Tunisia’s President, Kais Saied, swept to a second term in office with more than 90 per cent of the vote on 7 October. The campaign was marred by official manipulation, intimidation, low turnout, and the imprisonment of the president’s main challenger in the run up to polling day. In a ‘back to the future’ moment, the contest resembled the type of sham election that was commonplace under the country’s former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who ruled Tunisia from 1987 until he was dramatically overthrown by a popular uprising on 14 January 2011. Taking a leaf from the Ben Ali playbook, posters bearing Saied’s austere and emotionless figure dominated streets and squares around the country in the run up to polling day.

The contest was a foregone conclusion, an electoral charade that merely confirmed what has now been clear for a while: in recent years, Tunisia has been travelling on a road away from democracy back to authoritarianism. Indeed, this was Tunisia’s first unfree presidential election since the Arab Spring, and it follows hard on the heels of three years of autocratic counter-revolution. If, as some theorists of democracy believe, the holding of consecutive free and fair elections is a sign of democratic consolidation, then Tunisia’s latest electoral contest is emblematic of the country’s democratic backsliding.

How did Tunisia get here? How has the country that was once celebrated as the democratic success story of the Arab Spring returned to strongman rule? The answer lies partly in the failure of the post-Spring democracy to raise living standards for the majority of Tunisians. The mass protests that succeeded in ousting the Ben Ali regime during the winter of 2010-11 were followed by a wave of optimism, as Tunisians looked forward to a new order that would enhance economic opportunities as much as political rights. The Arab Barometer surveys fielded in post-revolutionary Tunisia illustrate this point. They indicated that those who took part in the country’s Jasmine Revolution – much like their peers who overthrew Hosni Mubarak in Egypt – were driven primarily by a desire to improve their economic situation and to put an end to the Ben Ali regime’s effusive corruption.

Despite the high hopes of Tunisia’s revolutionaries, however, regime change did not lead to economic transformation. Instead, the political gridlock and persistent corruption that characterised Tunisia’s ten-year democratic experiment of 2011-21 ultimately left many of the country’s citizens feeling disillusioned and sceptical about the power of elections to bring change.

This outcome was not inevitable. Rather, it was a consequence of political decisions that were made as Tunisians overthrew autocracy and embraced democracy. After Ben Ali fled on a plane bound for Saudi Arabia, Tunisia’s civic organisations, political dissidents and opposition parties united alongside some figures from the old regime to bring about a remarkably peaceful democratic transition. Wishing to minimise any conflict that might derail this transition, they created a system designed to maintain consensus among diverse political forces. Tunisia’s post-revolutionary leaders prioritised power-sharing between competing political elites over generating strong governments capable of responding dynamically to popular preferences. Accordingly, the country’s 2014 constitution created a semi-presidential system with a parliament elected by proportional representation. Coalition-building, compromise and gridlock became locked into the post-Spring system.

The successes of this system should not be dismissed out of hand. Notably, it facilitated a peaceful transfer of power between Islamist and secular parties on more than one occasion. Yet while consensus politics defused tensions among political leaders, it did very little to raise living standards for most Tunisians. Youth unemployment remained high and GDP per capita in 2019 was below where it was in 2010 – the last year of Ben Ali’s dictatorship. After nearly a decade of democracy, ordinary Tunisians had lost patience with a political class that had presided over a stagnating economy and appeared to be preoccupied with serving themselves rather than the Tunisian people.

It was this wave of popular discontent that Kais Saied rode all the way to the presidency in 2019. He burst onto the scene as a political outsider; a law professor untainted by a pre-existing political legacy or party affiliations, he tapped into many Tunisians’ frustration with the status quo by criticising endemic corruption and economic stasis. The strategy proved to be a winning gambit: Saied obtained just under 73 per cent of the vote in the second round of the September-October 2019 presidential elections. Since then, he has made eradicating corruption his personal mission; under this cover, Saied has targeted political rivals and eroded the independence of Tunisia’s institutions.

Tunisia’s road back to authoritarianism began in earnest in July 2021 when President Saied suspended the country’s parliament and began ruling by decree. Exploiting the public health crisis caused by Covid-19, Saied announced a nationwide curfew and invoked emergency presidential powers outlined in Article 80 of Tunisia’s 2014 constitution. The president then proceeded to dismantle independent state institutions and centralise power. As well as taming the legislature, in February 2022 he dissolved Tunisia’s Supreme Judicial Council and appointed a new one stacked with hand-picked appointments. This pattern of sacking and stacking has been repeated time and time again across institutions, including municipal governments and the Tunisian electoral commission. Nearly all previously impartial bodies, the sinews of the state, are now in the hands of Saied’s own supporters.

All the while, Saied has been clamping down on political opponents, civil society and the media. One prominent target is Ennahda – the moderate neo-Islamist party which had the largest number of seats in Tunisia’s parliament before the July 2021 coup. The party has been thrown into disarray by persistent state-sponsored lawfare and its leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who played an important role in the country’s transition to democracy in 2011, has been imprisoned on spurious charges. Yet it is not only Tunisia’s ‘Muslim democrats’ who have suffered under Saied; many secular figures and courageous dissidents have also fallen foul of the new order. Like other dictators without a guiding ideology, Tunisia’s President Saied is an equal-opportunities oppressor.

Within the space of three years, Saied has reversed Tunisia’s democratic revolution, but he did not execute this coup all by himself. The Tunisian armed forces expedited his rise to power. Long dormant as a force in Tunisian politics, the army has expanded in size and influence since the fall of Ben Ali. While the country’s generals were once marked by their tendency to stay in the barracks and keep out of politics, and were widely praised for acting as ‘guardians’ of the revolution in 2010-11, they have now lent their support to Saied’s dictatorship. Several retired military officers have been appointed to key positions in government as directors of top security agencies and as provincial governors. At the same time, Tunisia’s military courts have used martial law to prosecute Saied’s civilian opponents. The army is flexing its political muscles.

None of this means that President Saied can afford to be complacent. The army has supported him so far, but only because it has suited the generals to do so. Unlike its Egyptian or Algerian counterparts, the Tunisian army is not yet fully wedded to the regime. There is no guarantee that the military will not withdraw its support for Saied if he fails to turn Tunisia’s economic fortunes around, or if he were to face a renewed Arab Spring-style popular uprising.

There are many lessons to be taken from the Tunisian story. The experience of the last ten years suggests that the country, once described as ‘an Arab anomaly’ by one writer, may not be so immune from the authoritarian curse that has blighted other countries in the Arab World. It is true that Tunisia has a unique institutional and political heritage; it is perhaps no coincidence that the first country in the Arab world to have a constitution (proclaimed in 1861) has also been in the vanguard of democratic change in the region. Yet even with its traditions of civilian rule and robust civic associations, Tunisia’s increasingly assertive army is reminiscent of other powerful militaries that have shaped the destinies of states across the region, from Algeria and Egypt to Iraq and Syria.

The Tunisian experiment also offers lessons that transcend the Arab world. Tunisia’s democratic backsliding closely mirrors the experience of countries such as Turkey. In these countries, too, authoritarian governments have rolled back democratic norms and institutions that were only shallowly rooted. Tunisia’s road back to authoritarianism cannot be viewed simply as an Arab or Middle Eastern phenomenon. In its causes as much as its lessons and consequences, Tunisia’s path is part of a global phenomenon: a local expression of a wider geopolitical environment in which the tide of democratisation has been steadily receding.