At the time of writing, the euphoria of the early 2010s about what seemed to be a fundamental transformation of politics in North Africa and the ‘Middle East’ seems very remote. What Souad Abdelrahim, an Ennahda member and since 2018 Tunis’s first female mayor, formulated in an opinion piece in 2011 mirrors the Tunisian zeitgeist and is reminiscent of the wide spread spirit of optimism at the time:

For a long time, Tunisia was seen as the first and then the last remaining country to have turned the legacies of the Arab uprisings into a (more) democratic future. Since a series of terrorist attacks committed in 2015, however, a state of emergency has been in place. In July 2021, the president of Tunisia, Kais Saied, issued yet another extension of the state of emergency and announced the enforcement of Article 80 of the Tunisian Constitution according to his own interpretation (Ben Hamadi 2021). Since then, all democratic institutions have slowly but surely been dismantled (Weipert- Fenner 2022).