Cartelization, Neoliberalism, and The Foreclosure

middle east law and governance 11 (2019) 1-37
brill.com/melg
Cartelization, Neoliberalism, and the Foreclosure

of the Jasmine Revolution: Democracy’s Troubles
in Tunisia
Colin Powers
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
cpower15@jhu.edu
Abstract
While frequently hailed as the sole success story of the Arab Uprisings, the consolida-
tion of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution has in fact proven deeply problematic. This paper
will argue that the frailty of Tunisia’s democratic present is a direct function of lib-
eral democratization, specifically implicating this practice of democratization in the
hollowing and cartelization of the political system. In insulating policymaking within
a host of nocturnal councils, I will argue that liberal democratization has purposefully
obstructed the translation of popular preferences into policy outcomes, thereby pre-
venting the Tunisian people from realizing the social democracy they so clearly desire.
Keywords
Democratization – neoliberalism – Islamism
While frequently hailed as the sole success story of the Arab Uprisings, the
consolidation of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution has in fact proven deeply prob-
lematic. A brief survey of either the municipal elections of 20181 or the national
elections of 2011 and 2014,2 for example, reveals a polity plagued by stubborn,
1 As documented by the Instance Superieure Independante Pour Les Elections (isie), 2018’s
Municipal Elections saw only 33.7% of the 5.4 million registered voters turn out at the polls
(or a real voter turnout of roughly 1.8 million). http://www.isie.tn/.
2 Benjamin Preisler, “Three Remarks on the Tunisian elections,” The Washington Post,
January 5, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/05/three-
remarks-on-the-tunisian-elections/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4e926cc6ba65.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi 10.1163/18763375-01101003

2 Powers
pervasive, and increasing voter abstentionism. Whether declining participa-

tion rates represent a symptom or cause of the democracy’s infirmities, the
public’s demonstrated indifference when it comes to official politics should
be concerning. As unemployment, poverty, and inflation persist on without
abatement, moreover, protests and street mobilizations3 (as well as the state’s
inevitably violent, frequently extralegal responses) have come to define the
first days of popular government as much as they did the final days of autocra-
cy. Perhaps most worrisome of all, a wealth of public opinion data also suggests
that the country’s citizenry has drifted into disaffection and alienation over the
course of the past seven years.4
This paper will argue that liberal democratization underlies the frailty and
disquiet hitherto described. Specifically, I will contend that this particular
practice of democratization – a collaborative project jointly engineered by
international and domestic actors – has compromised Tunisia’s grand experi-
ment in self-rule in three ways.
To begin, borrowing from Peter Mair and Richard Katz, I shall seek to estab-
lish that liberal democratization underwrites both the (1) hollowing of Tunisia’s
democracy5 and (2) the cartelization of her parliament and state.6 Regarding
the former, one need first recognize that democratization in Tunisia has been
in keeping with liberalism’s tendency to hedge against participatory civic re-
publicanism through investing the citizenry with rights and duties that are
passive and laissez faire in nature.7 Operationalized through institutional and
Per Preisler, while the nca elections of 2011 saw a voter turnout of 4,308,888, that number
declined to 3,578,256 by 2014’s parliamentary elections. The average voter turnout for the
two rounds of the Presidential election (also held in 2014), meanwhile, was only 3.25 million.
3 Between January 1 and March 22, 2018 alone, data gathered by the Armed Conflict Location
& Event Project (acled) shows that Tunisia witnessed 207 separate riots or protests. This
follows an especially contentious 2017, during which 678 different protests and riots were
recorded across Tunisia (with interior cities like Kasserine, Tatouine, Sidi Bou Zid, Gafsa,
Kairouan, and Sfax slightly overrepresented). https://www.acleddata.com/data/.
4 As early as 2013, public opinion data shows 74.5% of Tunisians expressing little or no confi-
dence in government, 89.6% expressing little or no confidence in political parties, and 83.4%
expressing little or no confidence in parliament (World Value Survey 2013).
5 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (Brooklyn: Verso Books,
2013).
6 Richard Katz and Peter Mair, “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy:
The Emergence of the Cartel Party,” Party Politics 1, no. 1 (1995): 5–28; and Richard Katz and
Peter Mair, “The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 7 (2009):
753–66.
7 Marc Mulholland, Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: From Absolutism to Neo-
Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 43.

Cartelization, Neoliberalism, and the Foreclosure 3
administrative limits on the policymaking power of elected bodies, through

the institutional absence of direct democracy, and through the licensing and
empowerment of policymaking institutions that are designedly insulated from
popular oversight, I shall posit that this hollowing has undermined the ac-
countability and representativeness of transitional politics, especially when it
comes to the economy. Obstructing the translation of popular preferences into
policy outcomes, hollowing has prevented the Tunisian people from realizing
the social democracy they so clearly desire,8 and is therefore fundamental to
the pervasive disaffection described earlier.
As for the latter, by privileging elite bargaining9 and the axioms of pacted
transition theory10 across the transition, liberal democratization has also facili-
tated the cartelization of the Tunisian parliament. As of 2015, official politics
had in this manner been reduced to the vagaries of a duopolistic power shar-
ing arrangement controlled by the country’s two largest parties (Nidaa Tounes
and Ennahda). What is more, whereas cartelized political systems in Europe
and the United States retain, however cynically, some level of policy competi-
tion when it comes to life cycle issues,11 the formation of the Nidaa Tounes-
Ennahda coalition implied that the Tunisian political system would be
deprived of even such controlled, issue-specific instances of opposition. Be-
yond buttressing the political and institutional hegemony of the conservative
social forces that the two parties jointly represent, by fixing the policy market
to this extent, cartelization has therefore also drained the political system of
meaningful agonism. In so doing, it too has deeply delegitimized the demo-
cratic project in Tunisia.
Finally, though dangerous in their own rights, the hollowing and cartel-
ization of Tunisia’s transitional politics have not been ends in and of them-
selves. Keeping with the modus operandi of liberalism and its prioritization of
8 Andrea Teti, Pamela Abbott, and Francesco Cavatorta, The Arab Uprisings in Egypt, Jor-
dan, and Tunisia: Social, Political, and Economic Transformations (Switzerland: Palgrave
MacMillian, 2018).
9 On the general elite-centrism of transitology, see Jamie Allinson, “Class Forces, Transition,
and the Arab Uprisings: A Comparison of Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria,” Democratization 22,
no. 2 (2015): 294–314, 295–9; and Kevin Koehler and Jana Warkotsch, “Tunisia between
Democratization and Institutionalizing Incertainty”, in Elections and Democratization in
the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014), 9–34, 12–13.
10 Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions
from Authoritarian Rule: Southern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1986).
11 Timothy Hellwig, Globalization and Mass Politics: Retaining the Room to Maneuver
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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markets and private property in the final instance, each has served so to ex-
tract economic policymaking from the prerogatives of democratic delibera-
tion. This, in turn, has allowed for International Financial Institutions (ifis)
and their allies within the coalition to push forward with the neoliberalization
of the economy despite massive public opposition.12 Incapable, however, of
generating the job creation, productivity gains, wage growth, and investment
needed so to hold the country’s fraying social fabric together, turning to my
third argument, (3) the reimposition of this economic regime ends up structur-
ally undermining Tunisia’s democracy as well. In what may amount to an act of
tragic (if not unknowing) self-sabotage, by foisting neoliberal reforms onto the
Tunisian transition, liberal democratization has again very much provided the
conditions for democracy’s demise.
Before proceeding further, I want to make clear that this paper will interro-
gate liberal democratization and its discontents in Tunisia by primarily keying
in on the domestic actors and institutions most essential to its implementa-
tion. I will not, of course, neglect the international level of analysis entirely.
Tunisia’s Deauville Partners – a constellation of ifis, foreign governments, and
state-backed democracy-promotion agencies13 – have, after all, been critical
players in the transition, fencing in those political, social, and economic futures
that the Tunisians are allowed to imagine in any number of ways.14 In curating
the discourse and practice of democracy,15 in authoring the source material
12 Adam Hanieh, “Shifting Priorities or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in the
Post-2011 imf and World Bank Engagement with Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt,” British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 1 (2015): 119–34. On Ennahda’s particular contri-
butions, see Mathieu Rousselin, “In the Name of Allah and of the Market: The Capitalist
Leanings on Tunisian Islamists”, Science and Society 80, no. 2 (2016): 196–220.
13 The Deauville Partners consist of the members of the G8 as well as of the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Arab Monetary
Fund, the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the International Finance
Corporation, the Islamic Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, opec, and
the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
14 See Corinna Mullin, “Tunisia’s Revolution and the Domestic-International Nexus,” in
Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring: Rethinking Democratization (New York, Rout-
ledge, 2015), 89–104.
15 See Andrea Teti, “Democracy without Social Justice: Marginalization of Social and Eco-
nomic Eights in eu Democracy Assistance Policy after the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East
Critique 24, no. 1 (2015): 9–25; and Andrea Teti, “The eu’s First Response to the ‘Arab
Spring’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Partnership of Democracy and Shared Pros-
perity,” Mediterranean Politics 17, no. 3 (2012): 266–84.

that structures the transitional leadership’s efforts in institution building and

policymaking,16 in provisioning conditional material aid,17 and in dispatch-
ing ranks of roving technocrats,18 their foreign interference has been basic and
significant. Without diminishing the relevance of these players, as the effect
of foreign interference is ultimately contingent upon a partnership with local
translators (absent an outright military occupation),19 and as it is ultimately
Tunisian signatures and Tunisian politicians that have enshrined the country’s
hollow, cartelized, neoliberal democracy, I feel justified in assigning domestic
actors analytical pride of place.
Within the domestic space, moreover, I should also note that my attentions
will center on the actions of Ennahda’s political leadership more than it will
the leadership of Nidaa Tounes or any other party/organization in the transi-
tion. After all, following Ben Ali’s departure for Saudi Arabia in the winter of
2011 and the interlude that followed, it was Ennahda that would become the
leading party within the first two coalition governments subsequently voted
in by Tunisia’s electorate.20 As history has well established the outsized impor-
tance that early policy decisions have in determining the long-term trajecto-
ries of political transitions,21 Ennahda’s seat at the head of the post-2011 table
means that they, as much as any other domestic actor, hold responsibility for
the political, economic, and social trajectory of the democratic period.
16 Cornel Ban, Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016).
17 Corinna Mullin and Ian Patel, “Governing Revolt: eu-North African Relations after
the ‘Arab Spring’ Uprisings,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 9, no. 2 (2015):
162–89; and Michelle Pace, “Liberal or Social Democracy? Aspect Dawning in the eu’s
Democracy Promotion Agenda in the Middle East,” The International Journal of Human
Rights 15, no. 6 (2011): 801–12.
18 Jamie Peck, “Global Policy Models, Globalizing Poverty Management: International Con-
vergence or Fast-Policy Integration?” Geography Compass 5, no. 4 (2011): 165–81.
19 Ban deftly supports this position in Ruling Ideas, 18–28.
20 The first of these governments was led by Prime Minister and Ennahda party member
Hamadi Jebeli, lasting from December 2011 to March 2013. The second was directed by
Prime Minister and Ennahda party member Ali Larayeedh and held power from March
2013 until January 2014. The latter’s mandate famously collapsed when the combination of
persistent social turmoil and the assassinations of two prominent leftist politicians forced
the resignation of his government and its replacement by a caretaking configuration.
21 Dorothee Bohle and Bela Greskovits, Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2012), 4–6.

