The authoritarian madness of the Kaïs Saïed regime reached a new milestone this Saturday, May 11: repression on television. While the France 24 correspondent was live at the House of Lawyers in Tunis, police arrived. Their target? The lawyer and columnist Sonia Dahmani who had the misfortune, a few days earlier, to joke on television about the president’s racist drift against sub-Saharan migrants.
Sonia Dahmani was taken in manu militari, like the presenter Borhen Bssais and the columnist Mourad Zeghidi, who were arrested the next day. And like so many other journalists, lawyers and community activists, reduced to silence by an omnipotent president who nothing seems to be able to stop. “It is no longer a question of ‘classic’ Ben Ali-style repression [NDLR : le dictateur renversé par la révolution en 2011] against declared opponents, but of an identity-based authoritarianism targeting people for what they embody: openness to the world, bilingualism, free speech, everything that Kaïs Saïed loathes”, analyzes Vincent Geisser, researcher at the CNRS .
Raging conspirator, uninhibited xenophobic, the president who took full powers in July 2021 and dynamited all institutions is plunging Tunisia back into a police state. And calls on the people to settle scores with their “enemies”. In this country, more locked down than ever, the children of the revolution, greatly disappointed with democracy, seem for the most part resigned. It remains to be seen until when.