From unemployment and declining purchasing power to water shortages, migration and the rapid growth of an under-regulated digital economy, Tunisia in 2026 is confronting an increasingly difficult question: after nearly seven years of Kais Saied's presidency and almost five years of a political system built around concentrated presidential authority, where are the measurable results?
When Kais Saied entered Carthage Palace in 2019, he did not present himself as another politician promising to manage Tunisia's existing system more efficiently. His appeal rested precisely on the opposite proposition: that the system itself had failed and that Tunisia needed a fundamentally different political order.
He spoke repeatedly about corruption, public money that had been stolen from Tunisians, networks of influence operating inside the state and a political class that, in his account, had lost legitimacy. He promised to restore power to citizens, recover stolen wealth and rebuild a state capable of defending the public interest rather than serving parties, intermediaries and entrenched interests.
That message resonated in a country exhausted by years of unstable governments, parliamentary confrontation, economic stagnation and declining confidence in political institutions.
Nearly seven years later, however, Tunisia is in a very different political position. Saied is no longer the outsider confronting an institutional order created by others. Since July 25, 2021, that order has been profoundly transformed. Parliament was suspended and later dissolved, a new constitution was adopted, and political authority shifted decisively toward the presidency.
Whether one supports or opposes those changes, their implications for accountability are difficult to avoid. The greater the authority concentrated at the center of the state, the harder it becomes to explain persistent failures exclusively through the political system that existed before.
By 2026, the central question is therefore no longer whether Kais Saied succeeded in changing Tunisia's political architecture. He did.
The question is whether that transformation has produced results proportionate to the power accumulated around it.
An Economy Showing Growth, but Not Yet Delivering Security
Any serious assessment of Tunisia's current economic situation has to acknowledge improvements where they exist.
Official figures showed real GDP growth of 2.3% year on year in the second quarter of 2026. Inflation has also fallen from some of the much higher levels experienced in previous years. Those indicators matter, particularly for an economy that has endured years of weak growth, external shocks and severe fiscal pressure.
But they do not tell the whole story.
According to Tunisia's National Institute of Statistics, unemployment stood at 14.9% in the second quarter of 2026, representing approximately 622,400 unemployed people. Among Tunisians aged 15 to 24, unemployment remained at 35.4%. Among university graduates it stood at 26.6%, while the rate among female university graduates reached 35.6%.
The headline unemployment rate also requires context. Between the first and second quarters of 2026, Tunisia's active labour force declined, while the number of employed people also fell. A lower unemployment percentage therefore does not automatically mean that the labour market is becoming substantially healthier if fewer people are participating in it.
Behind those figures is a social problem that statistics alone cannot fully describe.
For many young Tunisians, education was supposed to provide a predictable route toward adulthood: study, obtain a qualification, find work, establish financial independence and eventually build a household. That progression has become increasingly uncertain.
A university degree no longer guarantees employment, while employment itself does not necessarily provide enough income for genuine independence. Years can be spent waiting for public-sector recruitment, moving between temporary jobs or searching for a private-sector opportunity that offers meaningful progression.
This is precisely where the success or failure of political transformation eventually has to be measured. Constitutions can be rewritten and institutions reorganized, but for citizens who supported change because they expected a more effective state, political restructuring has limited value if economic opportunity remains inaccessible.
Purchasing Power Remains the Test Citizens Feel Every Day
Tunisia's annual inflation rate stood at 5.1% in July 2026, considerably below some of the levels recorded during earlier periods. On paper, that represents progress.
At the household level, the picture is less reassuring.
Food and beverage prices were 6.6% higher than a year earlier, while several products consumed regularly by Tunisian families increased considerably faster. Lamb prices rose by 16.7%, fresh fruit by 13.8%, beef by 13.7%, poultry by 12.5% and fresh fish by 11.6%.
The distinction between headline inflation and the price of necessities is politically important because households do not experience the economy as a national statistical average. They experience it through the amount left in a salary after paying for food, rent, transportation, electricity, medicine, school expenses and family obligations.
For lower- and middle-income Tunisians, relatively small increases in essential expenses can absorb a significant part of monthly income. A decline in the inflation rate also does not mean that prices have returned to where they were before; it means that they are increasing more slowly.
This is why economic stabilization and improvement in living standards cannot be treated as the same thing.