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As regards paper organization, the first section will review public opin-
ion data so to establish how Tunisians interpret democracy and so establish
the kind of democracy that Tunisians had hoped to institutionalize during
the transition. In the second, I will hone in on the processes most relevant to the
hollowing of democratization in Tunisia. In the third, I will develop the effects
of cartelization in greater detail. In the fourth, I will focus explicitly on the neo-
liberalization of the economy and how it relates to democratic consolidation.
Finally, in the fifth and concluding section, I will recap some of the warning
signs indicating the fragility of democratic consolidation in Tunisia. Having
done so, I will reiterate my thesis that these outcomes are best explained in
view of the dissonance separating the country’s neoliberal economy and its
liberal, cartelized democracy from the economy and democracy that the Tuni-
sian citizenry had sought to establish. Parting remarks will touch on questions
of generalizability and future avenues of research.
1 What the People Want: Tunisians and Democracy
Normatively speaking, it is essential to begin by recognizing that most Tuni-

sians believe that the democratic state ought to adopt a structurally interven-
tionist role in the economy. Far from having been chastened by etatisme into
libertarian sentiment and fundamentally dissimilar from neoliberalism’s evolv-
ing hermeneutics – whether one speaks of the earlier, austere Night Watch-
man imaginary or the contemporary good governance model – their preferred
state is one that is representative, accountable, and, guided by the principles
of full employment and social justice, chartered so to insure that the econo-
my works for all. As evidence of this, 2013 World Value Survey data shows that
44.1% of Tunisians strongly agreed that “the government should take more re-
sponsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for”, that a significant majority
backs that same position, and that only 3.5% of respondents align themselves
with the position that “people should take more responsibility to provide for
themselves.”22 The same survey also establishes that 90% of Tunisians strongly
agree that government should constitutionally guarantee social protection and
health services to the poor.23
In marked contrast, then, to those that might cede to the market the
prerogative for addressing questions of distribution, growth, poverty and
inequality, Tunisians invest their ideal democratic state – with activist
22 World Values Survey 2013. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6

.jsp.
23 As cited in Teti et al., 108.

responsibility across those domains. As this might lead one to anticipate, a

majority of Tunisians also express more general social democratic sympa-
thies. As is detailed by Teti, Abbott, and Cavatorta’s work on the Arab Trans-
formation Survey – and as corroborated in both relevant Arab Barometers
(2011, 2014), in the Afro Barometer, and in the World Values Survey –
Tunisians are consistent in emphasizing economic criteria and an obligation
to social justice when asked to delineate the most important characteristics
of a democracy. For instance, though 50.6% of Tunisians in 2014 (50.2% in
2011) highlighted polyarchic and proceduralist properties as being most im-
portant to democracy, 60.8% (64% in 2011) chose the combination of inclusive
growth, the welfare state, and employment provision as democracy’s defining
attributes.24 Other data points from the 2013 World Value Survey corroborate
these trends, indicating that Tunisians also consider the redistribution of
income and wealth through taxation and state aid as being fundamental to
democracy.25
In view of the data, one can conclude that the Tunisian public clearly as-
cribes expansive and emancipatory obligations onto their interpretations of
popular government. Seeking something akin to social democracy, theirs is a
reading that elevates equity, solidarity, and collective welfare as its organizing
principles, theirs is a reading privileging positive liberty as well as social and
economic rights more than negative liberty and passive, civil-political rights,
and theirs is a reading that assigns the state responsibility for securing an indi-
vidual’s sociological agency.
2 Hollowing the Transition
Before laying out my analysis of democratic hollowing in Tunisia, I should

specify what, exactly, I mean by hollowing. Borrowing primarily from a heuris-
tic developed by Peter Mair in Ruling the Void (with a nod also to Elmer Schatt-
schneider and Sheldon Wolin), with hollowing, I describe an o verdetermined
process through which democratic political systems reduce the demos to a
24 Teti et al., 71.

25 The 2013 survey shows that 30% of Tunisians strongly agree that taxing the rich so to sub-
sidize the poor constitutes an “essential characteristic of democracy” (with an additional
36.5% skewed towards the agree poll, and only 9.9% expressing strong disagreement);
that 40.2% strongly agree that people receiving state aid for unemployment constitutes
an essential characteristic of democracy (with an additional 35.1% skewing towards that
poll, and only 4.5% expressing strong disagreement); and that 22.1%, by far the largest
single tally, strongly agree that income redistribution (the equalizing of incomes, more
specifically) constitutes an essential characteristic of democracy.

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position of semi-sovereignty by diminishing participatory practices of gov-

ernance, devaluing and stigmatizing popular accountability,26 and curtailing
ideological competition. Such processes operate at the institutional level –
identifiable in the growing primacy of non-majoritarian institutions within
democratic political systems – and at the level of party organization. Regarding
the latter, per Mair, hollowing can be seen in a shift whereby political parties
no longer function as “society’s bridgehead in the state” but rather as represen-
tatives of the state in society.27
As I will be explicitly scrutinizing party behavior in the subsequent section
on cartelization, this section will analyze hollowing at the institutional level by
disassembling the various measures through which political deliberation and
transitional policymaking have been concealed from the demos and insulated
within what Wolin once described as nocturnal councils.28 Deconstructing
the constitution writing process first, I will demonstrate how it circumscribed
popular agency by marginalizing youth, lower class, and revolutionary ac-
tors.29 Though considerably more inclusive than relevant comparators,30 this
process, in conjunction with the resulting constitution’s uneven implementa-
tion, I will proceed to argue, goes a long way towards explaining the precarity
of Tunisia’s democratic consolidation.
Beginning, then, with process, one need first acknowledge the influence ac-
quired and exerted by a number of technocratic, unelected figures during the
long years of negotiations and debate over the Tunisian constitution.31 Yadh
Ben Ashour, a lawyer and intellectual of the highest pedigree and a son of one
of Tunisia’s most respected and learned families, is particularly relevant in
these regards.
26 This stigmatization has been led by public choice theorists; see James Buchanan and
Robert Tollison, eds., The Theory of Public Choice – ii (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1984).
27 Rudy Andeweg, “Political Recruitment and Party Government,” in The Nature of Party
Government (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 140.
28 Sheldon Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide: On Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Political
Theory 24, No. 1 (Feb., 1996): 97–119, 100.
29 Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Anware Mnsari, and Estee Ward, “Women and the Making of
the Tunisian Constitution, Berkeley Journal of International Law 35, No. 1 (2017): 91–148,
100.
30 See De Silva De Alwis et al., “Women and the Making of the Tunisian Constitution,” 92 re-
garding the Lancaster Model and its effects on constitution writing in Zimbabwe amongst
other countries.
31 Gianluca Parolin, “Constitutions against Revolutions: Political Participation in North
Africa,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 1 (2015): 31–45.

The influence of Ben Ashour primarily operated through procedural and

nominally apolitical channels. Specifically, by virtue of both political skills
and legal acumen, Ben Ashour and his allies would manage to secure control
over the Expert Committees guiding both of the post-revolutionary, proto-
constitution writing bodies – the National Council for the Protection of the
Revolution (ncpr) and its successor, the High Authority for the Realisation
of the Objections of the Revolution, Political Reform, and Democratic Transi-
tion (isror).32 Of utmost importance vis-à-vis the constitutional process was
the Executive Committee of the isror, which had been delegated with the
task of establishing the rules of competition by which representatives would
be elected to the National Constituent Assembly (nca), a body subsequently
empowered to do the actual writing of the constitution.
As it played out, the Expert Committee’s decisions on election rules func-
tioned so to filter the actors selected to the Assembly in a highly discriminatory
manner. In particular, the combination of districting choices and the Com-
mittee’s selection of a closed-list proportional representation electoral system
resulted in a situation where one third of all the votes cast in 2011’s election for
the nca went to individuals and parties that ultimately received no seats in
the Assembly, a counterintuitive outcome given the premium that pr systems
place on representativeness.33 What is worse, the vote wasting thereby pro-
duced by the electoral system disproportionately afflicted Tunisia’s lower-class
voters.34
Vote wasting was, of course, to the benefit of certain actors – actors whose
caucus in the Assembly grew beyond its vote share as a result – and to the
detriment of others – those who won votes but not seats in the Assembly. Re-
garding the former, the complexities of the closed-list, pr electoral system had
unsurprisingly rewarded parties that came into the elections boasting some
measure of institutional knowledge, familiarity with electoral competition, es-
tablished organizational structures, and financial resources. This is evidenced
32 Ibid., 34–6.
33 Duncan Packard, “Challenges to Legitimate Governance in Post-Revolution Tunisia,” The
Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 4 (2011): 639.
34 Kevin Koehler and Jana Warkotsch, “Tunisia between Democratization and Institutional-
izing Uncertainty”, in Elections and Democratization in the Middle East, eds., Mahmoud
Hamad and Khalil al-Anan (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014), 26. As is evidenced in
the aggregate vote share received by the Troika parties across the underdeveloped, un-
derserved cities that birthed the 2010 uprising – Sidi Bouzid, Sidi Ali Ben Aoun, Menzel
Bouzaiene, Regueb, and Souk Jedid – the actors that would wholly dominate the writing
of the constitution failed to collectively garner more than 16% of the vote in any of these
voting districts.

