The Daily - Trouble in Tunisia

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

Tunisia was supposed to be the success story of the Arab Spring — the only democracy to last in the decade since revolutions swept the region.Recently, after mass protests, President Kais Saied appears to be taking the reins of power for himself.What happened? We hear from Mr. Saied and citizens of Tunisia on the ground. Guest: Vivian Yee, the Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Why is Tunisia’s promise of democracy struggling to bear fruit?In the days since their president staged a power grab, threatening their young democracy, many Tunisians are banking on the hope that things cannot get much worse.“Why do you think that, at 67, I would start a career as a dictator?” In a conversation with Vivian Yee, President Kais Saied vowed to preserve hard-fought rights.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Ten years after the Arab Spring, Tunisia is the only remaining democracy to have emerged from the uprisings. But now, the country's president has taken a series of actions that may imperil that democracy. Today, my colleague Vivian Yee traveled to Tunisia to speak to its citizens and its president.

It's Wednesday, August 4th. Vivian, where did this story start for you? So I woke up in Cairo, where I'm based, last Monday morning to the news that there had been huge countrywide protests across Tunisia. Demonstrations turned violent as protesters expressed anger at the deterioration of the country's health, economic and social situation. These protests had led to the president, Kayis Seyd, basically taking the reins of power for himself. We are seeing political turmoil in Tunisia. Tunisia's president today suspended parliament indefinitely. It comes one day after he unilaterally fired the prime minister.

He had fired the prime minister. He had suspended parliament. Today I have taken responsibility. He had fired the prime minister. He had suspended parliament. And it basically seemed like he had concentrated all the levers of government in his own hands. And Vivian, why was all of that so significant to you? Well, for a lot of people, it seemed like the last embers of the Arab Spring had been snuffed out. Explain that. Tunisia was supposed to be the success story from the Arab Spring, which was this series of popular uprisings against dictators and authoritarian rule 10 years ago that swept across the Arab world.

And it had actually all begun in Tunisia when a young fruit seller set himself on fire in this rural town in Tunisia to protest police harassment. And from there, it spread to countries across the Middle East, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen. And all of those countries have, you could say, failed in what protesters were hoping for back in 2011. Either they succumbed to counter-revolution or they fell into civil war. But Tunisia was supposed to be different. It actually ended up with a democracy, with a parliament and elections and freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to protest. So a lot of people across the region and beyond as well in the West had a lot riding on Tunisia as the kind of darling of the Arab Spring, as the one that might succeed. And as I'm

sitting at my desk starting to write about what had happened on Sunday night, I was wondering, does this mean the end of this 10-year experiment in democracy and the only country that ended up with one out of these Arab Spring revolts? And so what do you do next? So I got on the earliest possible flight to Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. And when I landed on Tuesday morning, I was braced for big protests. Things might get out of control. The army might come into the streets. There could be clashes between supporters and opponents of the president. And to my surprise, nothing was happening. It was completely quiet.

So to try to understand what was going on, I went with a translator and walked around Tunis talking to people in cafes and little parks and bars. So thank you so much for meeting us on such short notice. He can translate, It's okay. And what did they tell you? What did you find? What I found was that people weren't that interested in talking about the future of democracy. Instead, they were talking about the past 10 years and how hard it had been for people to get by and make ends meet.

One guy described all the debts that he had racked up to me. He earns 20 dinars per day, which is about $7. And that's been his daily wage for the past 10 years. It hasn't changed in 10 years while prices have gone up, and he's only gotten more mouths to feed at home. You just take the veggies. You don't take fruits or meat. And so he's completely cut meat out of his budget, fruit out of his budget.

So when's the last time you ate meat? For eight. For eight? meat out of his budget, fruit out of his budget. So when's the last time you ate meat? For Eid. For Eid. The only exceptions were a watermelon that was less than a cent that he shared with some friends recently and some meat for the Eid holiday a couple of weeks ago. I talked to a teenager, an 18-year-old guy in Tunis.

So you were going to take a boat to Europe? Who had tried to migrate to Europe three separate times. Oh, the first time he got arrested in Italy, but they sent him back? Because he hadn't found any ways of supporting his family, and he felt like the only option is to go somewhere else. The second time he got arrested in the forest. Even if it means potentially getting arrested or deported or drowning in the Mediterranean.

in the Mediterranean.. She says, yeah, indeed, Tunisia has people in Tunisia who are poor. People are eating from the garbage. I talked to a woman who said that they saw neighbors eating from the trash. Tunis is gone. No, Tunisia is gone.

Is gone or is garbage? Tunisia is literally gone because people are eating from the garbage. And a lot of less dramatic examples of people who just said, I need to leave. It's hard, I need to leave. It's hard. Really, it's hard. So it's just been tough for people. And even before the revolution, Tunisia was facing economic problems. But a lot of people hoped that democracy would help solve them and help give people better lives. But 10 years on,

that democratic government hasn't delivered very much. What do you mean? So since democracy was established a decade ago, Tunisia has faced growing political problems. People increasingly looked at their leaders and saw politicians who were out of touch with their needs and seemed more interested in lining their own pockets and fighting with each other than in improving people's lives. And that paralysis just seemed to get worse and worse, and the corruption seemed to get worse and worse. In the last few years, there have literally been fistfights on the floor of parliament.

