The sun held hostage
sovereignty, solar concessions
and strategic deficit

At dawn on Tuesday, 28 April 2026, the Presidency of the Republic announced, via a brief communiqué, the termination of functions of Fatma Thabet Chiboub, Minister of Industry, Mines and Energy. A few hours later, the Assembly of People's Representatives opened the longest plenary session of the current legislature.

Nearly eight hours of debate were devoted to five bill projects numbered 01/2026 to 05/2026, filed by the presidency the previous January and bearing approval of five concession agreements for the production of photovoltaic electricity1. The sites in question — El Khobna and Mezzouna in the governorate of Sidi Bouzid, El Ksar and Segdoud in Gafsa, Menzel Habib in Gabès — total an installed capacity of approximately 598 MW for an investment of around 1.64 billion dinars and an expected annual output of approximately 1,500 GWh2. By end of day, the five texts were adopted, with cumulative majorities of approximately 362 votes in favour, 160 against and 44 abstentions across the five ballots.

Zenith Energy

However, fourteen days before the minister's dismissal, on 14 April 2026, an official correspondence addressed by the Tunisian authorities to Zenith Energy — publicly disclosed by the company — acknowledged in writing the investor's ownership of certain oil concessions (notably Robbana and El Bibane) as well as of extracted and stored oil volumesi. This correspondence came as the dispute between Zenith Energy and the Republic of Tunisia before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID, case ARB/23/18) entered its decisive phase: final hearings opened in Washington on 20 April 2026, with financial claims that had grown, since initial filing, to an order of magnitude of approximately 640 million dollarsii.

The legal implications of this written acknowledgement are substantial: by validating the investor's ownership of the disputed assets, the Tunisian State weakened the line of defence it could oppose to the qualification of indirect expropriation. Part of Tunisian economic and legal opinion — notably in the public analyses of Moktar Lamari and the investigative work of the Ba7ath platform — sees this as a possible aggravating factor for the State's financial exposure, with the precise identification of the signatories remaining to be establishediii.

The documented facts are as follows: the correspondence of 14 April; the opening of ICSID hearings on 20 April; the presidential dismissal on 28 April at 4:39 a.m.; the vote on the five photovoltaic agreements on the same day; the departure of the Director General of Electricity and Renewable Energy, Belhassen Chiboub, on 6 May. The causal link between these events has not been officially established.

The logic of the sequence merits reflection: a minister is dismissed for having championed a dossier that the presidency itself had initiated four months earlier and which would be ratified that very evening by the parliamentary majority loyal to the head of state. On 6 May, the Director General of Electricity and Renewable Energy, Belhassen Chiboub, was in turn dismissed. The implementers are replaced; the policy is maintained; the text is adopted; the debate is displaced. This brings us back to the legitimacy register of the Saïed regime but remains contradictory.

His presidency has been built, since his power seizure of July 2021, on an explicitly sovereigntist register opposed to any privatisation of national resources. Yet it was his own administration that filed the five bills instituting twenty-five-year concessions to predominantly foreign operators.

When the backlash emerged, it came from elected representatives claiming the same sovereigntist register — placing the presidency in the unusual position of having to defend, against part of its own rhetorical base, a dossier its supporters were denouncing. The way out took the classic form in authoritarian contexts: the ministerial fuse that blows to prevent political grievances from escalating.

The agreements fall within the framework established by Law No. 2015-12 of 11 May 2015 on the production of electricity from renewable energy sources, which distinguishes three modalities: self-generation, the authorisation regime (up to 10 MW for solar) and the concession regime above this threshold4.

The mechanism adopted for the five power plants follows the international Independent Power Producer (IPP) model. A private developer — generally a consortium including international players — finances, builds, operates and maintains the installation for twenty-five years, within the framework of a Power Purchase Agreement that makes the Tunisian Electricity and Gas Company (STEG) the sole purchaser of the electricity produced. At the expiry of the concession, the equipment is either transferred to the State or dismantled, according to the terms specified in each agreement.

Three necessary clarifications

Three points deserve to be established with precision, because they structured the controversy and were massively distorted in public debate.

First, the land does not change hands. The sites remain State domain; they are made available through a temporary occupation agreement whose duration coincides with that of the concession. The precedent of Decree-Law No. 2021-20 of 22 December 2021 approving the Borj Bourguiba agreement, published in full in the Official Gazette, provides the template architecture for these agreements5.