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in the profiles of the Troika coalition parties (Ennahda, Ettakol, and the Con-
gress for the Republic) that came together to form a government and preside
over the nca following the election. While all genuine members of the opposi-
tion to Ben Ali, each of these parties was led by the figures from Tunisia’s older
generations, and each had an organizational history stretching back at least a
decade.
Conversely, the complexity of the electoral system would disadvantage and
ultimately marginalize the youthful, horizontally organized, unorthodoxically
trained radical actors that came to prominence during the street protests of
2010 and 2011. The same went for many of the unschooled lower-class actors
that had hoped to represent the country’s disinherited periphery in the As-
sembly. Unversed as all these actors were in the organizing, bargaining and
strategizing needed to succeed in electoral politics, they tended to divide votes
amongst themselves and thereby miss the minimum thresholds needed to se-
cure a seat. By consequence, such segments of the public found themselves
largely lacking in representation when the nca took up its mandate.
Nor did the institutional marginalization of lower-class voter and radical
actor hitherto described end once the National Constituent Assembly and
its Troika government finally got down to business proper. To begin, with the
Assembly provisioning for just a single multi-day period during which civil
society actors were invited to engage and debate with nca representatives,
opportunities for direct participation in the constitutional process was signifi-
cantly curtailed.35 In holding but one national consultation and hastily rushing
through the public sessions that were meant to educate the citizenry regarding
the details of the constitution (held between December 2012 and January of
2013), moreover, the insulation of the nca was further deepened by a general
lack of transparency. To make matters worse, like with the election, the nca’s
issues with transparency were amplified in the impoverished southwest and
interior of the country, where its various efforts to insure public engagement
were wholly inadequate.36 A un study – showing that 45% of individuals 15–29
felt that they had no involvement in the drafting process, and that 56% had
complete ignorance as to the substance of the draft provisions – gives some
indication of the magnitude of these effects.37
35 Jason Gluck and Michele Brandt, “Participatory and Inclusive Constitution Making,” Unit-
ed States Institute of Peace, 2012. https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/PW105-Partici
patory-and-Inclusive-Constitution-Making.pdf.
36 De Silva de Alwis et al., “Women and the Making of the Tunisian Constitution,” 115.
37 u.n. Dev Programme, Enquette Nationale Sur Les Attentes Des Jeunes A L’Egard Du Pro-
cessus Constitutionnel Et De La Transition Democratique En Tunisie: Rapport De Syn-
these 11, 2013.

In view of this all, then, one can assert that the hollowing of the constitu-
tional process had operated at a number of different but compounding levels.
Initially, the procedural power acquired and wielded by the unelected Expert
Committee of the isror functioned so to depoliticize the process behind
the constitution writing process (the latter commencing when the nca took
shape). With Ben Ashour et al. unilaterally deciding on the rules that in no
small way helped determine who came to control the nca, the autonomy of
their Expert Committee, as well as its non-democratic appointment, meant
that the Committee’s infrastructural operations were largely liberated from
oversight, accountability, or representativeness. As partial consequence of
this, as detailed, the Committee’s decisions on the electoral system for the nca
ended up functioning so to disenfranchise over one third of the citizenry, a dis-
enfranchisement that left poor communities in particular without voice when
the Assembly that would map Tunisia’s political future took up its work.38
With the election of that Troika-dominated nca also implying the marginal-
ization of the revolutionary cohort in the writing of the constitution, the inclu-
sivity and representativeness of that Assembly had been further compromised
by generational discrimination as well. Finally, the nca’s subsequent lack of
transparency as well as its more general institutional insulation only came to
widen these gaps between demos and their democracy across the structurally
critical months and years that followed.
Somewhat surprising given these issues in process, by virtue of consistent
popular agitation and the enduring efficacy of non-traditional, street-level
lobbying, the constitution that became law of the land in January 2014 would
be a relatively progressive one, and one that would mostly be in keeping with
public preferences.39 A majority of the Tunisian public had hoped that an ex-
pansive, welfarist vision of social democracy would be established in the era of
popular government, and the constitution that the nca ratified would honor
these hopes to a considerable extent. Article 38, for instance, defines health as
a right, stipulating that the state shall guarantee free health care for those with-
out means. Also of note, Article 12 asserts that the country’s u nderdeveloped
areas have a right to state assistance, Articles 35 and 36 insure freedom of
38 The magnitude of their voicelessness and of the principal-agent disjuncture that resulted
is rather starkly revealed in the fact that fewer than one in five within Tunisia’s poorer
governorates had voted for any single member of the ruling Troika coalition.
39 For analysis of the Arab Transformation Survey and Arab Barometer (2011), see Teti et al.,
The Arab Uprisings in Egypt, 70–72, 108.

12 Powers
a ssociation and the right to strike, and Article 40 defines work as “a right for ev-
ery citizen, male and female.” All these provisions represent bold, social demo-
cratic statements of purpose.
As mentioned at the outset, however, there have been very real issues when
it has come to implementation. Indeed, and by partial consequence of the
constitution’s foregoing of measures that might empower more muscular and
direct forms of accountability and popular agency, the translation of de jure
achievement to de facto reality has been consistently interrupted. Unencum-
bered by popular checks on their power, transitional governments have oper-
ated with relative impunity in violating the more socially ambitious aspects
of the constitution in particular, whether through violating the right to state
assistance, the right to freely form unions, the right to work, or the right to
strike.40 This autonomy of the political class vis-à-vis the constitution, provid-
ed for by their insulation from the public, ultimately amounts to a degrading
in the legal status of the citizenry’s social and economic rights, with such a
degrading compromising the social democratic properties nominally invested
in the constitution. Nowhere is this more visible than in the contrast between
a constitution requiring the tax system be fair and equitable and transitional
governments unanimously and disproportionately relying on a punitive Gen-
eral Sales Tax regime for their revenues.
While the idealizing blur emanating from the constitution and the nomi-
nal political and civil equality it enshrines may have impressed international
observers, then, for Tunisians, such celebrated norms only make the fact of
enduring social inequality all the more pronounced.41 For a great portion of
the population, the elite capture and non-implementation of the constitution
has meant that, materially speaking, very little has changed in the past seven
years. Arguing in this vein, Merone has posited that the transitional democ-
racy has actually maintained much of the class exclusivism and discrimina-
tion that had characterized Ben Ali’s decadent late period.42 In view of these
continuities, these issues with process, and these issues in protecting the social
and economic rights that were meant to be established in the constitution, the
growing apathy (as evidenced in voting data) if not outright resentment for the
political elite that is being witnessed amongst Tunisia’s disenfranchised and
40 A undp-provided English translation of the 2014 constitution is available at: https://www

.constituteproject.org/constitution/Tunisia_2014.pdf.
41 Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide,” 110.
42 Fabio Merone, “Enduring Class Struggle in Tunisia: The Fight for Identity beyond Political
Islam,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 1 (2015): 74–87, 75.

marginalized becomes less vexing.43 Hollowing is basic to all these outcomes,

and therefore to the more general legitimacy crisis afflicting the transitional
democracy as well.
3 Nidaa Tounes, Ennahda, and the Cartelization of Democracy
Turning to cartelization, I will begin this section by introducing the concept in

greater detail. Having done so, I will provide a brief historical review, process
tracing how cartelization (and the coalition of Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda)
came into being in 2015. From here, I will proceed to argue that cartelization is
implicated in four structural pathologies threatening democracy’s consolida-
tion in Tunisia today: (1) policy fixing and non-ideological competition; (2) the
rehabilitation and reintegration of Ben Ali era plutocrats, the foreclosure of
transitional justice, and the neutering of anti-corruption efforts; (3) the non-
reform of the judiciary and security sector following the abscondence of Ben
Ali; and (4) the reproduction of economic neoliberalism.
Building on the work of Schattschneider and Dahl, Katz and Mair introduced
the concepts of cartelization and the cartel party based on their observations
of established, western democracies in the 1980s and 1990s.44 Creatively inte-
grating findings from economic studies of oligopolistic markets, the heuristic
of the cartel was used to capture the changing forms of party organization, the
increasing interpenetration of state and party, and the secular decline in party-
society linkages that the scholars had witnessed in those decades.45
Katz and Mair’s analogic borrowing from economics followed from the hy-
pothesis that, just as an oligopolistic market might yield a stable equilibrium
in which the dominant firms cooperate so to fix prices and so to c ollectively
43 See the Instance Superieure Independante Pour Les Elections (www.isie.tn) for data on
voter turnout; across 2011, 2014, and 2018, voter turnout in the center, northwest, and ex-
treme south of Tunisia, all of which are characterized by significantly higher poverty and
unemployment rates vis-à-vis the national averages, were markedly below the national
participation rates. Regarding resentment, data from the second Arab Barometer showed
that as of 2014, just 14.9% of Tunisians trusted their government (as compares to 62.1% in
2011), that just 9.9% trusted their parliament, and that a mere 4.4% trusted in the coun-
try’s political parties (as compares to 22.1% in 2011) (108).
44 Richard Katz and Peter Mair, “Parties, Interest Groups and Cartels: A Comment,” Party
Politics 18, no. 1 (2012): 107–11.
45 Mark Blyth and Richard Katz, “From Catch-All Politics to Cartelisation: The Political
Economy of the Cartel Party”, Western European Politics 28, no. 1 (2005): 33–60, 38–9.

14 Powers
retain market control (to the detriment of the consumer and society),
oligopolistic political competition – especially when party-society linkages
are weak – might itself yield a stable equilibrium in which the dominant par-
ties cooperate so to fix policy choice and so to collectively retain power over
the state (to the detriment of the voter and society).46 Conspiring to compete
over less, they posited that oligopolistic political bargaining would therefore
imply a coordinated diminution of opposition, an arrangement that would al-
low dominant parties to more easily share the state’s resources and faculties
and thereby increase their capacity to jointly stave off external challengers.
Invoking Dahl’s 1965 article on opposition in western democracies, Katz and
Mair concluded that such a political formation would amount to a “govern-
ment by cartel”, a Pareto optimal state that would be difficult to displace once
established.47
Empirically, Katz and Mair argued that the cartelization of a democratic par-
ty system manifests and is recognizable in four forms of party interaction: (1)
party collusion in lowering constituent expectations (typically operationalized
through references to globalization and the restraints it imposes on domestic
political actors48); (2) party collusion in externalizing policy commitments;49
(3) party detachment from class cleavages;50 and (4) a reduced, controlled pat-
tern of partisan competition marked by a collective withdrawal from ideologi-
cal claim making.51
The effects of cartelization on democracy are not difficult to imagine. To be-
gin, per point two listed above, by externalizing (or devolving) policymaking to
actors and institutions that are not responsible to the electorate – independent
central banks, ifis, or the arbitrators of international trade – cartelization
both narrows the policy space available for elected officials and undermines
the principal-agent/voter-representative relationship that is foundational to
46 Ibid., 39.
47 Robert Dahl, “Reflections on Opposition in Western Democracies”, Governments and Op-
position 1, no. 1 (1965): 7–24.
48 Ben Rosamond, “Babylon and On: Globalization and International Political Economy”,
Review of International Political Economy 10, no.4 (2003): 661–71; and Ben Rosamond and
Colin Hay, “Globalization, European Integration and the Discursive Construction of Eco-
nomic Imperatives,” Journal of European Public Policy 9, no. 2 (2002): 147–67.
49 Blyth and Katz, “From Catch-All Politics to Cartelisation,” 43–4; for a classic example, see
Mark Wickham-Jones, “Anticipating Social Democracy, Preempting Anticipations: Eco-
nomic Policy-Making in the British Labor Party, 1987–1992,” Politics & Society 23, no. 4
(1995): 465–94.
50 Blyth and Katz, “From Catch-All Politics to Cartelisation,” 35–7.
51 Ibid., 34, 46.