Tunisia may achieve better macroeconomic indicators while households continue to feel financially weaker. Until economic improvement becomes visible in purchasing power, employment and disposable income, the political benefit of improved national indicators will remain limited.
For a presidency that promised not merely administrative reform but a transformation of the relationship between the citizen and the state, that distinction matters.
Water and Electricity Expose the Limits of State Capacity
The credibility of a state is not measured only through elections, constitutions or presidential speeches. It is also measured through much more ordinary experiences: whether water comes from the tap, whether electricity remains available, whether hospitals function and whether public administrations can provide essential services reliably.
During July 2026, prolonged water and electricity interruptions became serious enough to reach the presidency itself. In a meeting at Carthage Palace on July 22, Saied addressed outages lasting more than 24 hours in several regions, describing the situation as unacceptable and demanding immediate intervention. Days earlier, he had visited the Ghedir El Golla water facility as drinking-water interruptions affected several parts of the country.
It would be misleading to attribute Tunisia's water crisis entirely to the current presidency. Water scarcity is structural. Climate change, repeated drought, aging infrastructure, population pressure and decades of insufficient investment have created a problem that no government could realistically solve overnight.
The scale of the challenge was underlined in March 2026 when the World Bank approved $332.5 million for the first phase of a programme aimed at strengthening Tunisia's drinking-water security, irrigation infrastructure and resilience to water scarcity.
But acknowledging the historical causes of the crisis does not remove the responsibility of the government currently exercising power.
After years of political discourse centered on restoring the authority of the state, the ability to provide basic services becomes an unavoidable measure of whether that state is actually becoming more effective. A stronger presidency does not automatically produce stronger public utilities, and political centralization has little meaning to a family facing repeated water interruptions.
The state is ultimately encountered not as an abstract constitutional concept, but through the services citizens depend upon every day.
What Happened to the Promise of Recovering Stolen Money?
Recovering wealth allegedly stolen from the Tunisian people has been one of the most powerful themes in Kais Saied's political discourse.
The promise carries enormous political significance because it addresses one of the deepest frustrations of post-revolutionary Tunisia: the belief that corruption, illicit enrichment and networks of privilege have allowed a minority to accumulate wealth while ordinary citizens carry the cost of economic crisis.
Penal reconciliation was subsequently presented as one mechanism through which money could be recovered and redirected toward development.
The difficulty in 2026 is no longer explaining the objective. It is establishing the result.
A credible assessment requires a transparent distinction between assets under investigation, amounts estimated by authorities, settlements being negotiated, sums formally agreed, money actually collected and funds ultimately transferred to the public Treasury.
Without that distinction, extremely large numbers can circulate politically without allowing citizens to determine how much money the state has actually recovered.
After nearly seven years, the public interest would be better served by a detailed and regularly updated financial balance sheet covering completed reconciliation cases, amounts agreed, amounts paid, transfers received by the Treasury and the eventual allocation of recovered funds.
Such transparency would not weaken the government's anti-corruption narrative. If substantial amounts have been recovered, publishing the evidence would strengthen it. If results remain below expectations, the public is equally entitled to understand why.
A promise centered on public money should ultimately be capable of public accounting.
Community Companies Need an Economic Balance Sheet Too
Community companies have become one of the most distinctive elements of Saied's alternative economic model. The concept is intended to give local communities a more direct role in economic activity and allow residents to benefit from resources and projects developed within their regions.
The idea fits within Saied's broader political philosophy of reducing dependence on traditional intermediaries and creating alternative mechanisms for local participation.
As an economic experiment, however, community companies cannot be evaluated primarily through political symbolism.
The relevant measure is performance.
By 2026, the public should have access to consolidated information showing how many community companies are genuinely operational, how many permanent jobs they have created, what revenues they generate, how much financing they have received and how many have become financially sustainable.
Those figures are essential because Tunisia's economic problem is not a shortage of proposed models. It is a shortage of sufficiently productive economic activity capable of creating stable employment at scale.
If community companies are achieving that objective, their performance deserves recognition and expansion. If some are failing, their weaknesses should be identified rather than concealed behind political rhetoric.
Economic policy becomes credible when its results can be measured independently of the political narrative surrounding it.
A Generation Looking for Opportunity — and Often Looking Abroad
The persistence of youth unemployment inevitably affects more than the labour market. It shapes how young Tunisians imagine their future and whether they believe that future can be built inside Tunisia.
