20 July 2015
Since the 2011 Arab uprisings gave way to the dreadful combination of civil war and terrorism that has spread from Syria to Libya and Yemen, analysts and political actors from both the Arab world and West have felt an acute need for at least one success story in the region. Tunisia has provided such a tale—despite suffering two lethal terror attacks on its soil so far in 2015, the second being the killing of 38 tourists at a seaside resort in Sousse on June 26. But the reenactment of the emergency law in what is supposed to be a post-transition period, and under a government whose dominant party, NT, based its entire election campaign on “national security,” comes across as both an admission of failure and a threat to hard-won civil liberties. Depending on how it is used, the law may even endanger democracy and pluralism in Tunisia.