*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Walk down Avenue Habib Bourguiba in 2025 and the scene feels familiar, only heavier. Cafés hum, traffic inches, red-and-white flags flutter in the breeze. Yet conversations often return to the same topics: sugar rationed in Ramadan queues, milk vanishing from chillers, prices that pinch like winter. Over the last two years, reporting has traced recurring shortages alongside high living costs reported by the World Bank and Tunisia’s INS data the quiet metronome that sets the public mood. Inflation is the baseline beneath those kitchen-table laments. Headline prices jumped to 10.4% in February 2023, then eased toward ~6.2% by December 2024, according to African Manager and World Bank data — encouraging on paper, less so at the till. When flour is scarce or sugar arrives by quota, decimals don’t butter bread.

That tension between bread and breath has shadowed the story from the start. In December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi struck a match in Sidi Bouzid; less than a month later, on January 14 2011, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled, marking the start of Tunisia’s uprising. That was the revolution’s first miracle: a dictator toppled by street power, without tanks, without an army coup. Bouazizi’s cart became a symbol across the Arab world, from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to the streets of Tripoli and Sana’a. The chant that began in Tunisia “Work, freedom, dignity!” was echoed in Amnesty International’s 2025 report on arbitrary detention of human rights defenders and in its 2024 report on the clampdown on media freedom.

Avenue Habib Bourguiba today feels heavy, but not mute. The cafés are crowded, the traffic relentless, and children still wave the red-and-white flag. Yet the boulevard that once shook with chants of “Dégage!” during the Arab Spring now hums with quieter complaints, like the price of milk and empty shelves where sugar should be, or the sense that politics is happening somewhere far above. It’s a reminder that revolutions are not judged by their opening fireworks. They are judged in the patience of citizens, in the stability of prices, in whether dignity, that elusive word that carried the chants of 2011, feels any closer fourteen years on. And here lies Tunisia’s paradox: the Arab Spring’s brightest flame still burns here, but it flickers in a drafty room.

The early transition chalked up two achievements that still matter. First came a genuinely competitive election in 2011. Then, after bruising debate, Tunisia’s 2014 constitution, which enshrined freedom of conscience, gender equality, and the right to organize while placing checks on the executive, was signed into law, as reported by Al Jazeera. For a region haunted by Caesars, the text looked like a lighthouse.

In the immediate years that followed, Tunisia charted a course its neighbors could not. In October 2011, the country held its first free elections, producing a coalition led by the Islamist Ennahda party. Despite ideological tensions secular and Islamist blocs negotiated rather than fought: a contrast to Egypt, where the army removed Mohamed Morsi in 2013, or Libya, where rival militias tore the country apart. Meanwhile, civil society stepped from the wings to the........

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