Irregular migration remains one of the most tragic manifestations of that crisis of confidence.
In August 2026, another maritime tragedy intensified anger in southern Tunisia after bodies were recovered from the Mediterranean following the sinking of a boat carrying Tunisian migrants. Members of the same family were among those reported dead, while searches and identification efforts continued.
No responsible analysis should reduce migration to unemployment alone. People leave Tunisia for different and often overlapping reasons, including economic ambition, family circumstances, regional inequality, frustration with institutions and the expectation of greater opportunity elsewhere.
Yet economic insecurity cannot be removed from the discussion.
When a young person sees years of education followed by unemployment, weak salaries or limited career progression, migration can begin to appear less like an extraordinary risk and more like an alternative economic strategy.
Security operations can intercept boats and international agreements can influence migration routes, but neither addresses the fundamental question of why a person is prepared to risk the Mediterranean in the first place.
For Tunisia, migration policy cannot ultimately be separated from employment policy, regional development or confidence in the country's economic future.
Then the Same Young Tunisian Opens TikTok
There is another route to opportunity that did not exist in anything like its current form when many of Tunisia's economic structures were designed.
It exists on a smartphone.
A young graduate may spend months searching for employment or work for a salary that barely covers basic expenses. At night, the same person can open TikTok and watch another Tunisian livestreaming from a bedroom, café or living room while virtual gifts move continuously across the screen.
Some livestreamers publicly display gift totals or rankings that can create the impression that hundreds of dollars, and sometimes considerably more, are being generated during a single night.
Those figures require careful interpretation. The nominal value of virtual gifts displayed on a platform is not necessarily equivalent to the creator's net income. Platform commissions, conversion mechanisms, agency arrangements and withdrawal systems can substantially affect what ultimately reaches the creator.
But the social effect does not depend on the exact net figure.
What matters is the comparison visible to the viewer.
A young Tunisian who has been told that the economy cannot provide a stable job can watch another person apparently generate substantial value in several hours through a smartphone. The content may involve entertainment, music or legitimate creative work. But parts of the livestream ecosystem have also demonstrated that confrontation itself can become commercially valuable.
This is where Tunisia's unemployment problem, digital economy and regulatory weakness begin to intersect.
When Online Conflict Becomes Economically Valuable
Tunisian TikTok livestreams are not inherently problematic, and earning money through social media should not be treated as suspicious activity. The creator economy is a legitimate part of the modern global economy, and Tunisia has every reason to help successful creators, freelancers and digital entrepreneurs participate in it legally.
The concern begins when the mechanisms of the attention economy reward conduct that would be considered deeply problematic in almost any other public environment.
Some Tunisian livestreams have developed around recurring personal confrontations in which insults, humiliation, accusations, private disputes, family conflicts and personal information are exposed before audiences that can number in the thousands.
The financial structure of livestreaming can make this more than a cultural problem.
Controversy attracts viewers. Larger audiences generate engagement. Engagement can encourage virtual gifting, increase rankings and strengthen a creator's visibility. A confrontation that produces financial rewards creates an obvious incentive for further confrontation.
Under those conditions, the distinction between spontaneous conflict and monetized conflict becomes increasingly important.
The issue is not simply that people insult one another online. Tunisia has to confront the possibility that parts of its digital economy may financially reward the production of outrage while the country's institutions remain uncertain about taxation, consumer protection, privacy, financial flows and the legal responsibilities of professional online creators.
Ignoring that economy does not prevent it from growing. It merely allows it to grow faster than the institutions responsible for understanding it.
Tunisia's Livestreams Are Also Creating Their Own Informal Justice System
The growth of livestreaming has created another phenomenon with consequences beyond entertainment: the emergence of online spaces in which accusations are investigated, argued and effectively judged before enormous audiences.
A serious allegation can be introduced during a livestream, followed by screenshots, recordings, private conversations and responses from other creators. Within hours, fragments of the dispute can circulate across multiple accounts and platforms, reaching audiences far larger than the original broadcast.
The problem is that popularity is not evidence.
A creator with a large audience may have greater power to establish a public narrative than the person being accused. Repetition can give an unverified allegation the appearance of established fact, while the speed of social media leaves little room for the slower processes through which evidence is normally examined.
