«The Squandered State» : Tunisian Populism and the «Global Reactionary Moment»

Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro all belong to profoundly different national contexts and mobilize radically distinct institutional resources and cultural raw materials. They nonetheless share a single method of rule, grounded in a logic of retrenchment and in the demand to restore a purity corrupted by elitists, by outsiders, or by the very machinery of a debased liberalism. And Kais Saied is no stranger to this approach—though the dilapidated, impoverished and structurally fractured Tunisian context in which he operates lends this logic a particular bitterness and urgency.

This essay therefore seeks—without any claim to certainty—to situate Tunisia within this comparative frame, examining the structural conditions that produced Saied's rise, the ideological mechanisms of his populism, and the defining traits of his rule. By comparing Saied to his populist counterparts across the world, it identifies the shared rhetorical and structural logic, while tracing the singular Tunisian manifestation of that logic. Its aim is to defend the concept of the «Squandered State» to describe Tunisia's present condition: that of a country which passed through a phase of transition without the accompanying economic transformation needed to anchor it, and which has entered, since the summer of 2021, a phase of authoritarian stagnation, economic drift, and accelerating institutional decay.

The dominance of a narrowly «localist» reading has led analysts to neglect any account of Kais Saied in light of a broader global vision of the populist wave of the past decade—a wave that did not arise from nothing. It emerged from a matrix of conditions—economic, cultural and political—that intersected across profoundly different national contexts to produce a political model similar in its broad contours. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the fragility of the neoliberal matrix that had dominated the post-Cold War order, breeding a lasting sense of economic precarity among peoples who had been persuaded that the market would deliver them prosperity. Deindustrialization in the American Midwest, austerity in southern Europe, and stagnant wages across much of the Western world fostered fertile ground for anti-system resentment, organized around the diffuse and widespread conviction that existing institutions are skewed in favor of elites and incapable of serving ordinary people. Global surveys designed to gauge this sentiment have shown that, in more than one liberal democratic country, peoples have declared themselves willing to support leaders who openly advocate breaking legal and institutional rules in the name of reform and change—a sentiment that has remained strikingly high since 2016 and extends far beyond the United States.

The cultural dimension of this context is no less important. Identity politics—belonging, the fear of demographic and cultural transformation—have become central axes of political struggle in many societies. Authoritarian populists portray the world as a confrontation between two sharply defined camps: a virtuous group and a purely malevolent one, the latter held responsible for society's ills and made into a scapegoat. The concrete composition of these groups varies by context. In Trump's America they are the immigrants and the «globalists»; in Meloni's Italy, the immigrants and the Brussels bureaucrats; in Orbán's Hungary, Soros and the liberal intellectuals; in Saied's Tunisia, the corrupt parties, the «agents and traitors», and the migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. The structural logic, however, remains one and the same: the search for a «scapegoat» upon whom to pin responsibility for the crisis.

As for the political dimension, it manifests through decades of elite bargaining and of party convergence toward the center, which blurred the ideological cleavages between parties and political currents and allowed a form of political opportunism to prevail, as well as through parliaments that seemed more preoccupied with the distribution of patronage than with the concerns of citizens. These dynamics generated a crisis of representation that the populist newcomers, hailing from outside the system, exploited. According to data from the Arab Barometer and Afrobarometer, democracy enjoyed the support of more than two-thirds of Tunisians by 2021, while trust in political parties had fallen to 13 percent and in parliament to 9 percent—a clear illustration of what the political scientist Peter Mair called «ruling the void», that condition in which democratic institutions persist in form while their popular legitimacy evaporates.

From Taiwan to Croatia, the year 2024 alone witnessed the most severe democratic erosion since the end of the Cold War, marked by the advance of right-wing populist formations across Europe and beyond, propelled by anti-immigration sentiment, skepticism toward European unity, and a sweeping contempt for the elite. Orbán's Hungary led the way by dismantling democratic institutions and building an economic model that perpetuates his grip on power, while Meloni's government has been characterized by a blend of pragmatism at the European scale and illiberal orientations at home—a mold being replicated, with local modifications, across the world. More importantly, what these movements share is not merely an electoral or rhetorical style. They share a new theory of government, one that confines legitimacy to the direct will of the «people» alone (as an imagined entity) as embodied by a single leader, and that regards intermediary institutions as corrupt obstacles rather than essential components of democratic governance.

