Tunisia’s once-hailed democratic progress is plunging ever deeper into political repression.
Almost 15 years ago, the country’s calls for democracy reverberated throughout the Middle East and North Africa, toppling dictators and empowering citizens with new liberties. Now, Tunisia’s president Kais Saied is wielding his newly consolidated power to jail and harass any semblance of opposition.
Last week, a Tunisian court sentenced to prison nearly 40 political, media, and business leaders perceived to be threats to Saied’s tightening grip on power. Some received sentences up to 66 years.
This ruling is the latest in a troubling rash of government crackdowns on individuals and groups the Saied-led government deems to be problematic. The breadth of the arrests and the severity of the punishments have left many to fear the extent of this newest phase of repression.
But the repression has not to this point changed the life of William Brown, pastor of Église Réformée de Tunisie (ERT, Reformed Church of Tunisia). On a typical Sunday, he walks past a block of French-colonial-style apartments, turns into a courtyard adorned with bougainvillea, and enters a sanctuary. It’s Sunday, and he is preparing to preach in Tunis, the country’s capital city.
The 120 or so congregants have a variety of backgrounds. One was an astrologer who read the Bible and had his whole cosmology turned upside down. He asked to be baptized and now leads the liturgy at ERT’s services. Another attendee learned about Christianity online, told his mother, and faced her disappointment. Several years later, she had a dream in which Jesus came to her and told her to read the Bible. She woke up, did, and professed faith in Christ. Another is a young Tunisian woman who rejected Islam and became a Communist but felt compelled to seek a better purpose. She was recently baptized.
But most of the worshipers at the 143-year-old church are from sub-Saharan Africa and came to Tunis for college, or they are passing through the capital on their way to Europe. Sunday services also include a handful of American and Canadian expats.
Born in Virginia and raised by missionary parents in West Africa, Brown arrived in Tunis in 2002 and experienced the optimism that followed the 2011 Arab Spring, a movement that began in Tunisia and stirred hope across the region for human and religious rights.
Now, though, the country has reverted to autocratic rule. Saied views Christianity as a foreign force, counter to the Tunisian way of life, and a threat to his narrow, nationalistic perspective of what Tunisia should represent.
That’s ironic, because Christians lived in what is now Tunisia within decades after the first Easter, although the gospel’s exact journey has not been confirmed.
The early Christian apologist Tertullian, born in Carthage in 160, established core church doctrines that inspired the martyr Cyprian and later Augustine, a bishop in neighboring Hippo (modern-day Annaba, Algeria). A strong Christian presence continued until the Muslim conquest in North Africa in the seventh century reduced the Christian population to a small minority that persists today.
Tunisians then lived under numerous empires before the French took over in the late 19th century. After gaining independence in 1956, Tunisia was initially more tolerant toward religious minorities than many of its neighbors were, even protecting the freedom of religion in its constitution.
For the first decades of the postindependence period, a liberal expression of Islam coexisted with Christianity. But in 1987, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali took power, and his corrupt, paranoid leadership sought to tightly control all minority movements—including the Tunisian church—that could threaten his power.
On December 17, 2010, a young, demoralized man staggered angrily into a local government office in central Tunisia. He doused himself in paint thinner and lit a match. Incensed by Ben Ali’s decades-long authoritarian rule, Mohamed Bouazizi chose this gruesome final act of protest out of desperation for a freedom he believed impossible to attain.
Yet his death sparked the Arab Spring protests that unseated Ben Ali and raged in various forms throughout the Middle East and North Africa for 15 years.
The movement ignited civil wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria; spurred the removal of dictators in three of the North African countries; and launched an initially promising political transformation in Tunisia. In 2014, the country organized its first free and fair elections and had a Nobel Peace Prize–winning transition followed by subsequent peaceful transfers of power. Many believed the country would defy its neighbors’ return to despotism.
After becoming president six years ago, though, former law professor Saied systematically rolled back democratic gains in the name of protecting a specific brand of Tunisia’s identity that is defined primarily by what it is not—non-Arab, non-Muslim, politically unaffiliated.
With a political approach eerily reminiscent of prerevolution authoritarianism and a suspicion of everything foreign, Saied developed an isolationist foreign policy and rejected vital capital in the form of a nearly $2 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan due to mistrust in international financial institutions.
Saied reworked the constitution to centralize power in the executive. Dissolving Parliament and the nation’s top courts, Saied has effectively made himself both the head of public prosecution and the sole figure capable of dismissing any judge on relatively limitless grounds. Saied’s government is now a gun aimed at opponents—and Tunisia’s Christian minority is squarely in the cross hairs.
In the latest version of the Constitution, Saied included language directing the state to protect Islam and guarantee its preeminence. One constitutional expert concluded that he “is founding a religious state.” While Christianity and even conversion are not technically illegal, Brown says Tunisian authorities have begun using small violations—meeting permits, building codes, registration paperwork—to disrupt churches.
This micromanagement has forced Brown to spend significant time ensuring ERT compliance with each regulation. ERT now limits the size of home-church gatherings. (The church has a guard but this security is courtesy of the Ministry of the Interior.)
Anti-immigration sentiment in the country has further complicated the lives of many Tunisian Christians. About 16,500 black, sub-Saharan refugees and migrants have registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, though many have entered the North African nation without registering.
Framing the country’s immigrant population as attempting to change the country’s demographic makeup and threaten the Tunisian way of life, Saied has scapegoated the largely Christian migrants for the country’s deep, long-standing economic woes. In 2023, Saied said in a video posted online that migrants are part of a criminal “plot.”
Despite the absence of evidence, this charge has normalized and even encouraged racist violence throughout the country, including robberies and stabbings. In 2023, authorities rounded up 1,200 black Africans, destroyed their property, and, allegedly, physically and sexually assaulted the migrants before expelling them at the Libyan border.
Meanwhile, anyone who speaks out against the government increasingly risks prosecution. In 2022, Saied enacted Decree-Law 54—ostensibly a cybercrime law prohibiting speech that spreads false information, the definition of which remains vague and subjective.
His administration has since weaponized it to stifle dissent, hamstring lawyers, and punish antigovernment comments by journalists and others. Several of the recently sentenced political opponents were arrested under this law.
Brown makes sure that new converts don’t believe their faith will automatically make life easier. Throughout his more-than-two decades in Tunisia, the economy has always struggled, and achieving middle-class life has felt tenuous for most of his local congregants.
As Augustine, who spent much of his ministry in Carthage, once wrote, God’s grace is meant “to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.” This Augustinian sentiment is proving increasingly essential for Tunisia’s Church.
In the wake of heavy-handed government crackdowns, arrests, and seemingly haphazard imprisonments, uncertainty among Tunisia’s political, ethnic, and religious minorities is growing.
The country that so recently heralded self-determination in the region is now on the cusp of reverting to something even worse than its pre-revolution state of authoritarianism. Democratic decline amid growing nationalism, isolationism, and autocracy threatens a new age of repression that could finally end the season of hope born from the Arab Spring.