republican democracy.52 After all, if representatives lack the agency to enact

the will of those that voted them into power and if the notional principals of a
democracy struggle to affect policy outcomes, on what criteria can the political
system still qualify as a democracy?
Second, the collusive lowering of constituent expectations is likely to acute-
ly degrade voters’ perceptions regarding the integrity of the political system.
This degradation, in turn, is likely to engender disaffection on the part of the
citizenry if not the citizenry’s outright resentment of political elites.53 In con-
junction with policy fixing’s depriving the political system of ideological and
programmatic opposition, this resentment is likely to facilitate the emergence
of what Dahl called the “democratic Leviathan, a formation propitious to those
seeking to mobilize existential, anti-polity styled ‘oppositions of principle’.”54
Process Tracing Tunisian Cartelization

When discussing cartelization in Tunisia, I am specifically referring to the pat-
tern of politics and policymaking that crystallized upon the emergence of the
Nidaa Tounes party in 2012. Regarding Nidaa Tounes’ origins, the party’s rise to
prominence was swift if not unpredictable. Animated by the personalismo of
its leader, Beji Caid Essebsi, and mobilizing the re-emergent old guard of Ben
Ali, the party capitalized on instability and post-uprising anomie so to win a
plurality of seats (86) in October 2014’s elections for the 217-member Assembly
of the Representatives of the People. Later that year, the same forces would
also deliver the Presidency to Essebsi.
Somewhat surprisingly, though only after an intensive period of elite bar-
gaining, the party leadership of Nidaa Tounes eventually opted to form its first
government with the post-Islamist Ennahda Party as a junior partner.55 In
numbers, the combined caucus of this new government, which also included
52 Ibid., 45.
53 See Mair, Ruling the Void, for the relationship between cartelization and delegitimization.
54 As Dahl writes in “Reflections on Opposition,” “By the democratic Leviathan I mean the
kind of political system…tamed and controlled by competition among highly organized
elites, and, in the perspective of the ordinary citizen, some what remote, distant, and
impersonal…This new Leviathan (is seen by many citizens) as too remote and bureaucra-
tized, too addicted to bargaining and compromise, too much an instrument of political
elites and technicians.”
55 On the long road to the coalition, see Anouar Jamaoui, “The Impact of the Co-
alition on Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes,” Open Democracy, 2015. https://www
.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/anouar-jamaoui/impact-of-coalition-on
-ennahda-and-nidaa-tounes.

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two smaller parties,56 constituted a near super majority within the Assembly.
With Ennahda’s 69 representatives, the second largest total of any party in the
Assembly by a wide margin – no other party boasted more than 16 – moreover,
the formation of this coalition also meant there would be no significant oppo-
sition bench within the legislature henceforth.
That Ennahda would have joined Nidaa Tounes in coalition perplexed many
observers, especially in view of the post-Islamists’ resistance credentials and
the decades that its leadership had been forced to spend in exile, underground,
or in prison as a result of decisions taken by many now sitting in the offices
of Nidaa Tounes. In view of the premium Ennahda places on organizational
survival, its class composition, and its ideological conservatism on a number
of social and economic issues, however, this rather cynical maneuver becomes
less mystifying.57
Beginning with the first point, by 2011, Ennahda’s aging leadership had been
well schooled in secularist counter-revolution. To begin, they had been chas-
tened by their own history of repression; memories of Ben Ali’s ascension to
power, of the initial democratic opening he introduced, and of the compre-
hensive crackdown he soon thereafter directed at the party-movement were
seminal.58 Witness to the Islamist experience in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria as
well, the region’s recent history only furthered engrained the lesson of au-
tocratic resilience. By consequence, well before the revolts of 2010 and 2011,
Rachid Ghannouchi and his closest lieutenants had already learned the truth
that there is wisdom in accommodation.59
As for the aforementioned points on class and ideology, it is important
to reiterate the middle-class composition of the party’s base and the non-
revolutionary ambition of their politics. Ennahda are democrats through and
through, and pluralist democrats at that, but vanguardists they are not. Indeed,
when it comes to social and economic issues, the party leadership prioritizes
moderation, social stability, and freeing markets just as does Nidaa Tounes if
admittedly being less accepting of the old elite’s gratuitous corruption.
56 Afek Tounes and the ulp Party, specifically.

57 Regarding the economic ideology of Ennahda, see Ed Webb, “Changing the Player, Not the
Game: Ennahda’s Homo Islamicus,” Air & Space Power Journal-Africa and Francophonia 5,
no. 1 (2014): 4–19.
58 On the effects this had on Ennahda’s leadership, see Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio
Merone, “Moderation through Exclusion? The Journey of the Tunisian Ennahda from
Fundamentalist to Conservative Party,” Democratization 20, no. 5 (2013): 857–75.
59 Monica Marks, “Tunisia’s Islamists and the ‘Turkish Model’,” Journal of Democracy 28,
no. 1 (2017): 102–15.

Given, then, the party’s record as well as its shared commitment to both
social conservatism and to the kinds of pragmatic apologetics moderates tend
to offer vis-à-vis the neoliberal global economy, Ennahda’s decision to line up
alongside the first estate in the aftermath of Ben Ali’s departure was not the
about-face some have imagined it to be.60 While the question of Islam cer-
tainly complicated the partnership with Nidaa Tounes (and ultimately con-
tributed to the fracturing of Essebsi’s party), Ennahda’s bourgeois sensibilities
mean that few substantive disagreements exist between the two sides.61 In the
context of their mutual opposition to structural social transformation, their
shared material interests, and the consonance of many of their ideological po-
sitions, coalition (and the cartelization it facilitated) made a great deal of sense
for both Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda.62
Cartelization and Its Discontents

Having established the historical process through which the Nidaa Tounes-
Ennahda coalition came into being, as mentioned in the introduction, it is my
position that cartelization has come to threaten Tunisian democracy in four
specific ways.
(1) To begin, the style, aesthetic, and substance of electoral competi-
tion in the age of the Nidaa-Ennahda coalition has helped consolidate non-
sociological cleavages as the structuring pivots of Tunisian politics.63 This has
been carried out by a pattern of politicking that subsumes and dissolves class
and regional-based issues in the faux existentialism of an Islamist v. Secularist
divide. Amongst other things, the effect of this controlled competition and its
60 For a general typology of Islamist conservatism, see Luca Ozzano, “The Many Faces of the
Political God: A Typology of Religiously Oriented Parties,” in Religiously Oriented Parties
and Democratization, eds., Luca Ozzano and Francesco Cavatorta (London: Routledge,
2014), 19–42.
61 On this point, see Rob Prince, “Tunisia: New Government, Old Ways?” Foreign Policy in
Focus, December 2013.
62 For a review of Ridha Saidi’s economic vision (Minister of Economics under the
Laarayedh-led Ennahda government), see Dahi Saber, “Ridha Saidi puise-t-il le savoir dans
le genie des tortues!”, Nawaat, November 2012. https://nawaat.org/portail/2012/11/04/rid
ha-saidi-puise-t-il-le-savoir-dans-le-genie-des-tortues/. For a review of party’s economics
as articulated by top economic advisor, Ridha Chkoundali, see Ridha Chkoundali, “Un
nouveau modele de developpement pour la Tunisie”, Emerging New Economic Policy Mak-
ers in the Arab Mediterranean: Economic Agendas of Islamic Actors, 2012.
63 On the emptiness of this cleavage, see Mathieu Rousselin, “Is Religion Truly the Main
Source of Cleavage in the Tunisian Party Landscape?” Global Dialogues 7 – The Tunisian
Constitutional Process: Main Actors and Key Issues (2015): 36–45.

18 Powers
cynical emphasizing of Islam has been to empty the official public sphere of
both materialist content and ideological debate concerning basic questions of
welfare, distribution, and social organization.64 Thereby reducing opposition
and political conflict to identity – and having mutually divested class content
from either of the aforementioned categories of identity (secular and Islamist) –
the controlled competition of the Ennahda-Nidaa Tounes coalition has been
key in distancing official politics from the material issues that are of immedi-
ate and irrefutable concern to the Tunisian citizenry. This aspect of carteliza-
tion has thus resulted in a social disembedding of parliament and professional
politics, a disarticulation of political attentions from popular concerns.
Beyond compromising competition, the complicity of the Nidaa Tounes-
Ennahda coalition in a second property of cartelization – policy fixing, or the
lack of substantive economic policy alternatives being generated by Tunisia’s
democracy – is also explicit. After all, as the two predominant actors in
parliamentary politics, the coalition’s consistent solidarity on economic mat-
ters insures there will be no effectual partisan challenge to either the legisla-
tion or the necessitarian arguments that they jointly advance in support of
liberalization.65
Regarding legislation, the coalition has been consistent in jointly advancing
the economic reforms proscribed by their foreign creditors. For example, the
two parties have collectively seen to it that the annual Finance Laws for 2016,
2017, and 2018 – each of which ushered in austerity-styled budget restrictions,
and each of which faced considerable popular opposition – all managed to
pass through parliament.66 Their caucuses were also able to muster 96 votes
in support of the emblematically neoliberal 2016–2020 five year Development
Plan, requiring only an additional 13 so to pass that initiative into law. Together,
they have pushed through any number of loan and financing proposals that
have come before parliament (see, for example, the votes on ibrd loans, Afri-
can Development Bank Loans, and Islamic Development Bank Loans), as well
64 Sebnem Yardimci-Geyikci and Ozlem Tur, “Rethinking the Tunisian Miracle: A Party
Politics View,” Democratization 25, no. 5 (2018): 787–803 See also Boukhars, 258–259, 265.
65 The sections of Ennahda’s 2014 election platform (“Toward Growing the Economy and Na-
tional Security”) devoted to the economy are nearly indistinguishable from those of Nidaa
Tounes (“Our program for an ambitious development and service of all Tunisians”). The
two parties also both voted in favor of the five-year Development Plan (2016–2020) voted
for in April of 2017, a plan very much in keeping with the neoliberal policy paradigm.
66 Their combined votes of 121 (2016 budget) 109 (2017 budget) were sufficient to pass the law
on their own; their 106 member bloc (2018 budget; this tally includes al Hora), meanwhile,
required just three further supporters for a majority.