This becomes especially serious when livestream discussions contain allegations involving prostitution, sexual exploitation, drugs, extortion, money laundering or other criminal conduct.
Those accusations cannot responsibly be converted into facts merely because they are repeated online.
If judicial records, police investigations, indictments or court judgments exist, they can and should be reported accurately. If the only evidence is a livestream accusation, it remains an allegation.
This distinction is particularly important for journalism. A news website should not function as an extension of a TikTok battle, copying accusations from one platform to another and giving them the authority of published reporting.
The role of journalism is precisely the opposite: to establish what can be documented, separate evidence from allegation and provide context that a livestream rarely provides.
Tunisia Needs to Regulate the Digital Economy Without Criminalizing It
Tunisia's challenge is therefore more complicated than deciding whether TikTok is good or bad.
The creator economy represents a genuine economic opportunity.
A Tunisian designer, programmer, editor, consultant, artist or content creator should be able to sell services internationally, receive payment legally, declare income transparently and pay taxes under rules adapted to the reality of digital work.
For years, the debate around PayPal has symbolized a much wider frustration with Tunisia's participation in the global digital economy. The real issue is not one company. It is whether banking rules, foreign-exchange regulations, taxation and payment infrastructure have evolved sufficiently to accommodate economic activity that increasingly crosses borders without workers physically leaving Tunisia.
At the same time, significant recurring income from livestreaming cannot remain permanently outside a comprehensible legal and tax framework simply because the technology is relatively new.
Creators need to know how income should be declared. Banks need to understand the origin and nature of creator-economy payments. Tax authorities need rules capable of distinguishing occasional personal income from professional activity. Regulators need to understand virtual gifts, agencies, sponsorships and international payment mechanisms.
Authorities must also distinguish legitimate digital income from genuinely suspicious financial activity on the basis of evidence rather than assumptions.
Tunisia should not destroy a new economy because its institutions were slow to understand it.
It should modernize those institutions.
Fame Cannot Become a Different Standard Before the Law
The expansion of the creator economy has also produced a new form of social power: audience power.
A person followed by tens or hundreds of thousands of users can mobilize attention rapidly, frame a dispute before an opponent has responded and transform a personal accusation into a national online discussion within hours.
That influence can create a perception that popularity provides a degree of protection unavailable to an ordinary citizen.
Whether such protection actually exists in individual cases must be established through evidence. But the perception itself creates a problem for the credibility of institutions.
The principle should be straightforward: a person's follower count, income or digital popularity cannot determine the legal standard applied to his or her conduct.
At the same time, equal application of the law does not mean indiscriminate repression of social-media personalities. Tunisia has already experienced intense debate over freedom of expression, online speech and the use of criminal law in the digital sphere. Replacing regulatory weakness with arbitrary enforcement would simply create another problem.
A credible state must be capable of doing both things simultaneously: protecting freedom of expression and enforcing legitimate laws consistently when conduct crosses clearly established legal boundaries.
The answer to digital disorder is therefore neither institutional silence nor selective punishment. It is predictable law, transparent procedure and equal treatment.
TikTok Did Not Create Tunisia's Problems — It Is Revealing Them
It would be easy to make TikTok the villain in this story.
That would also miss the larger point.
The platform did not create Tunisia's unemployment problem, weaken household purchasing power or produce regional inequality. It did not create the difficulties freelancers face with international payments, nor did it create the loss of confidence that pushes some young people to search for opportunities abroad.
What TikTok does is expose and amplify these pressures with extraordinary speed.
When traditional routes toward economic advancement become less convincing, unconventional routes naturally become more attractive. When a university graduate sees limited prospects in the formal economy but watches a livestreamer apparently generate substantial income from a telephone, the comparison changes perceptions of work, status and opportunity.
When confidence in traditional media weakens, online personalities acquire the ability to function as broadcasters. When formal institutions respond slowly to disputes, livestream audiences begin creating their own judgments. When financial regulation fails to keep pace with new forms of income, a parallel economy develops around systems that were never designed with Tunisia's existing regulatory framework in mind.
TikTok is therefore not separate from Tunisia's wider economic and institutional difficulties.
It is one of the places where those difficulties have become most visible.
The Presidency Cannot Govern Permanently Against an Invisible Enemy
Throughout his presidency, Kais Saied has repeatedly referred to corrupt networks, monopolists, speculators and actors he accuses of attempting to undermine the state or aggravate citizens' suffering.