It is within a comparative perspective that the full significance of Saied's politics comes to light: he is no exception, but rather an iteration shaped specifically by the material and institutional conditions of an Arab-African society in a transitional context, economically strained and politically spent. The most illuminating structural comparisons are with Donald Trump, despite the radical contextual differences that separate them. Both present themselves as coming from outside the political class to dismantle a corrupt system on behalf of a betrayed people. Both deploy a language of emergency—grounded in the idea that the situation has grown so grave as to warrant the suspension of ordinary institutional constraints—to legitimize the concentration of power in their hands. Both have turned conspiracy theories into a strategic instrument of government rather than a marginal political tactic. Trump's authoritarian populism portrays the world as a confrontation between a virtuous group and a purely malevolent one, and stokes moral panics to justify authoritarian measures, perpetually invoking the pretext of a perceived existential threat to legitimize acts that would otherwise have been rejected by public opinion.

The difference, however, lies in the institutional context. Trump operates within a constitutional system distinguished by firmly established checks and balances; this is why he failed, during his first term, to undermine the system. Saied, by contrast, operates within a post-transitional condition that had already weakened by 2021, where the political elites had failed to build parties capable of converting political liberation into good governance and economic development—depriving the country of any bulwark capable of halting his advance. Where Trump was slowed, Saied was not. The same logic therefore produced profoundly different outcomes, because the institutional soil was radically different.

The trajectory of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni illuminates another dimension of Kais Saied's politics: that of the rehabilitation of a political current's tradition as a «new» and legitimate political force. Like the other leaders of the populist right, she deploys a rights-hostile playbook, made of anti-immigration and inward-looking policies, that draws its roots from the Italian fascist movement. And she has presented this tradition as the authentic expression of Italian identity in the face of the globalized liberal consensus. In Tunisia, Saied performs an analogous rehabilitation. His policies are rooted in an inward-looking vision of the «authentic» Tunisian identity. It is hardly surprising, then, to observe this deep convergence between Meloni and Saied on the migration file: coordination in this domain entails not only shared economic and geopolitical interests, but also a concordance of ideological and cultural vision regarding the question of identitarian authenticity and the threats said to bear upon it from «foreign migrants».

The comparison with former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is perhaps the most illuminating for understanding Kais Saied's institutional strategy. Over more than a decade in power, Orbán developed a methodical model for dismantling democratic institutions while preserving the formal procedural shell of elections and constitutional governance. Hungary under Orbán led the way by dismantling institutions and building an economic model that perpetuates his grip on power; the outcome, after all these years, is an authoritarian regime and a muzzled, economically fragile society.

The global dimension of Tunisian populism lays bare one of the most disquieting features of the worldwide populist moment: the propensity of «Western democracies» to embrace and support authoritarian regimes when those regimes serve their geopolitical interests. Since 2021, European institutions have warned that a collapse of Tunisia following a default on its debt could trigger waves of migration toward European Union countries and destabilize the Middle East and North Africa region. A warning that frames Tunisia's crisis first and foremost as a European migration-management problem. This explains the deal that followed, when European governments, under the aegis of Meloni's Italy, effectively abandoned rights-based conditionalities in exchange for cooperation on the migration file.

But it is the comparison with the Algerian case that appears the most telling, owing to its cultural and geographic proximity. Abdelmadjid Tebboune came to power in 2019 in the wake of the collapse of the Bouteflika regime under the pressure of the popular movement (the Hirak), presenting himself as the embodiment of a «New Algeria»—a classic populist promise of personal redemption for a regime that had been structurally deadlocked for decades. A promise that mirrors Saied's own historic pledge on the eve of the July 2022 constitutional referendum. Both men mobilized an anti-elite populist discourse to carry forward a project that, in reality, does not exceed the preservation and reinforcement of existing power structures under cover of novel narratives of legitimation.

The decisive difference between the two cases, however, lies in the economic cushion. Algeria possesses colossal hydrocarbon revenues that enable the regime to buy social peace through subsidies, public-sector employment, and social transfers. Energy export revenues there exceed 90 percent of the country's income and constitute more than 60 percent of government revenue—a rentier cushion that Saied neither possesses nor can manufacture. In this sense, Tebboune is sustainable in ways that elude Saied. The Tunisian president remains compelled to preserve his populist appeal without commanding the material resources needed to sustain it, which drives him toward populist rhetorical escalation and, along a parallel track, toward an escalation of repression in its hard and soft forms alike.

How shall we name Tunisia's present condition? Political science offers several options. Some favor «democratic backsliding», though it describes the process rather than the destination. Others resort to «authoritarian consolidation», which presupposes a degree of organizational capacity and durability that Kais Saied's regime may lack. The most pessimistic employ the concept of the «failed state», which seems premature in the Tunisian case and which, in any event, describes a different phenomenon—the collapse of essential state functions—that Tunisia has not yet reached. As for the «hybrid regime», this characterization captures the formal retention of certain democratic procedures within an authoritarian framework, but it misses the dynamic character of the present moment, namely that sense of a continuous and accelerating deterioration.