as supporting the Central Bank’s various attempts to raise revenues through

bond issuances. Finally, the coalition’s unified front also managed to push
through a new Central Banking Law that had been written in consultation
with the imf. Like with the coalition’s support for the aforementioned loan
agreements, this piece of legislation too externalizes a policy commitment of
considerable importance; in the case of the Central Banking Law, the effect is
to insulate monetary policy from democratic oversight.67
When it comes to the economy, then, Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda’s policy
fixing has been consistent and robust. The discontents born of this and of their
controlled political competition are many, undergirding in particular why so
many young people turn to non-partisan actors and unorthodox forms of poli-
tics in seeking to express economic grievance.
(2) Second, cartelization has allowed for the rehabilitation and reintegra-
tion of Ben Ali’s plutocratic elite while also stripping those anti-corruption
and transitional justice measures established in the wake of the 2010–2011 re-
volts of any real weight. Regarding corruption, in 2013 and at the behest of
Caid Essebsi, Ennahda’s parliamentary leadership maneuvered so to postpone
the ratification of the oecd’s multilateral convention on tax evasion, there-
by sparing the old networks of privilege any potential legal injury in the era of
democracy.68 In quiet partnership with Nidaa Tounes, Ennahda also helped
sterilize a number of anti-corruption organizations established following Ben
Ali’s removal, leaving the post-uprising political system without the legal and
institutional means necessarily to deal with corruption, retroactively or other-
wise.69 Each amongst the Commission of Inquiry into Misappropriation and
Corruption (headed by Abdelfattah Amor), the National Anti-Corruption Au-
thority (headed be Chawki Tabib), and the national web portal where citizens
can report acts of corruption (www.anticor.tn), for example, has been ham-
strung by partisan interference. By consequence, as shocking as it might seem
given the absurdity of the Trabelsi clan’s graft and malfeasance, the analyses
of Transparency International and the Carnegie Endowment of International
Peace both conclude that corruption in Tunisia is worse at the time of writing
than it was under Ben Ali.70
67 The website of the Tunisian parliament has made the full text of the legislation available
for viewing (in Arabic) at the following link: http://www.arp.tn/site/loi/AR/fiche_loi.jsp?
cl=93521.
68 Maria Cristina Paciello, “Delivering the Revolution? Post-Uprising Socio-Economics in
Tunisia and Egypt,” The International Spectator 48, no. 7 (2013): 7–29, 28.
69 Ibid., 27.
70 Sarah Yerkes and Marwan Muasher, “Tunisia’s Corruption Contagion: A Transi-
tion at Risk,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2017. https://

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As for transitional justice, the Nidaa Tounes-Ennahda coalition has consis-

tently undermined the country’s Truth and Dignity Commission over the past
three years.71 Established in 2013, the Commission had been enshrined in the
constitution and empowered to “implement a comprehensive transitional jus-
tice mechanism anchored in the law, informed by the evolution of transitional
justice theory and its use in other countries.”72 While Ennahda had initially
given the body its full support, upon the consolidation of its partnership with
Nidaa Tounes in early 2015, it largely abandoned the cause. Disregarding the
Commission’s popularity amongst the citizenry, Ennahda has since acquiesced
to Nidaa Tounes’ filibustering of its work, even tacitly backing Nidaa’s efforts
to defund and dissolve the Commission once and for all in March of 2018.73
Though the public furor at the vote was such that the Ministry of Relations
with Constitutional Bodies, Civil Society, and Human Rights unilaterally in-
tervened to extend the Commission’s operations until the end of December,
Ennahda’s willingness to bend the knee in parliament suggests they have ac-
cepted Nidaa Tounes’ reactionary preference for selective amnesia.
When it comes to the rehabilitation and reintegration of old elites, finally,
one need first consider the Economic Reconciliation bill that the coalition
passed into law in September 2017. A cynical, transactional piece of legislation,
Economic Reconciliation granted amnesty to those enriched by the perfidy and
ill-begotten gains of the Ben Ali era in exchange for such individuals’ pledging
to repatriate the capital they were hiding in offshore accounts across the world.
Framing this concession to plutocrats past as an unfortunate but necessary
means of securing the long-term health of the national economy, the coali-
tion sold reconciliation under the auspices that it would jumpstart the transi-
tion’s flagging growth and job creation numbers.74 Having failed to fulfill such
promises while simultaneously closing the door on the democracy’s pursuit of
carnegieendowment.org/2017/10/25/tunisia-s-corruption-contagion-transition-at-risk
-pub-73522.
71 Boukhars, 263.
72 International Crisis Group, “Tunisia: Transitional Justice and the Fight against Cor-
ruption,” International Crisis Group, Report no. 168, May 2016. https://www.crisisgroup
.org/middle-east-north-africa/north-africa/tunisia/tunisia-transitional-justice-and-fight
-against-corruption.
73 By their combined efforts and through Ennahda’s 69-member caucus collectively decid-
ing to abstain from the vote, the Nidaa Tounes nay vote was eough to defeat the renewal
with ease.
74 Yardimci-Geyikci and Tur, “Rethinking the Tunisian Miracle,” 8. See also Monica Marks,
“The Cost of Inclusion: Ennahda and Tunisia’s Political Transition,” pomeps (Jan 2017).
https://pomeps.org/2017/04/27/inclusion-at-any-cost-tunisias-ennahda-today/.

justice and reparations, the bill is widely conceived as a post-facto capitulation

to the cronyism that had undergirded Tunisian autocracy. Functioning so to
preserve and retrench the predatory, non-productive foundations of Ben Ali’s
bunco capitalism, the bill represents one of cartelization’s most disappointing
legislative legacies.
Beyond the economic rehabilitation of the old elite, the coalition has also
secured the political reintegration of such elements. Indeed, a look at either
of the coalition’s post-2015 cabinets confirms as much. Under Prime Minister
Chahed’s government, for example, the Minister of Transportation, Radhouane
Ayara, had previously served as a long time diplomat under Ben Ali; Hatem
Ben Salem, Minister of Education, had served in the same position prior to the
Ben Ali’s fall from power (in addition to serving in his Ministry of Foreign Af-
fairs for over a decade); Mohamed Ridha Chalghoum, the Minister of Finance,
held the same position under Ben Ali between 2010 and 2011; and Abdelkrim
Zbidi, Minister of Defense, had been Ben Ali’s Minister of Public Health in 2001
along with having long ties to the Neo-Destour party state.75 By consequence
of these policies and measures, Tunisia’s cartelized democracy has not only re-
tained the deep economic structures of the autocratic era; in returning people
like Chalghoum to positions of power, it has also seen to it that high-level eco-
nomic policymaking remains the reserve of an old, failed elite.
(3) Third, cartelization has also imperiled the transitional democracy by un-
dercutting efforts to reform the powers of Tunisia’s security sector. A number
of points are worth mentioning here. To begin, the Nidaa Tounes-Ennahda
bloc in parliament has largely shielded the Ministry of the Interior and its
mukhabarat from any serious scrutiny or institutional adjustment.76 With
these actors and institutions thereby administered and regulated by the very
same laws and regulations that had enabled their abuses under Bourguiba and
Ben Ali, little substantive progress has been made in bringing the state’s prae-
torian guard to heel.77
The coalition’s members have also taken little interest in reforming either
the penal or military codes established under the previous regime.78 Most
75 Keian Razipour, “Details on the New Tunisian Cabinet,” Project on Middle East Democracy,
September 2017. https://pomed.org/details-on-the-new-tunisian-cabinet/.
76 Boukhars, p. 263.
77 Yezid Sayigh, “Bringing Tunisia’s Transition to its Security Sector,” Carnegie Middle East
Center, February 2016. http://carnegie-mec.org/2016/02/05/bringing-tunisia-s-transition
-to-its-security-sector-pub-62563.
78 On the non-reform of penal codes, see Fadil Aliriza, “Lab Report: A Tale of Two Decrees,”
Foreign Policy, June 2014. https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/11/a-tale-of-two-decrees/.

22 Powers
orrisome in this regard (and though preceding the coalition’s coming to

w
power), the transitional parliament passed Decree-Law No. 2011–69 in July
2011, an amendment that reestablishes the powers of military courts when it
comes to prosecuting civilian actors for offenses deemed detrimental to the
army.79 A revanchist move preserving the expansive jurisdiction of the state’s
juridical-coercive apparatus, this law explicitly provides for the circumven-
tion of a liberal constitution that was meant to put shackles on the preroga-
tives (and excesses) of the state.80 Amnesty International has documented the
abuses that have resulted, detailing a worrying trend whereby state prosecutors
need only drag the accused into the orbit of terrorism so to try a dissident under
military laws less demanding of burden of proof.81 Having taking few efforts
to reform the judiciary, moreover, the coalition cannot guarantee justice will
be seen to even in the event that one is fortunate enough to be tried within a
civilian court.82
What is more, the cartelized democracy has also failed to scrutinize or re-
form 1978’s State of Emergency Decree. Thereby legally preserving the extraor-
dinary powers of the executive, this decision could prove more costly than
any other. Emergency has already been invoked on a number of occasions
across the post-2011 period, and for widely disparate purposes – from counter-
terrorism to putting down protests.83 Though the worst of its excesses have yet
to be experienced, the security sector’s continued involvement in racketeering,
their continued abuses of both salafists and the poor in the name of counter-
terrorism,84 and their consistent use of excessive force against protestors re-
veal that authoritarian drift is never too far off.85
79 For more details, see Article 19 Staff, “Tunisia: Military Justice Threatens Freedom of Ex-
pression,” Article 19, November 2016. https://www.article19.org/resources/tunisia-military
-justice-threatens-freedom-of-expression/.
80 Hanen Jebli, “Is freedom of Expression at Stake in Tunisia?” Al-Monitor, April 2018. https://
www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/04/tunisia-trial-bloggers-raises-controversy
-freedom-of-speech.html.
81 Amnesty International, “Tunisia: Drop Charges against Blogger and Newly Elected Par-
liamentarian,” Amnesty International Report, January 2018. https://www.amnesty.org/en/
latest/news/2018/01/tunisia-drop-charges-against-blogger-and-newly-elected-parlia
mentarian/.
82 Mahmoud Hamad and Khalil al-Anani, “Elections and Beyond: Democratization, Demo-
cratic Consolidation, or What?”, in Elections and Democratization in the Middle East, eds.,
Mahmoud Hamad and Khalil al-Anani (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 203–21, 212.
83 Boukhars, 263.
84 Through unlawful detention, harassment, and torture.
85 Human Rights Watch, “Tunisia: Crackdown on Peaceful Protests: Emergency Law Used
to Stifle Dissent,” Human Rights Watch Report, September 2015. https://www.hrw.org/
news/2015/09/10/tunisia-crackdown-peaceful-protests.

