History and future generations will judge harshly all those who by commission or omission have mortgaged Tunisia’s growth, stability, and sovereignty and have only offered the young generations the sad prospect of precarious underemployment, unemployment, or exile.
On reflection and without prejudice or bias, I will not participate in the referendum of July 25, 2022. Having voted neither for Kaïs Saïed nor for Nabil Karoui in 2019 and had hoped for a national jump on July 25, 2021, in order to postpone the process on track and proceed with a real revival of the national economy with a plan for the future based on an open, participatory and inclusive dialogue on the real issues and options available, unfortunately, I have only seen and heard practices and remarks lacking socio-economic and diplomatic insight and realism.
Personalization of power
The things left unsaid in the new constitution submitted to the referendum on July 25, as well as the atypical personality of President Kaïs Saïed with a particular conception of dialogue and a vision still shrouded in the mystery of the future of Tunisia, do not give me not enough pledges to participate in a referendum whose results could be exploited with as much liberalism and opacity as the electronic consultation which was supposed to have prepared it.
The trend towards the personalization of power since July 25, 2021, the circumstances of the drafting of the new constitution and the underlying project for the future of the country, do not seem to me to prepare a real way out of the crisis for Tunisia.
The absence of a sufficiently broad and lasting consensus will make even more turbulent and risky the period of reforms and future sacrifices which should have been undertaken since the beginning of this century and the postponement of which will accentuate the pain and the burden for almost all the segments of the population and especially for the young people to whom we are going to bequeath a country on the verge of bankruptcy and society in tatters with the only common denominator being refusal if not hatred of the other.
Precarious underemployment, unemployment or and exile
History and future generations will judge harshly all those who, by commission or omission, have mortgaged the growth, stability and sovereignty of the country and have offered the younger generations only the sad prospect of precarious underemployment, unemployment or exile.
To those who would be tempted to see in my position any nostalgia for truncated democracy and the folk political class before July 25, 2021, I would reply that Tunisia’s exit from the crisis and the revival of its economy require part of the State to be the first to make sacrifices and to scrupulously ensure the equitable distribution of the burden of recovery within the framework of a consensual and inclusive vision of the future because it is about the future of a whole country in a world in full effervescence and not that of a social group or a few ideologues in search of experimentation.