Second, the electricity produced is entirely injected into the national grid. Direct export is not permitted for concession-based power plants backed by the STEG PPA, as confirmed by the Minister of Economy and Planning during the hearing before the National Council of Regions and Districts on 4 May 20266. The domestic destination logic is therefore, contractually, respected for these five projects.

Third, international arbitration does not constitute the primary route for dispute resolution. The agreements stipulate that the applicable law is Tunisian law and that Tunisian courts have first-instance jurisdiction. Recourse to international arbitration only applies subsidiarily, in cases where the international nature of the financing requires it. This architecture is the universal norm for projects backed by lenders such as the EBRD, IFC or MIGA. Refusing this clause would, in practice, mean refusing the concessional financing that makes projects economically viable.

The tariff and its interpretation

The announced production cost per kilowatt-hour lies between 100 and 112 millimes, approximately 0.032 to 0.036 euro/kWh — a figure publicly defended by the Secretary of State for Energy Transition at the same hearing7. This order of magnitude is the decisive criterion for assessing the economic rationality of the contracts. It compares favourably to the marginal cost of the kilowatt-hour produced from imported gas, denominated in foreign currency and subject to international market volatility. It also falls within the global solar Levelized Cost of Electricity range, for which IRENA puts the weighted average at $0.043/kWh in 20248 — slightly above, reflecting Tunisia's sovereign risk premium and the absence of competitive pressure from reverse auctions.

The arguments mobilised unfold across four distinct registers whose robustness differs substantially.

The first register is that of the oil analogy. The concessions would be likened to an "energy colonialism" in which a foreign actor would come to extract a national resource — here, the sun. The evocative power of this analogy draws on the memory it reawakens: that of the oil concessions of the 1950s–1970s and the unequal contracts that accompanied them. Its logical solidity, however, is weak. Oil and gas are finite stocks located in a subsoil governed by mining law. The sun is an inexhaustible flow. What is valorised by a photovoltaic power plant is not an extracted resource but an electricity production service injected into the national grid. The distinction is not merely semantic: it determines the applicable legal framework and the nature of the relationship between the State and the investor.

The second register concerns the tax and land advantages granted to concession holders. This criticism is partially valid from a sovereigntist standpoint: Law 2015-12 and its implementing texts grant investors significant exemptions whose calibration deserves rigorous scrutiny. The pertinent question is not, however, whether to grant advantages — all jurisdictions that have successfully launched their solar sector have done so — but how to calibrate them, against what commitments on local content, skills transfer and regional spillovers. On this terrain, the debate never genuinely shifted.

The third register is that of local content. Several trade union voices, notably within the General Federation of Electricity and Gas, lamented that the very design of the tenders mechanically favours international groups with the necessary balance sheet depth — Scatec, AMEA Power, TAQA Power, Qair and others. This criticism is the most solid of the four, and it was paradoxically smothered by the symbolic saturation of the debate. It points to a structural reality: Tunisia has no upstream photovoltaic industry — no cell or module manufacturing at national scale — nor a sufficiently mature EPC ecosystem to handle projects exceeding 100 MW. Domestic benefits are limited to civil engineering, maintenance and a restricted volume of technical jobs. This weakness is real; it will not be resolved by slogans, but it should have shaped the negotiation of contractual clauses.

The fourth register is politico-symbolic. The word sovereignty occupies a central place in Tunisia. It refers to the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist themes of the national liberation struggle and to the denunciation of the IMF structural adjustment programme of 1986.

Yet, in a sense, a state's sovereignty is measured first and foremost by its capacity to finance its public policies, reduce its structural dependencies and negotiate its international contracts under conditions it controls. In this regard, a country like Tunisia — which imports 65% of its primary energy and carries nearly 3 billion euros of annual energy deficit — does not, in practice, possess the levers to make its sovereignty non-negotiable.

The official figures from the Ministry of Energy, reproduced by the World Bank in the TEREG programme, are unambiguous. Primary energy production fell from 8.3 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) in 2010 to approximately 3.4 Mtoe in 2025, while consumption stabilised at around 9.7 Mtoe9.

The energy deficit, marginal in the early 2000s, now stands at 65%. More than 90% of Tunisian electricity is still produced from natural gas, a majority share of which is imported, principally via the TransMed pipeline from Algeria10. In 2025, the energy trade deficit reached nearly 11 billion dinars; fuel and electricity subsidies exceeded 7 billion dinars, a figure higher than the combined budgets of several sovereign ministries.

