Pan-African Tremor: From Spring to Winter
In the final weeks of 2025, the African continent shudders under a cold wind of democratic reversal. Tunisia—the only country to have harvested genuine pluralism from the Arab Spring—has become the latest exhibit in a grim gallery that already includes nine military coups since 2020, the strangulation of civil society in Mali, the electoral thefts in Cameroon and Mozambique, and the youth-driven upheavals in Kenya and Madagascar. The arrest of Ayachi Hammami on 2 December 2025, hours after an appeals court confirmed his five-year sentence for “belonging to a terrorist group and conspiring against state security,” is not an isolated outrage. It is the clearest signal yet that President Kais Saied has completed his transformation of Tunisia from a fragile democracy into a personalised autocracy. Across Africa, the tremor is felt: when the Maghreb’s brightest post-2011 star dims, the message to juntas in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Bissau is unmistakable—repression pays, and the regional bodies that once promised “never again” are toothless.
Unrest’s Chronicle: A Continent on Permanent Boil
Political unrest in Africa has ceased to be episodic; it is now chronic. From the Mediterranean to the Cape, 2025 has been a year of almost unbroken turbulence:
- January–March: Sudanese civil war enters its third year, 25,000 dead, 11 million displaced
- June–July: Kenyan Gen Z storms parliament over tax hikes, 48 killed, government forced to withdraw bill
- August: Nigerian #EndBadGovernance protests met with live ammunition
- October: Madagascar’s post-election blackout riots morph into a military coup
- November: Guinea-Bissau’s army seizes power three days after the presidential vote
- November–December: Tunisian streets fill with black-clad marchers chanting “Saied dégage!”
The common denominators are youth (median age 19.7), unemployment (often above 40%), and a profound distrust of institutions, captured by ageing elites. In Tunisia, the “Against Injustice” marches on 22 November drew tens of thousands in Tunis, Sfax, and Sousse—the largest since 2021—while doctors, teachers, and journalists staged rolling strikes. Yet unlike Kenya, where protests forced policy reversal, or Madagascar, where they triggered regime change, Tunisia’s unrest has been met with escalating brutality: 14 NGOs suspended, over 60 political prisoners, and now the systematic jailing of an entire generation of democratic activists.
Tunisia’s Descent: The Slow Death of the 2011 Miracle
Tunisia’s tragedy is particularly bitter because its starting point was so hopeful. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in December 2010 ignited the Arab Spring; by January 2011, Ben Ali had fled; by October 2011, Tunisians voted in a genuinely free Constituent Assembly; by 2014, they had adopted what was then the Arab world’s most progressive constitution. For almost a decade, the country was celebrated as “the only success story.”
The unravelling began in earnest on 25 July 2021 when President Kais Saied—elected in 2019 as an anti-system outsider—invoked Article 80 of the 2014 constitution to freeze parliament, dismiss the prime minister, and rule by decree. What Saied called “exceptional measures” became permanent:
- 2021: Parliament suspended
- 2022: New constitution drafted by a hand-picked committee, approved in a low-turnout referendum, granting the president near-total power
- 2023: Mass arrests begin under Decree 54 (cyber-crime law used to jail critics for Facebook posts)
- 2024: Sham presidential election—90.7 % for Saied, turnout officially 28 % but widely believed closer to 12 %
- 2025: Systematic purge of remaining independent voices
The “conspiracy case” that ensnared Hammami and 39 others—opposition leaders, lawyers, businessmen, journalists, and human rights defenders—is the regime’s masterpiece of legal theatre. Charges range from “forming a terrorist group” to “harming food security” and “damaging the environment.” Many defendants were accused of nothing more than meeting foreign diplomats or publishing critical articles. Eight have been in pre-trial detention since February 2023; at least two are on hunger strike; more than twenty fled into exile before the verdict. The appeals court’s November 2025 ruling—sentences of up to 45 years—confirms that Tunisia’s judiciary, once a regional model, is now an instrument of vengeance.
Democracy’s Demolition: From Ballot Boxes to Prison Cells
Across Africa, democracy is being demolished brick by brick. Tunisia offers the most sophisticated blueprint:
- Constitutional coup (invoke emergency powers, suspend parliament)
- Rewrite the Constitution to concentrate power in the presidency
- Neutralise independent institutions (electoral commission, judiciary, anti-corruption body)
- Criminalise dissent through vague “security” laws
- Stage-manage elections to produce Soviet-style results
- Jail or exile the remaining opposition
This sequence has been replicated with local variations in Egypt (2013), Sudan (2021), Mali (2020–21), and now Tunisia. The continent’s median score on the V-Dem democracy index has fallen every year since 2015. In 2025 alone, Freedom House downgraded seven African countries from “partly free” to “not free.” The African Union’s response remains ritualistic: verbal condemnation, occasional suspension, but never the sustained pressure that forced reversals in Gambia (2017) or Madagascar (2009). When Saied was re-elected with 90 %, the AU sent observers who declared the vote “largely peaceful”—a phrase that now rings hollow across the continent.
Human Rights’ Agony: The Price of Integrity
The human rights situation in Tunisia has deteriorated to levels not seen since the Ben Ali era. Ayachi Hammami—former minister for human rights (2020), veteran anti-torture campaigner, and defence lawyer for hundreds of political prisoners under Ben Ali—is only the most prominent victim. Others include:
- Chaima Issa: 20 years for “offending the president”
- Issam Chebbi (Free Destourien Party): facing 20 years
- Rached Ghannouchi (Ennahdha): already serving 14 years in a separate case)
- Jawhar Ben Mbarek (Citizens Against the Coup): health collapsing on hunger strike
- Over 60 political prisoners documented by local NGOs, many in prolonged pre-trial detention
Decree 54 (2022) has been weaponised to jail journalists and fine hundreds of people for social media posts. Independent media outlets have been raided, journalists sentenced in absentia, and foreign correspondents expelled. Travel bans prevent critics from leaving; asset freezes cripple civil society. The agony is both physical (torture allegations in Mornaguia prison) and psychological: a climate of fear in which parents warn children not to discuss politics even at home.
Transitional Mirage: No Light at Tunnel’s End
Tunisia stands at a dangerous threshold. Saied’s narrative—that he alone can rescue the country from chaos, corruption, and foreign interference—has lost credibility as the economy contracts (–2.1 % projected for 2025), inflation tops 9 %, youth unemployment hovers at 40 %, and the currency has lost 45 % of its value since 2021. Yet the regime doubles down on repression rather than reform, calculating that fear is cheaper than bread.
The opposition is fragmented: Ennahdha weakened, Nidaa Tounes dissolved, the UGTT trade union co-opted in parts and intimidated in others. The National Salvation Front still exists, but many of its leaders are jailed or exiled. Civil society persists through underground networks and diaspora mobilisation, but the space for open contestation has shrunk to almost nothing.
For the rest of Africa, Tunisia is the cautionary tale: even the continent’s most institutionalised transition can be reversed in four short years if power is concentrated in one man’s hands and independent institutions are systematically dismantled. The Arab Spring’s last ember is being deliberately extinguished. Unless the African Union, the European Union, and the United States move beyond statements to coordinated pressure—targeted sanctions on Saied’s inner circle, freezing of illicit assets in Europe, suspension of non-humanitarian aid—the light will go out entirely. And when Tunisia finally falls silent, the tremor will be felt from Cape Town to Cairo: if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.
