Tunisia's New Constitution

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

The country of Tunisia is in the midst of a slow motion political crisis. The country's populist president has crafted a new constitution that gives him broad, unchecked powers and secured its approval by referendum, albeit a referendum in which most Tunisians did not participate. What's not clear is whether other factions will acquiesce to his exceptional actions, and whether those actions will prove to be the antidote for corruption that he has promised or the nail in the coffin for what had been the Arab Spring's last surviving democracy.

To discuss these developments and what they might mean, Scott R. Anderson sat down with Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Program, and Sharan Grewal, an assistant professor of government at the College of William and Mary and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. They discussed where the new constitution came from, what it may mean in practice, and how it will impact Tunisia and the broader region's future.

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1:02.1	So I don't belay the chairman of this commission.
1:11.6	Came out and said this is not the version we wrote, this is not the version we ended
1:14.8	of site and this version has the potential to lead to mecha down a path of autocracy.
1:20.0	Again this is a guy who is in site's pocket is very much a site loyalist.
1:24.1	So the fact that he would come out and so harshly criticise the version that site put forward
1:28.8	just tells you how flawed this process was.
1:31.6	Site then in the even stranger turn of events they discovered there were multiple errors,
1:36.2	whether they were just typos or actual changes site wanted to put in.
1:40.0	It's not clear, but about a week after the constitution was reported into the Gazette,
1:45.0	they came out and fixed it with some new changes that led to this referendum process
1:51.0	where you had most of the people who opposed site ended up boycotting the process entirely,
	...

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