There is nothing inherently illegitimate about investigating such claims. If organized networks manipulate markets, sabotage public services, steal public money or engage in corruption, the state has both the authority and responsibility to investigate them and bring evidence before the appropriate institutions.
The political difficulty arises when the identification of those obstructing reform begins to replace an assessment of whether reform itself has produced results.
After nearly seven years, the effectiveness of the state cannot be measured primarily by the number of obstacles the presidency says it confronts. It must also be measured by the state's capacity to overcome those obstacles within the law.
If monopolies manipulate markets, competition and criminal law should address them. If officials deliberately obstruct public services, investigations should identify responsibility. If public money was stolen, recovery should eventually appear in Treasury accounts. If infrastructure is failing, investment and administrative reform should improve it.
A strong state is not one that simply identifies those allegedly preventing it from functioning.
It is one capable of functioning despite them.
The Old System Cannot Explain the New System Forever
Tunisia's current difficulties did not begin with Kais Saied.
The country entered his presidency carrying enormous structural problems: weak investment, regional inequality, high unemployment, public-sector pressures, indebted state enterprises, political fragmentation, administrative inefficiency and deep public distrust.
Any serious assessment of Saied's record must acknowledge that inheritance.
But acknowledging inherited problems is different from allowing them to become a permanent explanation.
The political order that existed when Saied won the presidency in 2019 is no longer the political order governing Tunisia in 2026. Since July 2021, he has had an extraordinary opportunity to implement his own institutional vision. The presidency has become considerably stronger, the constitution has changed and the architecture through which political authority is exercised has been redesigned.
That gives the president greater capacity to pursue his programme than he possessed at the beginning of his mandate.
It also gives him greater responsibility for its results.
A new political system cannot indefinitely measure itself against the failures of the system it replaced. Eventually it accumulates enough time, authority, decisions and policies to develop a record of its own.
Nearly seven years after Saied's election and almost five years after July 25, 2021, Tunisia has reached that stage.
Tunisia in 2026 Needs a Balance Sheet, Not Another Promise
The most important political question facing Tunisia today is therefore not whether Kais Saied genuinely believes in the project he has pursued, nor whether every difficulty facing the country can fairly be attributed to his presidency. Political intentions cannot be measured objectively, and Tunisia's structural problems clearly extend across decades and multiple governments.
What can be measured are outcomes.
Tunisians can measure whether employment opportunities are expanding, whether salaries provide greater purchasing power, whether water and electricity services are becoming more reliable and whether regional inequality is narrowing. They can ask for transparent figures showing how much stolen money has actually been recovered and where it has gone. They can examine whether community companies are creating sustainable jobs and productive economic activity. They can judge whether the country's financial system is adapting quickly enough to allow young Tunisians to participate legally in the global digital economy.
They can also judge whether the law is applied consistently in a society where political critics, ordinary citizens and influential online personalities should all be subject to the same legal principles and procedural protections.
This is ultimately why the concentration of political authority matters.
When authority is dispersed among competing institutions, responsibility is also easier to disperse. Governments can blame parliament, parties can blame governments, presidents can blame political coalitions and institutions can blame one another.
Kais Saied's political project was explicitly designed to break with much of that system.
The consequence is that the presidency cannot claim the political advantages of concentrated authority while indefinitely escaping the accountability that comes with it.
Tunisia does not need to pretend that nothing has improved since 2019. Where economic indicators improve, those gains should be acknowledged. Where reforms produce measurable results, they should be reported. Nor should every structural failure accumulated over decades be attributed personally to one president.
But the opposite standard would be equally misleading.
Nearly seven years is long enough to begin judging a presidency by more than its diagnosis of the country it inherited.
Kais Saied came to power promising that Tunisia needed a different system because the previous one had failed to deliver.
Tunisia now has a different system.
The question in 2026 is what that system has delivered.
For citizens facing unemployment, rising living costs, unreliable public services or the temptation to leave the country, that question is not theoretical. For a generation watching a parallel economy of digital money and influence expand on smartphones while the formal economy struggles to absorb them, it is becoming increasingly urgent.
The legitimacy of any political project eventually depends on the distance between what it promised and what citizens can see in their own lives.
After nearly seven years, Tunisia has reached the point where that distance deserves to be measured.
