in Tunisia, the Constitution of discord

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Volunteers distribute leaflets calling for votes in the constitutional referendum, in Kairouan, on July 11, 2022.

Fatma Khadraoui has found a shadowy puddle in a setting of heat-crushed dust in which to display her stall of coffee machines and toys. It’s market day in Zannouch, a town located about twenty kilometers east of Gafsa, the mining region of southwestern Tunisia. The villager in her fifties, scarf adjusted around her face and pleated fabrics on her shoulders, waits for the barge on the edges of the railway line where the phosphate is conveyed, heading for the port of Sfax. In this Tunisian hinterland where precariousness can be gauged by the rickety carts pulled by donkeys at the foot of stony massifs sheltering a few Berber hamlets, the echo of political turbulence in Tunis only reaches muffled.

“The country’s liberal elite is now openly worried about the risk of a relapse into authoritarianism”

Fatma Khadraoui admits not knowing much about the draft constitution that the head of state, Kaïs Saïed, is submitting to a referendum scheduled for July 25, a year after assuming full powers in a coup force against the institutions resulting from the Fundamental Law of 2014. While the country’s liberal elite, which had initially conceded the benefit of the doubt to Kaïs Saïed, is now openly concerned about the risk of a relapse into authoritarianism in Tunisia after a decade of muddled and chaotic apprenticeship of democracy, Fatma Khadraoui does not affect so much alarmism. “I don’t know anything, she says. All I know is that I will vote for the president. Everything has deteriorated in the country. I just hope that after this referendum things will be better. »

This observation of a depressed present coupled with a vague hope placed in the person of Kaïs Saïed, credited with an image of integrity, sums up quite well the state of mind reigning in this Tunisia of the neglected, neglected by decades of development that mainly benefited the coastal regions. It is primarily this Tunisia that pro-Kaïs Saïed activists are addressing, campaigning for a “yes” vote in the markets, in Zannouch and elsewhere. They promise a “better country”, “less unemployment”a “Disciplined Parliament”a “responsible justice”the “religious tolerance” and an “healthy democracy” in order to “to end the mess once and for all”. A concise summary, to say the least, of a Constitution that few of their interlocutors have really read, like Fatma Khadraoui.

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