And so by 2019, Tunisians were totally fed up. They wanted change, which is where President Kayis Saeed comes in. So tell me about Kayis Saeed. Well, Saeed wasn't a politician at all. And that's what people liked about him. He was a former constitutional law professor who had been talking about ways to structure Tunisia's constitution pretty much since the revolution. And he had gotten a following on Facebook. And young people really backed him because he seemed genuinely clean and non-corrupt and totally different from any politician they

had known. He went to regular coffee shops. He smoked the cheapest brand of cigarettes. And he truly just seemed interested in making Tunisia work. And he ended up winning in a landslide. But after he got into office, things quickly went south. He was fighting with his own prime minister and then coronavirus hit. It totally wiped out Tunisia's tourism industry, which meant that its economy got even worse. Then over the past couple of months, a big wave in COVID cases totally overwhelmed the country's hospitals. Tunisia had the highest COVID mortality rate in the region. So that was the backdrop when people started taking to the streets. And that's when the president seemed to see an opening. And what it seems like is that he saw the mass discontent and he took it as a mandate to cut through all of the gridlock and just seize the reins for himself.

And that's what he ended up doing. up doing. Right. And as a result, this democracy in Tunisia, the only real democracy to emerge from the air of spring, as you said, isn't feeling all that democratic. It's starting to suddenly feel kind of authoritarian. Yeah, well, that's what I was trying to figure out. I was trying to read the signs to figure out whether this democracy was inching toward autocracy. And as the week went on, I ended up getting a very firsthand experience with where things might be headed. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. So Vivian, what exactly happened to you?

What are these firsthand experiences? Well, there were a couple of things, and one led into the other. But I'll start with the first. On Wednesday, we were reporting in a pretty poor area of Tunis, talking to people about how their lives were going and how difficult it was for them to make ends meet. And I was sitting in a cafe doing an interview when the photographer I was working with tapped my shoulder and said, the police are on their way.

Hmm. And pretty soon, these plainclothes cops showed up and asked if we were journalists. And we said yes. And they said that they would have to take us back to the local police station to make sure we were who we said we were. And it didn't feel exactly threatening, And it didn't feel exactly threatening, but I did know that before I had even gotten to Tunis, the local office of Al Jazeera, which is the pan-Arabic TV channel, had gotten shut down to the police station, and we got the very strong sense that they were checking to see that we were journalists and not spies. You're being harassed, basically. It didn't feel menacing or scary in the moment. In some ways, it felt like a normal document check.

And they were nice to us, but they told us that we couldn't report in that neighborhood anymore. So they kept us from doing journalism. Right. And if you're evaluating evidence that Tunisia may be tilting towards authoritarianism, this is not a very good sign. It wasn't great, no. But all the same, I didn't think too much of it and I wanted to just keep reporting. Mm-hmm.

But a few hours later, I start noticing all these notifications from social media and people reaching out to ask me if I had been arrested. And I think that's why I got the call that I got Friday morning. Hmm. Which was what? So I got this call from a mysterious number, and I picked up, and a voice on the other end of the line said, this is the chief of protocol for President Qa'is Sa'id. We would like you to please be at the presidential palace in an hour.

Please dress formally. The president would like to meet you. You're being summoned by the president of Tunisia. Yeah, I was summoned by the president of Tunisia. And I wasn't appropriately dressed. What do you mean? Well, let's just say it's very hot in Tunis right now. And when I packed, I was not expecting to meet a president. I was expecting to cover protests. So I get in a taxi and rush over to the presidential palace.

And luckily, I had brought a button down with me that I could throw over my tank top. And after waiting a bit, we meet the chief of protocol for the president, who tells us, this is how you will enter. This is where you'll stand. This is where you'll sit. Please don't sit until you're told to. And then he looks down at my shoes, which are practical sandals. And I see this look across his face of, this is unacceptable. Wow.

And so before we go in, he brings out a pair of high heels for me to wear, which are two sizes too big. What are you thinking at this point? What do you imagine in your head is happening here? Well, we had been asking for an interview and hadn't gotten anywhere. And so, of course, I wanted to steer it into an interview and ask a few questions. But that's not what it turned out to be at all. What did it turn out to be?

Well, so I clomped in in my two big heels, and it's this very formal audience room where all the chairs are edged in gold, and there are chandeliers, and it looks like a stage set. And as it turned out, that's kind of what it was. There was a camera crew there, and this meeting was posted as a video on his official Facebook page. Hmm. And it turned out to be a lecture, a lecture on the U.S. Constitution, of all things.

