Skyrocketing prices, runaway inflation and shortages of essential goods. After the Jasmine Revolution, there is again a risk of unrest in Tunisia. In fact, the country is in a very serious economic crisis that could result in a default. There is no bread and what is available is too expensive, as are other essential goods. As the local media denounces with increasing frequency, we see queues outside the bakeries. Grains are in short supply due to difficulties in the agricultural sector and high unemployment, particularly among young people, is increasing tensions.
But Tunisia is also full of migrants, many of them in transit to Europe. Due to widespread corruption, the authorities are unable, and in some cases unwilling, to stem the departures of small boats towards the Italian coast. More and more often, Tunisians in search of happiness, who want to find the opportunity to change their lives in Europe, meet here. For this reason, at the insistence of the Italian government, the European Union has decided to intervene by signing the Memorandum of Understanding.
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Twelve years after the famous Arab Spring in North Africa, the political and economic situation in countries like Tunisia and Libya is unstable. And that’s where the influx of migrants is headed, not just from sub-Saharan Africa. Tunisia is effectively fighting for self-determination despite the presence of an elected government. Parliament met last March, two years after it was closed in 2021 and dissolved in March 2022 by President Kais Saied, who was elected in a second round in 2019 with 72.7%.
The president himself, who enjoyed great popular consensus, gradually transformed the country, giving himself greater constitutional powers and amending the constitution through a referendum in 2022. In fact, to this day, Saied does not enjoy a high reputation in many European law firms due to an alleged authoritarian tendency, which also restricts the disbursement of the 1.9 billion loan by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which entails the implementation of important and structural reforms.
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On the immigration front, however, Tunisia is being cracked down on, particularly after Saied’s remarks last February when he spoke of “hordes of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa” arriving in Tunisia “with violence, crimes and the unacceptable behavior that has resulted ». Saied described an “unnatural” situation, part of a criminal plan to “change the demographic makeup” and make the country “another African state that no longer belongs to the Arab and Islamic world”. Therefore, he stressed the need to “quickly put an end to” this immigration. Tunisia has a population of around 12 million, while there are 21,000 sub-Saharan Africans in the country, most of whom are irregular.
The chronicles increasingly report episodes of violence and intolerance on the part of Tunisians, with clashes, deportations and forced returns. Since June 28, some 1,200 sub-Saharan people have been displaced and others transferred to a desert area bordering Libya. In Sfax in particular, after the killing of a local resident by a sub-Saharan man, police forces responded with forced and “temporary” evictions of migrants, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). These are collective deportations to desert areas, where hundreds of people are left “without water, food and without any medical assistance”. A border situation that has forced some countries in sub-Saharan Africa to take voluntary repatriation measures, but very few units are currently affected. Among the initiatives in this direction is that of the Embassy of Guinea, which would have sent staff to Medenine to facilitate the repatriation of about forty of its citizens.