Authoritarian Nostalgia and Practices in Newly Democratising Contexts: The Localised Example of Tunisia

Abstract Democratic setbacks in established democracies and resilient authoritarian regimes continue to draw scholarly attention, while analyses on what authoritarianism may look like in relatively new twenty-first-century democracies have thus far been rather limited. Through a practice-oriented approach, this chapter examines how a major ‘nostalgia’ of the autocrat’s myth plays out in Tunisia’s one-decade-old democracy and the extent to which legacies of the former regimes manifest themselves. It argues that although Tunisian democracy seemed to have escaped the worst of the violence and authoritarian drifts that have beset most of the countries of the (first) Arab Spring, worrisome trends have nonetheless emerged, manifesting in multifaceted authoritarian reflexes or shadows. Specifically, the cumulative effects of three interrelated and mutually reinforcing aspects hinder democratic anchoring: first, the spread of an ‘authoritarian nostalgia’ and support for strongmen; second, the resuming of pre-existing authoritarian patterns like human rights violations, police abuses, and securitization dynamics in a permanent ‘state of exception’; finally, the disillusionment with democracy. All this contributes to the (re)empowerment of actors and attitudes which were hallmarks of past authoritarian rule. These include old cronies and police, corruption, and unaccountability.