So we sit down and the president starts talking and he doesn't stop. And he doesn't stop. He's sitting very straight and orating in this very resonant, formal Arabic. And he had this sheaf of papers to the right of him, and one of them was this copy of the U.S. Constitution. And he even read some of it to me in French. And basically, his point was, I'm not going to be a dictator. I respect the Constitution. In fact, I taught the U.S. Constitution for more than three decades. I understand freedom of speech. I understand freedom of the press. And therefore, I respect it in the Tunisian Constitution as well. And the only reason I'm doing this now is because Tunisia is in a desperate state.

And just as Abraham Lincoln had to take extraordinary measures to save the United States of America, so I have to take extraordinary measures to save Tunisia during this moment of crisis. So he almost compares what he's doing to the Civil War era in the United States. Exactly. And at some point he quoted Alexis de Tocqueville. He quoted Charles de Gaulle. And it wasn't for a while that I had a chance to break in and ask him some questions. And how did that go?

Not so well. I tried to break in and say, well, can you explain what happened to us the other day in terms of having our reporting interfered with? Can you explain what your vision is for the country? Can you explain how dissolving parliament and firing your prime minister, how does that fit into your view of the constitution? And are you sure that what you're doing isn't authoritarian? And he just wouldn't answer. He and his advisors kept telling me,

no, this is not an interview. This was just a meeting. If you'd like to arrange an interview, we can do that later on. You can apply for that. But this meeting is over. Wow. Thank you. So this meeting in which the president of Tunisia summons you to insist that he's not becoming authoritarian and that he celebrates democracy, and yet he never lets you ask a single question, ends up, in a way, reinforcing the idea that actually he is tilting into authoritarianism. Well, it's not totally for me to judge,

but as a friend said to me later on, there's nothing like a monologue on free speech where the person you're talking to doesn't get to ask a single question. I think it definitely reinforced the idea that this president wants to do things his way and not be held accountable for what he was doing. As you said, it may not be for you to judge as a journalist, but it is, of course, for the people of Tunisia. And I'm curious, after all this time you spent in the country, what your sense is that they have to say about the president's actions and whether they are democratic or democratic enough. So what do you think of President Kaya Saeed? I found that pretty much every Tunisian I talked to was pretty happy with what the president was doing.

We're waiting for this day, you know? People said, great, somebody needed to step up and come up with a plan. They deserve what happens. They gave nothing to Tunisia for 10 years. And somebody needed to bring these corrupt politicians to justice. And somebody needed to just take the wheel and undertake economic reforms and get COVID under control. Well, given everything that you have laid out here, you can begin to understand why the people you're talking to, why Tunisians would prioritize their next meal and their

economic security over these high-minded ideals and structures of democracy. And they could forgive him for doing things that might not seem perfectly democratic. Exactly. I think back in 2011, what did people want? They were chanting for justice and more freedoms. And they wanted to be able to make a decent living without being harassed by the police. But they weren't necessarily asking for democracy the way Americans see democracy.

They wanted better lives. And if you talk to Tunisians, they say, we don't want dictatorship, but we also don't want a completely dysfunctional democracy where we get to vote, yes, but our lives are not better. And a lot of people I talked to over the past week said, we hope and believe that this president will find a way to fix things without stripping our freedoms away. But if he doesn't, we'll just go back out onto the streets and protest again and get something else. And Tunisia is only 10 years into this.

It's a really young, really fragile democracy. And I don't know how things will play out. I do know that for for now at least, they're willing to wait and see. Well, Vivian, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. Over the past few days,

Tunisia's security service has arrested several critics of President Saeed, as well as judges, raising new questions about his commitment to democracy. His dismissal of parliament will remain in effect until the end of August, at which point he will need to decide whether and how to restore its authority. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. This investigation has revealed conduct that corrodes the very fabric and character of our state government and shines light on injustice that can be present at the highest levels of government. A report conducted by the Office of New York's Attorney

General and released on Tuesday found that the state's governor, Andrew Cuomo, sexually harassed multiple current and former government employees, and that he broke state and federal laws in the process. The investigators independently corroborated and substantiated these facts through interviews and evidence, including contemporaneous notes and communications. The report documents a pattern of unwanted, touching, and inappropriate comments, including toward a member of the governor's own security detail. A female state trooper recalled Cuomo running his hand across her stomach and down her back, making comments about her appearance

and kissing her on the cheek. In one case, the report claims, Cuomo and his allies illegally retaliated against one of the women who had made her allegations public. The report renewed calls from fellow Democrats, including President Biden, for Cuomo to either resign or be removed from office. I want you to know directly from me that I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances. In response, or made inappropriate sexual advances. In response, Cuomo denied the allegations, called the report biased, and made clear that, for now, he does not plan to resign.

I am 63 years old. I have lived my entire adult life in public view. That is just not who I am. And that's not who I have ever been. Today's episode was produced by Soraya Shockley and Claire Tennesketter, with help from Jessica Chung. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Alisha Ba'etube, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.