In this configuration, refusing projects capable of producing 1,500 GWh per year at 100–112 millimes per kWh would mechanically prolong a more costly and more carbon-intensive dependency. The pertinent question is therefore not whether to engage in large-scale solar, but under what modalities, on what conditions and with what safeguards.

The structural fragility of the incumbent operator

Furthermore, STEG accumulates three weaknesses, any one of which would alone invalidate the option of fully public financing for the projects. Its ageing thermal fleet requires costly renewal. Its massive unpaid receivables — notably from public entities such as steel and chemical complexes — have been repeatedly rescheduled. Its debt is partly held by the State itself, creating a circular situation in which the principal debtor is also the supervisory authority. Asking this entity to finance on own funds or sovereign borrowing the equivalent of 1.64 billion dinars for the five projects under discussion alone would exceed the company's balance sheet capacity. The recourse to IPPs is therefore not an ideological pro-market choice: it is a balance sheet constraint recognised by all the lenders accompanying Tunisia's energy transition.

The multilateral financial architecture

Finally, the World Bank approved in November 2025 a $430 million programme dedicated to Tunisia's energy transformation, known as TEREG (Tunisia Energy Reform and Green Growth), explicitly designed to mobilise $2.8 billion in private investment and add 2.8 GW of solar and wind capacity by 202811. MIGA granted $23.5 million in quasi-equity guarantees to AMEA Power for the country's first large private solar plant, in Kairouan12. The EBRD financed the Qair El Khobna plant to the tune of €37 million and is examining a €40 million loan to STEG for a solar-plus-storage project13. This financial architecture is not a technical detail: it conditions the very feasibility of the projects, and it requires the international arbitration clauses that detractors denounce. The two elements form a system; they cannot be dissociated without jeopardising the whole.

A controversy about the nationality of capital only makes sense when set against the value of the resource in question. The order of magnitude of Tunisia's solar resource, rarely made explicit in public debate, therefore deserves to be stated.

According to the Global Solar Atlas developed by Solargis for the World Bank Group, Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) in Tunisia ranges from 1,800 kWh/m²/year in the north-west to more than 2,200 kWh/m²/year in the south — the regions of Tozeur, Kébili, Tataouine — with Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) exceeding 2,400 kWh/m²/year in the desert south14. By comparison, Germany — which long led the global photovoltaic race — peaks at around 1,200 kWh/m²/year. One megawatt installed at Tozeur therefore produces approximately 1.7 times more energy than in Munich for a comparable initial investment. Tunisia also benefits from more than 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, one of the best ratios in the Mediterranean basin.

IRENA, in its report Renewables Readiness Assessment: The Republic of Tunisia published in 2021, estimates Tunisia's technical solar potential at several tens of gigawatts, an order of magnitude greater than the national peak electricity demand15. The World Bank, in its country brief on Tunisia's energy transition, puts the combined solar and wind potential at approximately 320 GW, compared to a national peak demand that does not exceed 5 GW16. Concretely, by mobilising less than 1% of the territory — typically on degraded land in the south — Tunisia could technically install more capacity than its own market can absorb.

It is this asymmetry that opens up the strategic horizon of export. The ELMED project, jointly led by STEG and the Italian operator Terna, plans the laying of a 600 MW HVDC submarine cable linking Mlaabi (Cap Bon) to Partanna (Sicily), at a total estimated cost of around €850 million, of which €307 million financed by the European Union via the Connecting Europe Facility17. The cable supply contract itself, awarded to Prysmian at end-2025, amounts to approximately $532 million. Commissioning is anticipated at the 2028–2030 horizon. Beyond that, the national green hydrogen strategy adopted by the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy aims to make Tunisia a net exporter of more than 6 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year to the European Union by 205018.

The real stakes of the five April 2026 agreements therefore extend beyond a marginal addition to the electricity mix. These contracts constitute the first verifiable building block of a trajectory that can, if pursued with discernment, make Tunisia one of the three or four major exporters of decarbonised electricity from the southern shore of the Mediterranean by 2040 — on a par with Morocco and Egypt, ahead of Algeria and Libya. It is this horizon, and not the nationality of a shareholder in a Sidi Bouzid power plant, that should have occupied the parliamentary debate.

