THE TUNISIAN CONSTITUTION: THE PREROGATIVES OF THE PRESIDENT OR THE WALTZ BETWEEN OMNIPRESENCE AND POWER-SHARING

Abstract

Tunisia was rocked in 2010 by a popular protest that sparked the events of the Arab Spring. This led to the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime. The uprising highlighted the need to amend the 1959 Constitution. The desire for reform resulted in a total overhaul through the election of a National Constituent Assembly with the objective of drafting a new Constitution. After several twists and turns, the new Constitution, heralding the advent of the “Second Republic”, was approved in 2014, putting an end to the presidential system established by the Constitution of 1959 under which a large part of the powers was monopolized by the two presidents who governed for half a century. While putting an end to the presidential regime, the new Constitution has generated a mixture of semi-parliamentary and assembly regimes. However, political forces were quick to state the need to amend it. Although the powers of the new President have been clearly defined by the text, the powers of the President and the Head of Government overlapped to the point of creating confusion and degenerating into conflict during the first post-2014 term and at the beginning of the second term. Thus, the discrepancy between the text and reality has led to a drift of the new system, in the midst of a chronic precariousness in the political arena, sharpened by the current president Kais Saied’s decision to set up an exceptional regime in 2021.