Finally, (4) as mentioned in the introduction, cartelization also led to the

externalization of economic policy commitments, with Nidaa Tounes and En-
nahda thereby able to guarantee that Tunisia’s democracy can be trusted to
carry on with economic liberalization in the transition period.86 A series of
Stand-by Agreements with the imf (agreements neither subjected to public
scrutiny nor having required parliamentary approval) as well as the coalition’s
passing of key pieces of legislation (like the Central Banking Law discussed
earlier) have been basic to this. I will discuss all these matters in full in the fol-
lowing section.87
Before concluding here, however, I would be remiss were I not to acknowl-
edge some of the positives of the Nidaa Tounes-Ennahda coalition. As Boukhars
has detailed, the post-revolt politics of accommodation and compromise real-
ized through the coalition deserves genuine commendation for insuring that
the transition did not descend into a politics of enmity.88 One need only look
around the region to see what such a descent may have entailed. If for that rea-
son alone, the cartel politics practiced by Tunisia’s two parliamentary heavy-
weights should be celebrated. Ultimately content to privilege national unity
and “the restoration of the so-called ‘awe of the state’…under the aegis of bipar-
tisan hegemony”, however, on balance, I believe their oligopolistic partnership
has helped institutionalize a form of democratic government that threatens to
delegitimize the very democratic project in whose name they act.89
4 Neoliberalism and its Discontents
In this section, I will develop how both process (the depoliticization of econom-
ic policymaking as achieved by the externalization of policy commitments)
and outcome (the lack of welfare gains being generated by the chosen eco-
nomic policies) compromise the transition to democracy.
86 For a general review, see Karen Pfeifer, “The Tortuous Path to a New Economic Agenda in
Egypt and Tunisia,” Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 9–23; and Ines
Mahmoud, “Tunisia’s Next Revolution,” Jacobin Magazine, February 2018. https://www
.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/tunisias-next-revolution.
87 I have already touched on details regarding monetary policy externalization. Details of the
policy recommendations (fiscal policy externalization) offered through the Deauville Part-
nership are available at the website of the Ministry of Finance at the following link: http://
www.portail.finances.gov.tn/publications/PLan-Jasmin-tra-duction-FR-SIGMA-finale
-1-.doc.
88 Boukhars, 258.
89 Ibid., 265.

24 Powers
Regarding the former, one need begin with the Jasmine Plan, a series of ar-
rangements negotiated in secret and without democratic review following the
fall of Ben Ali. Provisioning a financial stabilization package conditional on the
implementation of economic reform, the Jasmine Plan was primarily brokered
between Beji Caid Essebsi and a constellation of foreign partners collectively
referred to as the Deauville Partners, a group including G8 member states,
the imf, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Arab Monetary
Fund, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Not with-
standing the rhetorical emphasis put on inclusive growth, participation, social
spending targets, and good governance,90 in substance, the Jasmine Plan – as
best represented by the imf Standby Arrangement, or sba – was little different
from the ifis’ prior interventions in Tunisia.91
Specifically, in exchange for a number of low-interest loans broken into
tranches and totaling $1.78 billion (to be distributed over two years, with latter
injections of capital contingent upon the debtor’s honoring of the terms of the
agreement), the sba of May 2013 required that Tunisia’s new democratic gov-
ernments both institute a number of administrative and managerial reforms
and that they implement a series of quantitative and structural reforms.92 Re-
garding the latter and as delineated in the sba’s Technical Memorandum of
Understanding and Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, structural
reforms entailed legislation and executive action targeting fiscal consolidation,
macroeconomic stability, privatization, labor market flexibilization, banking
90 On the changes in policy and rhetoric at the imf more generally, see Sarah Babb, “The
Washington Consensus as Transnational Policy Paradigm: Its Origins, Trajectory, and
Likely Successor,” Review of International Political Economy 20, no. 2 (2013), 268–97; Cornel
Ban and Kevin Gallagher, “Recalibrating Policy Capitalization Orthodoxy: The imf Since
the Great Recession,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and
Institutions 28, no. 2 (2015): 131–46; and Cornel Ban, “Austerity versus Stimulus? Under-
standing Fiscal Policy Change at the International Monetary Fund since the Great Reces-
sion,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 28,
no. 2 (2015): 167–83.
91 See Pfeifer “The Tortuous Path to a New Economic Agenda;” and Hanieh “Shifting
Priorities.”
92 imf Country Report No.13/161, “Tunisia: Request for a Stand-By Arrangement – Staff
Report, Press Release on the Executive Board Decision; and Statement by the Executive
Director for Tunisia”, International Monetary Fund Publication Services, June 2013. https://
www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2013/cr13161.pdf. Chedly Ayari and Elyes Fakhfakh,
“Tunisia: Letter of Intent, Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, and Techni-
cal Memorandum of Understanding,” International Monetary Fund Country Policy Inten-
tion Documents, May 2013. https://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/2013/tun/052413.pdf.

and financial sector reform, Central Bank independence, the development

of public-private partnerships, and business environment improvements.93
Imposing such structural reforms without democratic sanction therefore im-
plied a significant externalization of policy commitments, with the sba func-
tioning so to strip the democracy’s elected officials of the right to influence
many of the most essential domains of economic policy.
Disassembling for a moment what the series of externalized policy commit-
ments contained in the sba actually involved, fiscal consolidation specifically
mandated that transitional governments reduce the annual deficit through im-
posing limits on public expenditures and through increasing tax revenues. On
the expenditures side of the ledger, this meant instituting policies that would
control the wage bill,94 reform the pension system, reform the social protection
system, and reverse the state’s longstanding commitment to providing univer-
sal subsidies on certain basic goods.95 Regarding pension reform, while the As-
sembly had not yet passed legislation at the time of writing, the Ministry of
Social Affairs did reach an agreement with the country’s largest public sector
union – the ugtt – in May of 2017, a measure that will increase the retirement
age for these workers by two to five years as of 2020.96 As for the legislation
currently under debate in parliament, in classic neoliberal fashion, it proposes
an increase in labor’s share of pension contributions and a decrease in the pen-
sion benefits to be provided on the backend.97
Subsidy reforms, meanwhile, have seen transitional governments institute
cuts to state assistance on electricity, gas, milk, and fuel.98 Though one should
acknowledge that Ennahda initially refused to implement the most socially
damaging of these cuts while in control of government between 2011 and 2014
(and that the party did work to preserve subsidies for bread, semolina, gas,
and diesel oil, all of which are essential to the survival of Tunisia’s poor), their
motives in doing so have been brought in for questioning. Halimi, for example,
93 imf Report, 22–5.

94 It should be said that Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes have been less than faithful in imple-
menting these policies.
95 Ayari and Fakhfakh, “Tunisia: Letter of Intent,” 7–15.
96 Tarek Amara, “Tunisia to Lift Retirement Age by Two Years, Official Says,” Reuters,
November 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/tunisia-economy-reforms/tunisia-to-lift
-retirement-age-by-two-years-official-says-idUSL8N1NN3ES.
97 Chedly Ayari and Slim Chaker, “Tunisia: Letter of Intent, Memorandum of Econom-
ic and Financial Policies, and Technical Memorandum of Understanding,” Interna-
tional Monetary Fund Country Policy Intention Documents, May 2016. https://www.imf
.org/external/np/loi/2016/tun/050216.pdf.
98 Hanieh, “Shifting Priorities,” 125–26.

26 Powers
references these subsidies as an instrument of a bargain whereby “Tunisian

workers in industries that are dependent on foreign capital accept miserable
wages in exchange for the promise of being able to buy subsidized (goods).”99
Beyond reducing what the World Bank has taken to calling “corrosive subsi-
dies”, as mentioned, changes to social protection and to the state’s larger welfare
regime were also stipulated in the sba. In total, these reforms have seen a wel-
fare paradigm that had been based on a rights-based approach to social protec-
tion be replaced by the targeted, need-based approach favored by the i fis.100
As hinted at in the shift in language, this substitution has also functioned so to
excise rights from the domain of social protection, to rescind the individual’s
right to welfare. Essential to and reflective of the liberal priorities and obliga-
tions institutionalized under the depoliticized economic policymaking of the
new democracy, this change, in conjunction with the aforementioned subsidy
reforms, formalizes the cartelized political system’s renunciation of those con-
stitutional articles meant to guarantee the fundamental social and economic
rights of the citizenry.101 As targeted welfare systems tend to miss a large per-
centage of deserving individuals due to inevitable errors in data collection,
spurious calculations of the poverty line, eligibility restrictions leading to an
exclusion of the working poor, and due to an inability to account for the sea-
sonal poverty so common in the agricultural sector, moreover, the consequenc-
es of such a renunciation for Tunisia’s poor were always going to be significant.
While full conclusions on the impact of the move to targeted social protec-
tion cannot yet be established, the poverty rates observed during the transition
period – an outcome tied to reductions in subsidies, changes in welfare eligibil-
ity, slumping economic performance, and insufficient job creation – are trou-
bling. Based on the standards of the fao (un’s Food and Agriculture Organiza-
tion) and the World Health Organization,102 the Tunisian National Institute of
Statistics establishes a national poverty rate of 15.2% as of 2015, a figure that
jumps to 26.0% in non-urban areas. While an improvement vis-à-vis 2010 and
99 Serge Halimi, “Tunisia: Change, but No Change,” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2014.
http://mondediplo.com/2014/04/01tunisia.
100 An approach that privileges efficiency, prioritizes blocking “welfare leakage” above any
obligation to insure that none of the deserving get left behind, and stipulates that only the
“truly poor” are afforded access.
101 imf Country Report No.13/161, 7–10, 22–4.
102 For full details, the institute’s methodology is available at: http://beta.ins.tn/sites/default/
files/methode/pdf/Mesure_de_pauvrete_en_Tunisie.pdf.