To assess the Tunisian choice, it must be situated within a comparative landscape. Three neighbouring cases shed light by contrast on the strengths and weaknesses of the model taking shape.

Morocco and the strategic institution

Morocco made, as early as 2010, the choice of a dedicated institutional architecture. Law 13-09 liberalised renewable electricity production; that same year, the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN) was created as a strategic buyer distinct from the incumbent operator ONEE19. MASEN negotiates PPAs, structures tenders, imposes progressive local content rates — rising from 35% to 60% over the 2013–2020 period — and carries the permanent technical expertise required by a multi-gigawatt programme. The Noor Ouarzazate complex (580 MW), while proving more costly than anticipated due to the choice of concentrated solar technology, demonstrated the capacity of a Southern Mediterranean state to structure complex projects without surrendering control. Morocco has since shifted to photovoltaics and wind, with winning tariffs now comparable to the best global levels. Tunisia does not, to date, have a functional equivalent of MASEN; this absence is probably the most structurally significant institutional deficit in the dossier.

Egypt and the cluster effect

Egypt illustrates the power of large-scale standardised tenders. The Benban complex (1.5 GW, commissioned in 2019) brings together on a single site 32 developers and more than 40 plants, with State-provided shared infrastructure20. By aggregating demand and pooling grid connection and contractual expertise costs, Egypt compressed unit costs, attracted intense competition and created an industrial cluster effect that now underpins its green hydrogen strategy. Tunisia proceeds instead through isolated projects negotiated one by one — a method that slows timelines, dilutes negotiating power and prevents the emergence of an ecosystem.

Jordan and the discipline of auctions

Jordan offers the most compelling demonstration of the virtue of recurring reverse auctions. According to analyses by the lenders who accompanied the programme, the average of the four best winning tariffs in round 2 came in more than 50% below the round 1 tariffs21. By methodically moving from case-by-case negotiation to repeated competitive auctions, Jordan not only compressed its costs but also built a contractual credibility that now attracts first-tier investment funds. The current Tunisian mechanism — concessions negotiated case by case and ratified by legislation — is the antithesis of this model. It introduces a political discretion that paradoxically fuels the very suspicions that fed the sovereigntist controversy of April 2026.

Assessing the five agreements does not reduce to a binary verdict. It requires holding simultaneously three propositions that may appear contradictory but are in reality layered.

From a strictly economic and energy standpoint, the necessity of the projects is not seriously debated. The announced tariff of 100–112 millimes/kWh sits within a competitive range — not exceptional, but sound for a first round negotiated outside reverse auctions and in a context of sovereign risk premium. Measured against the marginal cost of the current Tunisian kilowatt-hour — produced largely from imported gas denominated in foreign currency — these agreements do not constitute a concession to foreign investors: they constitute an instrument for reducing the structural energy deficit.

From a strategic standpoint, however, the assessment is more mixed. These contracts arrive a decade late relative to neighbours. Morocco enacted its framework law in 2010, Egypt launched Benban in 2017–2019, Jordan deployed two auction rounds before 2018. Tunisia, which objectively possesses the best resource/proximity-to-European-market ratio in the entire MENA region outside the Algerian Sahara, is signing its first large photovoltaic concessions between 2023 and 2026, in a position of negotiating weakness: budget urgency, implicit pressure from lenders, credibility lost through the aborted rounds of 2017–2020. Part of this differential is irrecoverable.

From an institutional standpoint finally, these agreements are symptomatic of a weakness in the strategic state. With a comparable resource, Morocco achieves greater local spillovers, Egypt mobilises more concessional institutional capital, Jordan compresses tariffs further. Tunisia signs contracts without having built the industrial ecosystem nor the auction doctrine that would have enabled it to extract maximum value. The phase now opening — that of the additional 1.7 GW already announced and the 2.8 GW that the TEREG programme intends to finance by 2028 — must correct this imbalance; failing which, Tunisia's energy transition will replicate on solar a pattern already witnessed with phosphates and gas: value extraction without ecosystem formation, revenues captured at the centre without trickling down to the producing regions.

Four elements absent from the parliamentary debate silently structure the dossier.

First element: the macro-financial calendar. Tunisia has been negotiating since end-2024 a new cooperation framework with its international lenders. The World Bank's TEREG programme, approved in November 2025 for $430 million over an exceptional 43-year maturity, carries implicit conditionalities concerning the opening of the energy sector and the rationalisation of subsidies23. The timing of the vote on the five agreements, a few months before the scheduled reviews, is probably not coincidental. Did the presidency need a signal of openness to markets and lenders while preserving its domestic sovereigntist discourse? The ministerial dismissal constituted the political cost of this dual requirement.

