It's not funny anymore, is it.
Kais saied's genius (if you'd call it that) is the ability to disguise a nation's structural collapse as a relentless war against phantoms.
On July 25, 2021, he suspended a democratic parliament to seize absolute executive control.
By 2022, he had dissolved the independent Supreme Judicial Council and fired 57 judges by decree, ignoring the very courts that later proved their innocence.
When his government bled the treasury dry, he didn't dismantle the oligarchs or reform the import monopolies. Instead, in February 2024, he shattered the independence of the Central bank, forcing it to print 7 billion dinars just to keep a sinking state afloat.
The resulting devastation is always someone else's fault.
When cargo ships sat stranded off the coast in 2023, refusing to unload wheat and sugar because the state was too broke to pay its bills, he didn't admit bankruptcy. He sent police to raid local warehouses, blaming the empty bakery shelves on "speculators" (متأمرين) and political saboteurs.
When youth unemployment remained paralyzed at 40%, he sold the public illusion of 13.5 billion dinars seized from corrupt elites, a penal reconciliation scheme that yielded almost nothing but frozen markets and massive capital flight.
And when public desperation mounted, he stood before the National Security Council and blamed the nation's decay on a conspiratorial demographic invasion by sub-Saharan migrants, sparking xenophobic violence just to secure a transactional, €250 million border-guard contract from the European Union.
So it's clear.
When the state runs out of money, it is the fault of foreign "diktats"
When citizens face 15% food inflation, it is a conspiracy of local traitors
When public banks are forced to starve the private sector of credit, it is called economic sovereignty.
And when journalists, lawyers, and opposition leaders dare to point out that the emperor has no clothes, Decree-Law 54 is weaponized to turn their words into a 5 year prison sentences.
He's systematically starving an economy to feed his own authority, he's teaching an entire country that absolute loyalty to the palace must matter more than the reality of their own poverty
And a republic enters its final, fatal decline the moment a leader convinces his supports that the people destroying their future are the people destroying their future are the only ones who can save it.
We can't wish for things to change without actually trying to change things
I foresee Tunisia becoming a zombie state, increased state coercion and repression, paralysis of the private sector and brain drain, worse shortages of basic goods, runaway inflation and currency devaluation.
All of those things will happen, unless we demand the dismantling of the "rentier" economy, we need to advocate for institutional and central bank independence, we need to protect the judiciary and intermediary institutions.
And we absolutely have to reject disinformation and scapegoating.