2005,103 the tendency towards undercounting in poverty research is by now

well-established, suggesting matters may be even direr than is indicated in the
data.104
Before moving on from the topic of social protection, it is also worth add-
ing that despite the ifis being almost exclusively blamed for these policies,
the empirical record shows that Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes have in fact em-
braced this aspect of the liberalization agenda with a militancy exceeding that
of their foreign partners. Indeed, without diminishing the restraints that are
imposed by institutions like the imf,105 the Fund itself has nonetheless also
attached some soft, positive conditions to the sba signed with Tunisia. Spe-
cifically, amongst the arrangement’s Quantitative Indicative Targets, the imf
inserted conditions that establish minimal social spending standards. Though
these targets are not binding – in this sense, they are certainly of secondary
importance as compared to the balance of payments-centric Quantitative Per-
formance Criteria – they do demonstrate that even the imf is looking to ame-
liorate the most punitive aspects of liberalization. And yet, despite the Fund’s
hitherto described efforts to incentivize responsible social policy, coalition
governments have failed to hit the spending floors laid out in the Quantita-
tive Indicative Targets on a number of separate occasions.106 This all being the
103 The National Institute of Statistics recorded national poverty rate for 2005 and 2010 at
23.1% and 20.5%, respectively, and the non-urban rates 38.8% and 36%, respectively.
104 Achcar, The People Want, 21.
105 Middle East Eye, “Tunisia to Raise Fuel Prices – Not Public Wages – to Meet imf Terms,”
Middle East Eye, June 2018. <http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tunisia-raise-fuel-prices
-not-public-wages-meet-imf-terms-1735760257>. Tarek Amara and Ulf Laessing, “Exclu-
sive: Tunisia to Raise Fuel Prices, Hold off Public Wages Increase,” Reuters (June 2018).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tunisia-economy-exclusive/exclusive-tunisia-to-
raise-fuel-prices-hold-off-public-wages-increases-idUSKCN1IX4oo. In 2017, for example,
the imf withheld the release of a $320 million tranche from its 2016 Extended Fund Facil-
ity arrangement with the Tunisian government in response to that government’s delin-
quency in cutting energy subsidies and reducing the public sector wage bill; though the
Fund eventually made those capital injections available, it again used the conditional
withholding of a second, $250 million tranche in 2018, this time successfully incentivizing
the Chahed government to bring about the desired wage freeze and cuts to fuel subsidies.
106 Chedly Ayari and Hakim Ben Hammouda, “Tunisia: Letter of Intent, Memorandum of
Economic and Financial Policies, and Technical Memorandum of Understanding,” Inter-
national Monetary Fund Country Policy Intention Documents, January 2014. https://www
.imf.org/external/np/loi/2014/tun/012814.pdf. Per page 7 of this document, transitional
governments under Ennahda’s leadership missed each of the indicative targets for social
spending.

28 Powers
case, the complicity of the domestic leadership – Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda,
primarily – in the poverty figures detailed above should not be diminished in
any way.
Turning to the revenue side of fiscal consolidation, the emphasis has of
course been on tax reform. Not withstanding the progressive language infused
into these efforts, the Ennahda-led government’s first foray into tax reform (the
2013 Budget Law) introduced a 1% flat levy on all income exceeding 1700 Dinar,
a regressive maneuver denounced by unions and civil society for its injurious
effects on wage workers.107 While in leadership, the party also helped deliver a
cut in corporate tax rates (from 35% to 25%108 and, in the case of smes, from
25% to 20%)109 and managed to protect, more or less, prevailing loopholes for
offshore corporate tax evasion (tax rates on offshore businesses were raised
from 0% to 10%).110 Combined with the fact that comprehensive income tax
reform remains eternally in committee – and that the preceding, moderately
progressive system has been systematically undermined by upper-class tax eva-
sion111 – government revenue continues to rely on the Value Added Tax (vat)
in trying to close Tunisia’s persistent fiscal deficits during the transition period.
Indeed, the receipts generated by this regressive vat regime – a series of
taxes on consumption, goods, and services – comprise a far greater share of
total tax revenue than do income, corporate, or capital gains taxes. As of 2015,
vat was in fact contributing nearly four times more revenue than corporate
taxes.112 Despite this, the Finance Law passed by the coalition this last Decem-
ber actually raised the vat by an additional 1%, with vat now reaching 19%
for certain goods. Even when such measures have been presented as socially
just – like with the increased vat on vehicles, a targeted reform reputedly iso-
lated to luxury goods and their wealthy consumers – moreover, the outcome
has been disproportionally punitive for Tunisia’s struggling lower and middle
classes (taxi drivers and small farmers in this case).113 All in all, the revenue
side reforms of fiscal consolidation have thus had distinct and negative distri-
butional effects for the economically vulnerable.
107 Paciello, “Delivering the Revolution,” 20.

108 Ayari and Ben Hammouda, “Tunisia: Letter of Intent,” 21.
109 The details of the Budget Law of 2018 are available at parliament’s official website: http://
www.arp.tn/site/loi/AR/fiche_loi.jsp?cl=100388.
111 Principally, tax evasion on the part of the rich; see http://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ID/
Tunisia-Individual-Taxes-on-personal-income for full details.
112 Statistics provided by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development:
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=REVTUN.
113 Hanieh, “Shifting Priorities,” 126.

Moving on from the area of fiscal consolidation, in consultation with the

ifis, the transitional democracy has also been called upon both to reform
Tunisia’s investment code and to reinstate and accelerate privatization initia-
tives begun under Ben Ali. Regarding the latter, in addition to presiding over
the privatization of a number of state properties seized from the family and
allies of Ben Ali (such as the telecoms company Tunisiana and the Ecole inter-
national de Carthage), Ennahda-led governments also oversaw the sale of 13%
of the Bank of Tunisia to private investors.114 As for the former, in what perhaps
best epitomizes the externalization of policy commitments that is fundamen-
tal to cartelization, Tunisia’s democratic leadership literally turned the writing
of a new investment code over to its foreign creditors. As the Investment Min-
ister at the time, Ennahda member Riadh Bettaieb, has openly acknowledged,
composition of the National Investment Code was outsourced to a coterie of
foreign consultants, lawyers, and advisors overseen by the oecd, European In-
vestment Bank, and the ifc.115 Now law after being ushered through the Coun-
cil of Ministers in November 2013, the Code is unsurprisingly generous to the
interests of both domestic and international capital.116
As mentioned in previous sections, monetary policy too has been depoliti-
cized and insulated from popular oversight as a result of the coalition’s actions.
Securing parliamentary ratification for a new central banking law in April 2016,
their legislation – written in consultation with the imf – at once strengthened
independence of the Tunisian Central Bank117 and established price stabil-
ity as the fundamental policy objective of the Central Bank.118 Given the re-
strictions already imposed on fiscal policymaking, by thereby also removing
monetary policy from the remit of elected officials, this legislation only further
insulated the tools of economic management from democratic oversight. As
the Central Banking Law barely passed through parliament by a margin of two
votes – the bill had set off considerable popular opposition and was deemed
an unobscured capitulation to the imf by many119 – its passage required the
concerted efforts of Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes, with the late mobilization of
the former’s caucus proving decisive.
114 Paciello “Delivering the Revolution,” 24.

115 Rousselin, “In the name of Allah”, 215–16.
117 Specifically, the law stipulates that the Board of the Central Bank will not take instruc-
tions from the government and will have absolute control over monetary policy, currency
reserves, and gold reserves.
118 See Ayari and Chaker, “Tunisia: Letter of Intent,” 7 for review of the legislation.
119 Reuters Staff, “Overcoming splits, Tunisia’s parliament approves new banking law,” Reuters,
May 2016. https://www.reuters.com/article/tunisia-economy/overcoming-splits-tunisias-
parliament-approves-new-banking-law-idUSL5N1874LJ.

30 Powers
Beyond implementing these structural reforms, one should also acknowl-

edge the earnestness with which coalition members have honored Tunisia’s
pre-existing public debts. Indeed, despite both huge popular support and legal
precedent (the Sack Doctrine) for seeking forgiveness for “odious debts” in-
curred by non-democratic predecessors, Ennahda120 and Nidaa Tounes fully
committed themselves to servicing (and politically legitimizing) those debts
that financed the reign of the Ben Ali’s autocracy.121 As explicitly pledged in
the Quantitative Performance Criteria Tunisian governments have agreed to
with the imf, the transition leadership has in fact bound Tunisia’s democracy
to zero accumulation of net external debt payment arrears.122 In other words,
regardless of either punitive social effects or the circumstance under which a
debt was incurred, the transitional democracy has institutionalized the timely
repayment of foreign creditors as the single inviolable principle of fiscal policy.
The discord between such a commitment and the public will could be no more
pronounced.
As for labor issues, the International Trade Union Confederation (ituc) has
drawn attention to the transitional leadership’s complicity in a number of le-
gal and legislative shortcomings. Amongst them, the ituc has documented
the state’s continued regulation of collective bargaining, the state’s continued
control over union leaderships, legal restrictions on strike actions (no wildcats,
notably), excessive civil and penal sanctions for non-authorized strike actions,
restrictions and prohibitions on the right to strike, the arbitrariness of the
state’s refusal to recognize unofficial unions (and the subsequent imposition
of sanctions on those organizing and member to such unions), and legal stat-
utes allowing the state or employer to unilaterally annul or modify the content
of collective bargaining agreements.123 That the ilo has downgraded Tunisia’s
rating regarding domestic labor protections during the transition period pro-
vides perhaps the starkest indication of the cartelized democracy’s political,
social, and economic priorities.
Efforts in job creation have been wholly insufficient as well, with the de-
mocracy’s two largest parties here also offering little in terms of policy alter-
natives. Sharing the same development model, each pushes a jobs program
120 Pfeifer, “The Tortuous Path to a New Economic Agenda,” 17.

121 Pfeifer, “The Tortuous Path to a New Economic Agenda,” 17; and Rousselin, “In the Name
of Allah,” 216.
122 Ayari and Fakhfakh, “Tunisia: Letter of Intent,” 16.
123 Cited in Danish Trade Union Council for International Development-Cooperation, Tuni-
sia: Labor Market Profile, 6.

dependent on foreign direct investment and operationalized through initia-

tives to develop small and medium sized enterprises, to improve the business
environment, to improve financial rationalization and financial inclusion
through the establishment of credit bureaus, to expand microfinance, and to
foster entrepreneurship.124 With each party thereby alike in only superficially
addressing the structural reality of marginality, informal sectors, low labor
force participation, surplus populations, inequality and poverty, and human
capital deficiencies, with each party foregoing industrial policy and initia-
tives to generate domestic savings (both of which are essential for sustainable,
long-term growth), and with each party ignoring the fundamental issues with
f di-dependent development, it is unsurprising that a parliament dominated
by the Nidaa Tounes-Ennahda coalition has delivered little progress vis-à-vis
unemployment, wage growth, productivity gains, real gdp growth, gross capi-
tal formation, and investment.
The Tunisian Economy in the Transition
Labor productivity (output per

worker/constant USD 2010)
30000
25000
20000
15000
10000
5000
0
2005
2015
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
World Upper-Middle Income Tunisia

* ilo Estimate/data
124 As evidenced in Ennahda’s 2014 election platform (“Toward Growing the Economy and
National Security”) and Nidaa Tounes’ 2014 platform (“Our program for an ambitious de-
velopment and service of all Tunisians”), as well as their collaboration in promoting Tu-
nisia’s 2016–2020 Development Plan at the International Investment Conference “Tunisia
2020” in November of 2016.