Second element: the political geography of the plants. The five sites — El Khobna, Mezzouna, El Ksar, Segdoud, Menzel Habib — are all located in governorates of the centre-west and south-east, i.e. in the regions most marginalised from Tunisian development since independence. Sidi Bouzid remains the symbolic sentinel of regional decline since the Revolution broke out in December 2010. Gafsa concentrates the memory of the 2008 mining basin uprisings. Gabès is the emblem of the environmental damage from the chemical complex. The choice of these three governorates for the first large photovoltaic plants, without an explicit link to a local spillover strategy, is doubly revealing: of the real solar potential of these areas, but also of the insufficient attention paid, at this stage, to the requirements of territorial justice. From the parliamentary reports, none of the five agreements includes a clause obliging the investor to a binding local employment quota, a regional development fund fed by operating revenues, or equity participation reserved for local authorities — all mechanisms that exist in Morocco, Chile (regional mining royalty) or Texas (wind rents allocated to county schools).

Third element: the absence of technical debate on the grid. A photovoltaic plant produces when it is daytime; Tunisia's consumption peak is now dual — daytime in summer (air conditioning) and nighttime (lighting and cooking). Without parallel investment in battery storage (BESS), hydraulic pumping (pumped hydro) or interconnections, the massive injection of intermittent solar can destabilise an already fragile grid. This is precisely why the EBRD finances, in parallel with the IPP concessions, STEG projects combining solar and batteries — such as the El-Medina project for 50 MW solar and storage, supported at €40 million24. Not a single MP, either in the sovereigntist camp or among supporters, genuinely raised this question during the debate. The controversy focused on the nationality of capital, never on the physics of the grid.

Fourth element: the silence on self-consumption. The existing Tunisian framework, inherited from Law 2009-7 and Law 2015-12, permits decentralised self-generation in low, medium and high voltage. The PROSOL Elec programme and its extension PROSOL Elec Économique aim to equip several tens of thousands of households. Yet the share of residential and small industrial users in Tunisia's solar mix remains marginal, even though it alone could cover a substantial fraction of daytime peak demand without any concession to a foreign operator. It is on this terrain that genuine distributed energy sovereignty would lie — every rooftop transformed into a productive asset, every household a mini-sovereign — and it is precisely what the detractors of the five agreements never genuinely addressed.

If these five concessions are, within the current framework, a necessary lesser evil, it remains legitimate to interrogate the counterfactual. Four institutional orientations would likely have been able to change the equation.

The first would have consisted in creating a strategic buyer distinct from the grid operator, on the model of MASEN. A Tunisian Renewable Energy Agency, endowed with a permanent technical team, a clear mandate and operational independence, could have structured aggregated competitive tenders, negotiated standardised PPAs and imposed progressive local content clauses. STEG, relieved of this role, would have concentrated on the grid and dispatching. The current confusion of roles — STEG is simultaneously operator, buyer, partial financier and judge in offer evaluation — constitutes a structural flaw that the next wave of concessions will need to correct.

The second would have consisted in substituting recurring reverse auctions for case-by-case legislative ratification. The Jordanian method — successive rounds with declining tariff ceilings — would likely have yielded kilowatt-hours at 80–90 millimes rather than 100–112, a 10–15% gain over 25 years. Over 1.5 TWh annually, this represents several tens of millions of dinars in cumulative savings for STEG, and therefore, ultimately, for the Tunisian taxpayer.

The third would have consisted in imposing progressive local content requirements and a regional fund. A clause obliging concession holders to subcontract at least 30% of EPC value to Tunisian companies, to train a quota of local engineers and technicians, and to contribute to a regional development fund at 1–2% of revenue would have transformed these projects into tools of territorial development. The current agreements' silence on these points constitutes the major blind spot of the dossier — and it is precisely the criticism that should genuinely have been debated.

The fourth would have consisted in attaching to each large concession a parallel programme of decentralised self-consumption and storage in the same governorates. This balance — utility-scale concession on one side, mass self-consumption on the other — would have both technically stabilised the grid and politically neutralised the asset-stripping argument, by demonstrating that for every conceded megawatt there is a distributed megawatt. It is precisely the combination that IRENA has recommended in its Renewables Readiness Assessment since 202125.

