Did Ben Ali rule by repression or by consent?

The short answer

• A coup that promised freedom. Many Tunisians, including Bourguiba’s opponents, welcomed Ben Ali in 1987. He had removed a senile president constitutionally and without bloodshed, released prisoners and promised democracy. An amnesty, abolition of the state security court and a new political-parties law followed in his first months. The welcome gave him time to take control of the party, police and media. When he withdrew his promise after 1989, the opposition was divided and exhausted, helping explain two decades of weak resistance.
• The Islamist threat as justification. Ennahda’s 1989 showing helped Ben Ali present repression as protection. The civil war that began in neighboring Algeria in 1992, after Islamists won an election there, strengthened that appeal. Many secular Tunisians, including some feminists and leftists, feared an Islamist government more than a police state; Western governments accepted the same trade. The regime could use the claim of defending stability against critics both religious and secular.
• Education outrunning jobs. Universities expanded rapidly, but skilled jobs did not keep pace. By 2010 about 23 per cent of graduates were unemployed, and graduates made up a growing share of the jobless. Young people had studied as the state encouraged them to do, only to find jobs requiring connections or bribes. Graduate unemployment was highest in the interior, where private firms were fewest. The gap between education and opportunity made blocked hopes a source of anger: protest can grow from frustrated expectations as well as poverty.
• A family that owned the economy. From the 1990s the president’s relatives and his wife’s family seized stakes in banks, airlines, car imports, telecoms and property. Their greed was visible to ordinary Tunisians and offended even the coastal business class that had supported the regime. A government claiming to provide order came to look like one that simply stole, weakening support within its own elite. US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in December 2010 gave written evidence of what Tunisians had long whispered.

What it changed

A template for revolt. The actions used at Gafsa appeared again two years later: sit-ins outside local government buildings, hunger strikes, marches led by unemployed graduates, local union support and phone videos. Protesters in Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine knew the basin’s story, and some of the same activists joined them. The next chapter follows the movement beyond the local limits that had contained Gafsa.

A divided union federation. Gafsa widened the distance between the UGTT’s regime-friendly national leaders and its militant local and regional branches. In January 2011 regional unions pushed the national leadership to authorize strikes. The federation helped turn scattered protests into a national movement and later brokered the democratic transition. Its connections to both the regime and a popular movement made it an intermediary between street and state.

Exit by sea. For some young people in the south and interior, departure was an alternative to revolt. The often illegal boat journey to Lampedusa or Sicily was called the harga, literally ‘burning’ the border. After the police state collapsed in 2011, about 20,000 Tunisians crossed to Lampedusa in three months, showing how many had been waiting to leave. For many young men the boat was a private answer to a public failure.