32 Powers
GDP per capita (constant 2010 USD)

9000
8000
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000
0
1980 1990 2000 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Tunisia Upper Middle Income

* Data provided by the World Bank
Unemployment Rate
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
2000 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

* Data provided by the World Bank
Consumer Price Index during the

transition (Annual Average Inf lation)
8.0
7.0
6.0
5.0
4.0
3.0
2.0
1.0
0.0
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
* Data provided by Tunisian National Institute of Statistics

Gross capital formation (percentage of GDP)

40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
1980 1990 2000 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

*Data provided by World Bank
Gross domestic savings (percentage of GDP)

40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
1980 1990 2000 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
*Data provided by World Bank
FDI vs. remittances (in millions, USD)
3,000.0
2,500.0
2,000.0
1,500.0
1,000.0
500.0
-
1980 1990 2000 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
FDI Personal remittances
* Data provided by World Bank

34 Powers
As these graphs establish, the Tunisian economy is significantly underper-

forming vis-à-vis comparator countries, with the development model being
adopted by the transition’s leadership yet to generate even marginal welfare
gains. That economic deficiencies of the kind described in this section would
have destabilizing effects on the consolidation of democracy is very much in
keeping with expectations of democratization theorists.125
5 Conclusion
Tunisia’s democracy is most certainly in trouble, as evidenced by any num-

ber of indicators. In addition to witnessing unceasing protests, in the space of
three years – between 2011 and 2014, the time separating the country’s first ever
free national election from its second ever free national election – Tunisian
voter participation had already declined by between 20–25%. Worse, this
downward trend only accelerated subsequently, as evidenced in the data from
2018’s municipal elections. This much-ballyhooed effort to commemorate the
decentralization of government enticed only 1.8 million Tunisians to vote, a fur-
ther 40–50% decline in participation as compares to 2014’s already moribund
numbers.
Across each of these elections, moreover, non-participation numbers have
been acutely worse in the interior of the country, amongst Tunisia’s poor, and
amongst Tunisia’s youth. Regarding the latter, while reliable exit poll-derived
demographic data does not exist, Arab Barometer and World Value Surveys sug-
gest that voter participation rates for Tunisian youth (18–34 year olds) in 2014
was likely no more than 33%.126 Confirming anecdotal speculations, this sug-
gests that the pathologies of disaffection and abstentionism afflicting Tunisian
democracy are all the more acutely felt amongst the country’s revolutionary
subjects.127 Rafik Halauani, head of the election monitory agency M
ourakiboun,
has himself come to a similar conclusion following May’s municipal elections,
125 See Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transi-
tions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) for the liberal perspective.
126 Sarah Yerkes, “Young People Are Staying Away from Tunisian Politics – Here’s Why,”
Brookings Markaz, March 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/03/20/
young-people-are-staying-away-from-tunisian-politics-heres-why/.
127 Christine Petre, “Why Aren’t Young People Voting in the Tunisian Elections?” World Bank
Blog, November 2014. http://blogs.worldbank.org/arabvoices/why-aren-t-young-people
-voting-tunisian-elections.

saying that young Tunisians “no longer believe in elections as a source of

change, which is very serious for democracy.”128
The relationship between these outcomes and the arguments made in this
paper is, I believe, quite significant. In some cases, the relationship is even
rather linear. A cursory look at the campaign of Fech Nestennaw, the principle
organizer of 2017–2018 protest movement, for example, reveals that the move-
ment mobilized in response to the 2018 Finance Law.129 As discussed, this law,
a classic piece of neoliberal legislation, instantiated significant cuts to subsi-
dies and public sector hiring while also increasing vat rates. Pushed through
parliament by Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes and publicly stumped for by En-
anhda Economic Reforms Minister Taoufik Rajhi, the through lines connect-
ing cartelization, neoliberalism, and democratic disaffection here are undeni-
able.130 The same goes, moreover, for pre-2018 protests and mobilizations, the
vast majority of which mobilized in response to the coalition’s imposition of
economic reforms sanctioned not by the Tunisian people but rather by the
state’s foreign creditors.131 These people are fighting for social democracy and
against the liberal, cartelized facsimile they have been bequeathed. Given the
deep linkages between Tunisia’s hollow democracy, her stubborn neoliberal-
ism, and her endless summer of protest, the irony laden in Rachid Ghannouchi
128 dw Editorial Staff, “Tunisia: Low Turnout as Ennahda Party Claims Victory,” May 2018. http://
www.dw.com/en/tunisia-low-turnout-as-ennahda-party-claims-victory/a-43678089.
129 Communications available at: https://www.facebook.com/Fech.Nestanew/.
130 Many Nahdawi politicians in particular have expressed their unease with the law’s com-
bination of subsidy cuts and increased taxes, responding to the protests by calling for an
increase to the minimum wage as well an increase in cash transfers to the poor. Rajhi,
however, has used his platform at the Ministry to propagate necessitarian arguments in
favor of austerity, asserting that the Tunisian government simply does not have the re-
sources to increase spending on health, subsidies, education, or public sector hiring.
131 Boukhars, 265–66; and Jan Philipp Vatthauer and Irene Weipert-Fenner, “The Quest for
Social Justice in Tunisia: Socioeconomic Protest and Political Democratization Post 2011,”
Hessische Stiftung Friedens-und Konfliktforschung (2017). Boukhars, for example, explains
2016’s massive outbreak of social unrest as coextensive with the transition’s continued
disenfranchisement of both the poor and the interior writ large, as an outcome of these
people’s continued exclusion from the rights of social citizenship (265–66). Vatthauer,
meanwhile, has focused on democracy’s failure to sufficiently address unemployment and
poverty (especially in the interior) as well as the more general inadequacies of the eco-
nomic growth model being pursued by Tunisia’s politicians in explaining 2015’s endless
protests (2–7, 20).

36 Powers
sullying those who take to the street – claiming that their actions are funda-
mentally anti-democratic – is all the more telling.132
As for questions of generalizability and future research, a number of points
are worth touching on. To begin, contrary to the musings of some who are keen
to render democratic consolidation a function of institutional integrity and
culturalist-psychological variables, Tunisia’s example suggests that the legitimi-
zation of a transitional democracy may depend less on ideological persuasion
and more on a transition’s capacity to deliver substantive improvements in the
lives of anxious citizenries.133 Outcomes – bread, jobs, and a decent life – in
other words, have proven to be deeply relevant, potentially even more so than
process.134
This being the case, the Tunisian example should also only give further
credence to those who have long been concerned with the effects that eco-
nomic neoliberalism can have on democracy. After all, beyond the many is-
sues with the hollowing and cartelization of popular government, this is a
policy paradigm that is unlikely to produce the kinds of substantive material
improvements that are necessary so to legitimize a new democracy. In acutely
outcome-determined contexts – like transitions – then, neoliberalism’s well-
established inability to deliver job growth, welfare gains, and social justice will
most certainly redound onto democracy’s more general credibility.135 If for this
reason alone, it seems well beyond time that the ifis review their practices.
132 Middle East Monitor Editorial Staff, “Ghannouchi: Ennahda Is Not at War with Ni-
daa Tounes,” Middle East Monitor, January 2018. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com
/20180109-ghannouchi-ennahda-is-not-at-war-with-nidaa-tounes/.
133 71.7% of those Tunisians polled in 2011, for example, listed the economic situation as the
largest challenge facing the country, a figure that dangerously increased to 79.8% by 2014
(corruption ranks as the second largest concern, with 49.5% expressing that opinion in
2014; Teti et al, “The Arab Uprisings,” p. 91). Surveys administered by the International
Republican Institute (iri) in late 2017 show that economic concerns (regarding employ-
ment, poverty, low wages, and inflation) continue to dominate the concerns of Tunisians
today (iri 2017; 6).
134 Teti et al., “The Arab Uprisings,” 128.
135 Ibid., 97, 109. As early as 2014, only 10% of Tunisians were expressing the opinion that the
(democratic) government – a faithful if involuntary neoliberal contractor – was handling
the economy well. Regarding employment policies, that same year just 8.5% expressed
satisfaction with the government’s job creation policies. As for government performance
in basic social services, only 25.7% expressed satisfaction with the social security system,
a mere 30.9% with the healthcare system; and nearly 40% expressed anxiety that the gov-
ernment could not ensure that their children receive a proper education. These metrics
cannot help but influence the status of democracy in the country.

Across the subject areas touched on in this paper, there obviously remains
a great amount of work still to be done. Future research might examine inter-
nal struggles within both Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes, and the extent to which
the former’s accommodationism in particular has come to alienate the party’s
membership, voters, or even factions within its leadership class. More work
need also be done regarding both Ennahda and Nidaa Tounes’ more general
party organization. Research examining the relative strength of the party in
public office vs. the party on the ground vs. the party central office, for example,
would greatly illuminate our understanding of these actors. While this paper
has focused on the function and outcomes born of neoliberal economic policy-
making, moreover, it might be fruitful to interview Ennahda’s or Nidaa Tounes’
respective leaderships so to understand the extent to which either party is or
is not a true believer in these policies. In so doing, one might better understand
how each actor perceives their own agency and how they perceive the lim-
its imposed on the Tunisian policy space. Finally, it is also critical that more
work be done regarding democracy promotion agencies, international finan-
cial institutions, and their material effect on the institutionalization of Tuni-
sian democracy. Both organizational-sociological research – examining power
dynamics, hierarchies, and internal contests within these institutions – and
research examining the intentions of these organizations could offer critical
contributions to the field.136 In regards to the latter, establishing whether the
imf, European Union, or USAid recognizes the dangers that economic reform
poses to democracy could go a long way in unlocking the present and future of
political transition.
To close, the unreconstructed doxa promising that sufficiently liberalized
economies will result in liberalized, stable, and socially just polities should have
been discredited many years ago.137 I hope this paper can help draw atten-
tion to the urgent challenges facing Tunisia’s democracy as well as stimulate
the debate on alternatives to both liberal democratization and economic
liberalization.
136 For research already completed, see Assem Dandashly, “eu Democracy Promotion and
the Dominance of the Security-Stability Nexus,” Mediterranean Politics 23, no. 1 (2018):
62–82; Vincent Durac, “Counterterrorism and Democracy: eu Policy in the Middle East
and North Africa after the Uprisings,” Mediterranean Politics 23, no. 1 (2018): 103–21; and
Michelle Pace, “Liberal or Social Democracy? Aspect Dawning in the eu’s Democracy
Promotion Agenda in the Middle East,” The International Journal of Human Rights 15,
no. 6 (2011): 801–12.
137 Mullin and Patel, “Governing Revolt,” 174.

Cartelization, Neoliberalism, and The Foreclosure

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Cartelization, Neoliberalism, and The Foreclosure

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middle east law and governance 11 (2019) 1-37