The April–May 2026 sequence should not be read as a full stop but as an operational warning. Three agendas would benefit from being pursued without delay so that future rounds do not reproduce the same configuration.

The first agenda is regulatory and institutional. Law 2015-12, useful in its time, must be revised to clarify governance, separate the operator and regulator functions, endow the sector with an independent regulatory authority (modelled on Morocco's ANRE or Egypt's EgyptERA) and codify publicly accessible standard PPA clauses. Transparency of contracts — not secrecy — is the best protection against suspicions of undervaluation. The ESMAP RISE indicators provide a directly operational roadmap to identify the twenty to thirty priority reforms26.

The second agenda is industrial and social. A local integration policy must be built as a mechanism rather than a slogan: minimum local content thresholds indexed to ecosystem maturity, financing of technical training centres (the National Engineering School of Tunis, the Polytechnic School of Tunisia, the ISET network could host dedicated curricula), targeted tax incentives for domestic manufacturing of inverters, mounting structures and — if the market reaches critical mass — module assembly. Morocco, India and Turkey have all taken this path; none has regretted it.

The third agenda is fiscal and redistributive. Social justice, in this dossier, is not decreed: it is financed. A share of the revenues generated by concessions — from land royalties and specific taxes — must feed a regional fund dedicated to the host governorates. This mechanism exists in Chile, Texas, Norway and Alberta. Without it, the photovoltaic plants risk reproducing the geography of value that has fuelled regional decline since 2011 — which constitutes, paradoxically, the truly combustible material that the sovereigntist controversy concealed rather than defused.

Social justice in Tunisian solar energy is measured against three concrete yardsticks that the April 2026 controversy prevented from being properly posed.

The first criterion is the final tariff for the consumer. If the concessions genuinely enable production at 100–112 millimes per kWh, STEG must pass on this reduction — at least partially — to residential tariffs and to the electro-intensive industries that carry formal employment in the country. If the savings are entirely absorbed by servicing STEG's public debt or by unwinding subsidies, the transition will have produced a rent without social return. This pass-through must be contractually linked to plant commissioning and publicly audited by an independent authority.

The second criterion is household access to self-consumption. The PROSOL Elec Économique programme is a step forward, but its target — a few tens of thousands of households — remains marginal against the three million Tunisian households. A "one million solar rooftops" plan by 2032, financed by a green fund combining public contribution, subsidised bank financing and mobilisation of diaspora remittances, would constitute the genuine democratisation of the sun: the one that transforms every rooftop into a productive asset and every STEG bill into an investment rather than a cost.

The third criterion is territorial capture of value. The host municipalities of the plants must automatically receive a share of royalties, in the form of a grant conditional on local investment projects — water, health, education, transport. Without this mechanism, the energy transition risks simply replacing oil and gas with the sun, reproducing the centralised value-capture patterns that have fuelled the feeling of relegation among interior regions since independence.

The controversy over the five 2026 photovoltaic agreements presented itself as a debate about sovereignty; it in fact obscured the fundamental questions. No scandal was exposed: a necessity was concealed. The necessity of an energy transition that the country cannot finance alone, that it must pursue with international partners, and whose conditions could, ten years earlier, have been negotiated from a position of strength — which is no longer the case today, given the scale of the energy deficit.

The vote of 28 April settled the short term. 1.64 billion dinars of investment will officially be deployed. Nearly 600 MW of photovoltaic capacity will be installed in three southern and central governorates. More than 1,500 GWh will theoretically be injected annually into the grid, reducing the national gas bill by approximately 13%. This achievement is not negligible. But the real test begins now. Transforming these concessions into a lever for industrialisation, regional development and energy democratisation is the decisive challenge. Failing that, the detractors will have been, despite themselves and for the wrong reasons, partially right: Tunisia will not have extracted from its sun all possible benefit — not because of the nationality of capital, but from a deficit of strategic steering.

The potential remains intact. It is now for Tunisia's public authorities — executive, parliament, administration and local authorities — to decide whether this potential will translate into a productive common good, democratised down to the rooftops of the most modest households and equitably captured by the territories that host it, or whether it will become, through excess of mistrust or lack of method, a raw material hastily traded under the pressure of the deficit. No international arbitration will make this choice on behalf of Tunisians.