Since 25 July 2021, the opposition in Tunisia, in terms of both parties and associations, has been undergoing successive changes in composition, political practice, and discourse. The “state of exception” introduced by President Kais Saied now confronts oppositional action with issues concerning legitimacy, effectiveness, and mechanisms of protest and organization. It also paves the way for a reshaping of oppositional action’s political sphere via Presidential Order no. 117, which granted the president unilateral control over its legislative foundation and the power to define the institutions of political participation and mechanisms for the transfer of power.

While the old and new opposition seek to construct political and organizational instruments to confront the new authority, Saied is searching for ways to curtail the role of opposition and limit its sociopolitical effectiveness. In this context, the coming stage raises several questions: How will the opposition face the new manifestations of hegemony given its internal predicaments? What is the fate of oppositional action as a whole given the new authority’s rigidity and inclination toward outlawing or punishing such action? These are the questions this article will explore.

 

The Opposition’s Changing Composition

The most prominent effect of the state of exception was its reshaping of the opposition’s political composition. It made the governing parliamentary majority, represented by the Islamist Ennahda Movement and its allies, drift toward the position of opposition. By contrast, some of the old opposition forces, such as the People’s Movement, the Popular Current, and the Tunisia Forward Movement, tended to identify with the presidential discourse, thereby becoming an objective ally of the authorities. Presidential Order no. 117 played a large part in pushing some other party forces that had expressed stances virtually supporting the July 25 measures, such as the Republican Party, the Democratic Current, Afek Tounes, the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties, and the Free Destourian Party, to settle into the position of opposition. As for the leftist Workers’ Party, from the beginning it has maintained its stance on Saied, deeming him an aspiring autocrat and part of the system that ruled the country before 25 July 2021.

This opposition with diverse ideological backgrounds and political conceptions may be united by the general political position that the July 25 measures are a threat to representative democracy and suspension of constitutional life. It is, however, divided by many disputes that outweigh the common opposition to Saied. The centrist and leftist opposition display major reservations toward the Islamist Ennahda Movement and hold it mostly responsible for the failure of the democratic transition stage. Part of this opposition, such as the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties, Afek Tounes, and the Democratic Current, participated in government from various positions during the past decade. These parties are trying to form a new political alliance called the “Coordination of Democratic Forces”. In parallel, the Ennahda Movement and some of its former allies in government, such as Heart of Tunisia and the Dignity Coalition, are trying to form a political front against Saied that includes not only the Islamic current but also activists and political entities beyond it. This front has come to be known as “Citizens Against the Coup”.

As for the Free Destourian Party, it constitutes a unique case within the opposition as it does not base its oppositional stances on support for the democratic transition system and revolution in general yet also questions the “constitutional legitimacy” of the president’s decisions. This questioning may be explained by the fact that the Free Destourian Party is fixated on political power, which has now fallen fully into the hands of President Saied. The party sees this development as a curtailment of its position as the authoritarian alternative that was preparing to inherit the pre-July 25 system. That being said, the Free Destourian Party and Saied share the idea of suspending the 2014 Constitution and replacing the parliamentary system with a presidential system.

 

The State of Exception and the Authoritarian Threat to Oppositional Action

Saied constantly seeks to present the exceptional measures as a necessity for political, economic, and social reasons. Yet he does not see it as a deviation from constitutional and legal normativity. This conception is reminiscent of some of philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s conclusions in his description of the dangers and pitfalls of a state of exception. He mentioned that it is a “figure of necessity [that] appears as a measure that is ‘illegal’ but ‘accordant with the juridical and constitutional system’ and is realized in the production of new norms (or a new juridical order)”.[1] Presidential Order no. 117 is a way to produce new legal norms, including the right of the president to issue decrees concerning “regulating parties, unions, associations, organizations, and professional bodies and their funding”. These texts will constitute a new legislative basis for regulating opposition in accordance with the conceptions of the system of exceptional governance, which is currently inclined toward creating “consensus” rather than “plurality” and toward prohibition and constriction rather than respect for public freedoms (the freedoms of protest, assembly, and expression). The current authority maintains a discourse aimed at granting prohibition a legal basis, such as Saied’s recent statement that he “only prohibit[s] based on law”.

Presidential Order no. 117 constitutes a framework for exercising total authority under the pretext of a force majeure whose time limit is not yet clear. Like any other authority, this total authority seeks to consolidate its institutional and normative existence by “producing various acts of coercion and compulsion”, in the words of public intellectual Abdelilah Belkeziz.[2] The opposition, in its various expressions, does not appear to be safe from the authority’s compulsive-coercive orientation. The political reforms that Decision no. 117 mentioned will embody this orientation as they will tend to create a new legal norm that serves the vision of political centralization and marginalize opponents, especially minor ones. In line with this trend, Saied previously described some of his opponents as having “no weight in society”.

In parallel, the presidential discourse tends to moralize the political sphere by dividing it vertically into two perpetually feuding axes. On one hand is the axis of the good and honest, who are “impeccable” in the president’s words. On the other is the “axis of evil”, which comprises the corrupt, conspirators, and opportunists, who belong in the “trash bin of history”. This Manichaean conception strips opposition action of any political reasonability and associates it with all negative morals and values.