This paper proposes the concept of the «Squandered State» to capture the Tunisian case with greater precision. It is a state that crossed a critical historical threshold (in the Tunisian case, the transitional phase between 2011 and 2019) without building the economic, institutional and social foundations needed to make that crossing irreversible. During the transitional phase, the state was used as an instrument of political competition rather than of institutional construction; resources were squandered in partisan struggle; and the economy failed to generate the growth that would have endowed democracy with a material foundation. When the political crisis arrived, it found all the conditions ripe for authoritarian restoration, and the country squandered its historic chance at transformation. The Squandered State is marked by several traits.

First, institutional decomposition: the gradual dismantling of checks and balances, the shackling of independent bodies, the subordination of the judiciary to the executive, and the abolition of any genuine legislative oversight. Saied has succeeded in accomplishing all of this. Second, economic stagnation without structural transformation: the state maintains a vast system of subsidies and public-sector employment—not as social policy but as a mechanism of political appeasement—while the structural transformation of the economy remains blocked by its political cost to the regime's base. Tunisia embodies this trade-off precisely. Third, the nationalization of civic action: the recourse to legal tools to suppress the press, the opposition, and civil society, substituting for the pluralist public space of the transitional phase a managed informational environment in which self-censorship and fear prevail. Fourth, and in its most singular trait, the Squandered State is marked by aimlessness: the absence of any coherent project for the future—one that offers neither a clear vision of the state nor hope for the people. Saied dismantled the system without preparing anything to take its place. And unlike other forms of authoritarian configuration, he offers society no class compromise; quite the contrary—the deterioration of living conditions under Saied follows an accelerating trajectory parallel to that of the deterioration of political conditions and rights.

In this sense, the Squandered State is the determinate outcome of a populism without resources. Wealthy and rentier populisms are able to preserve themselves by dispensing material benefits to their base, by maintaining the welfare state, by redistributing the rent, or by financing patronage networks. Threadbare and destitute populisms, by contrast—such as Kais Saied's—can operate only at the symbolic level: selling a discourse about the dignity of the nation, the defeat of its enemies, and the authenticity of the bond between the leader and the people. And though this symbolic economy is not devoid of power, it suffices neither to govern nor to ensure the continuous reproduction of power. Over time, it produces a state that grows ever more repressive and impotent at once—a state for which one can find no name other than a «Squandered State».

Perhaps the most disquieting dimension of the Squandered State—the one that distinguishes it most clearly from mere authoritarian regression—is what might be called the demographic hemorrhage, manifested in the accelerating departure of a broad swath of Tunisians whose labor, skills and energy the state needs more than ever to achieve its recovery. Between 2021 and 2025, roughly 6,000 doctors and 39,000 engineers emigrated, depriving the country of the skills required for its health system and its economy. This is the embodiment of a concrete and irreversible loss of decades of investment in education—an investment to which the Tunisian state devoted abundant public resources, in the universities, medical faculties and technical institutes that trained professional cadres who later emigrated to Europe, Canada and the Gulf.

Thus this Squandered State does not squander its present alone; it also squanders its past, for the investments accumulated by earlier generations are being liquidated through emigration without yielding the returns that would have justified them. Nearly half of Tunisians, including three-quarters of their youth, express a desire to leave the country. Should this situation persist, it describes a society passing through a phase of collective detachment from its national project. The psychological and social consequences of this trend are difficult to quantify, but they appear profound: when emigration becomes the optimal option for the educated and the talented, those who remain are most often those with limited options, the least capital, and the weakest ties to the global economy. The composition of the residual population shifts gradually in ways that render any future recovery more difficult still.

The demographic situation grows further complicated with the accelerating aging of the country's population. Tunisia is indeed experiencing a demographic aging faster than that of any other country in the region: fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level, the working-age population is shrinking in proportion while the number of elderly people rises. All of this heralds a financial time bomb with an already-lit fuse. The Squandered State may find itself unable to pay the pensions of its retirees and, at the same time, unable to employ its youth—a generational bankruptcy whose human consequences are difficult to imagine. To this is added the squandering of any prospect of economic development, through recourse to so-called solutions both old and new, which belong to the same populist logic in the way they conceive of problems and their solutions, and which at the same time reveal the structural incapacity of populisms to rebuild the economy. Such is the case of the model of community companies (*entreprises citoyennes*) and the funds and privileges allocated to them, at the expense of economic actors and without any return in terms of wealth creation or new employment.

There is another manifestation of this squandering that I would propose to add: the funds earmarked for financing community companies at the expense of economic actors and without any return in terms of wealth creation or new employment. We are facing a squandering born of an ideological affliction and of a genuine deficiency and incapacity to rebuild the economy.

The other manifestation of this squandering is the distribution of state property to these companies. The relinquishing of state assets to maintain the status quo, to control the street, and to guarantee appeasement. We are not facing a regime that seeks to build a loyal social base by relinquishing the state's resources: it depletes and undermines them.