Kais Saied Is Building a New Dictatorship in Tunisia — With Help From the EU
Tunisian president Kais Saied has launched an authoritarian clampdown on opposition parties and media while inciting hatred against African migrants. But EU officials seem happy to embrace Saied as another thuggish border guard for Fortress Europe.
Charles Michel, president of the European Council, right, and Kais Saied, president of Tunisia, ahead of their meeting in the Europa building in Brussels, Belgium, on June 4, 2021. (Valeria Mongelli / Hans Lucas / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On Friday, July 14, a crowd gathered outside the front gate of the Tunisian journalists’ union headquarters amid the colonial-era French buildings in downtown Tunis. Activists, most of them old hands in the struggle who know each other, milled around the gates, chatting together with placards in hand, awaiting direction as they prepared to protest.
Later, they started down one of the main avenues, blocking traffic as they chanted militant slogans in Arabic and French. The emergency action was small and called in response to weeks of racist violence against sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia by citizen vigilantes, most flagrantly in the country’s second-largest city, Sfax.
The Tunisian military went on to expel the migrants to a military zone in open desert on the Tunisian border with Libya and Algeria. They were left without water or food in heat well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
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