Beyond the myth of the Tunisian exception: the open-ended tale of a fragile democratization

The narrative of the ‘Tunisian success story’, which often portrayed the country as a model, invites some criticism. Five years after the Revolution Tunisia is still fragile and divided between the horizon of democratic consolidation and the specter of authoritarian resilience. Although the international community welcomed the young democracy by conferring the Nobel Prize to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet1 for its contribution to the democratic transition, Tunisia continues to suffer a slow and arduous recognition of socio-economic rights, which eventually questions future political developments of the country. Indeed, the increasing poverty and the youth unemployment crisis, which ignited the Revolution in 2011, continues to cyclically spread tensions erupting into mass protests in most marginalized areas of the country and overflowing to the peripheries of the capital. The last episodes of riots, urban guerrilla unrest, and sit-in have been registered during the winter of 2016, and they originated in the center-west region of Kasserine, the least developed area of the country and the epicenter of protests in 2011.