Thus, “political opposition is no longer one of the political system’s mechanisms and a dynamic that drives its renewal and the development of the public political sphere; rather, it becomes a cause of division in the community and the nation and a catalyst for internal strife [fitna]”.[3] This view causes the authority to gradually drift toward political exclusion, i.e. exclusion of everything that falls outside its subjugation. So far, the exceptional governance system’s promises to liberate the downtrodden majority from the hegemony of the “corrupt minority” seem to correspond in reality to a tangible trend toward once again using punitive and policing instruments to handle social protests, as the city of Agareb recently witnessed because of the garbage crisis.[4]

 

The Strategy of Assimilating the Slogans of Those Not in Power

To a certain extent, Saied has succeeded in over-politicizing some socioeconomic issues. In other words, he has mainstreamed political debate over issues that were previously confined to certain political and ideological groups. Examples include “class disparity”, “national sovereignty”, and “corruption”. Although these issues were being discussed, they were not attracting community interest as they have been recently, and the previous ruling elites were treating them in an excessively cold and perhaps suspiciously dismissive manner. The reductive and moralistic presidential discourse managed to penetrate new social spheres that had not paid much attention to critical structural economic and social issues.

Even though Saied holds all the authorities in his hands, he expresses his perspectives on major issues (corruption, disparity, sovereignty) via a political discourse closer to the language of opposition. He does not present his conceptions and stances as a platform of governance. Rather, he does so through a discourse of protest governed by a constant conflict with invisible “enemies of the nation”, which he usually mentions not explicitly but through allusion. The president also usually tries to express his perceptions through symbolic channels, which makes him crave slogans and causes, particularly those advocated by people outside the sphere of authority. For example, summoning the American ambassador to Carthage Palace was enough to assuage a vague sense of defeat afflicting the masses. But on a practical level, the president presented no new conception of sovereignty. Similarly, the raids of factories stockpiling certain products were enough to create the illusion that the president is fighting corrupt monopolies. But on the political level, a comprehensive economic vision for eliminating the monopoly phenomenon was absent, and larger monopolies were granted safety.

The appointment of a woman as the head of a government of which women constitute nearly half was enough to stir feminist sentiment in support of the president’s government and helped to neutralize part of the Tunisian feminist movement. However, all this did not undermine or cause a revision of the authority’s patriarchal substance, nor did it alter the president’s opposition to certain causes concerning equality, foremost among them equality in inheritance.

Saied’s general and loose discourse made him akin to a “floating signifier”, in the words of political theorist Ernesto Laclau,[5] and attracted many contradictory political and ideological currents following July 25 because he himself was an ambiguous figure behind which contrasting and conflicting political bodies rallied. To this day, the president strives to assimilate every political and social issue that his opponents champion in order to leave the impression that he is the “most honest” one to express and engage with it.

 

The Opposition and the Predicaments of “Stereotypical Party Politics”

During this phase – specifically after July 25 – party politics in Tunisia faces nontrivial challenges and problems that will affect the future of Tunisian democracy. The parties face the external challenge of the president’s perspective on the notion of party politics, namely that it is a moribund historical phenomenon.[6] In practice, Saied seeks to accelerate its demise, both on the symbolic level by casting doubt over the parties’ integrity and accusing them of opportunism and on the political and legislative level by constraining their activities and preparing a new legal norm that curtails their effectiveness in political life.

Additionally, the parties seem besieged by internal crises that put them in a predicament with their supporters, on one hand, and society in general, on the other. Usually, the internal crises express themselves through “party splits”, which are usually accompanied by calls for party life to be “democratized” and broader access to positions and decision-making for the rank and file. This internal dynamic governed by clashes and conflict left a negative impression with onlookers and helped consolidate a stereotypical image of party politics as an elitist affair detached from the expectations of most social groups. This the president and his supporters seek to prove by highlighting party politics’ failure to express society’s needs. Casting doubt over the social value of parties is a means of establishing a new “political logic” that opposes political elites, monopolizes speech in the name of the people, and presents the councils project as an expression of “radical democracy”. This logic does not establish itself through its internal political and ideological coherence but by force of excluding the other, particularly the party other.

The coming stage will confront Tunisian parties with pressing issues primarily concerning their internal structure and social role and their modes of organization both in discourse and practice. They will probably find themselves preoccupied with revision, erosion, and alliances.

This is an edited translation from Arabic.

[1] Giorgio Agamben, Halat al-Istithna’: al-Insan al-Haram [Estado De Excepcion: Homo Sacer], trans. Nasir Ismail, 1st edition, Madarat for Research and Publishing, Egypt, 2015, p. 85.

[2] Abdelilah Belkeziz, Nihayat al-Da’iya: al-Mumkin wa-l-Mumtani’ fi Adwar al-Muthaqqafin, 2nd edition, Arab Network for Research and Publishing, Beirut, 2010, p. 120.

[3] Ibid., p. 123.

[4] See the Legal Agenda’s coverage of the garbage crisis in Agareb in “Nufayat Safaqis: ‘Indama Tasqutu al-Shi’arat fi Ikhtibar al-Maydan” and “Ahali ‘Aqarib Bayna al-Qam’ al-Bulisiyy wa-l-Irhab al-Bi’iyy”.

[5] Mahmoud Hadhoud, “Wu’ud al-Sha’bawiyya wa-Ghawayatuha: Ernesto Laclau wa-l-Bahth ‘an Istratijiyya li-l-Quwa al-Dimuqratiyya”, Maraya.

[6] Shortly before rising to power, Saied expressed his position on party politics in general and on the Tunisian parties in particular in an interview with the Tunisian weekly Acharaa Almagharebi.