decolonial’ Saiedists vis à vis the plight of Sub-Saharan migrants reveals how decolonialism works as a fig leaf for authoritarian and statist nationalism.”
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