Three months after parliamentary and presidential elections, Tunisia still has no government. The prime minister designate, Habib Jemli failed to win the confidence of parliament when he presented his list of ministers on 10 th January.
Many Tunisians openly regret the former president today. The economy meanwhile continues to drift. Foreign indebtedness rises inexorably, so does corruption. When he was appointed prime minister four years ago, Youssef Chahed gave the impression he was a reformist. But he soon gave up, notably where reforming the justice system and fighting corruption are concerned. Individually some ministers and judges have tried to clean up the Augean stables but to no avail.
The transparency organization I Watch has actively sought to promote public investigation into alleged cases of corruption but it is funded from abroad which makes the task of understanding why some of the corruption cases it brings to the courts go forward and others are held back remains clouded in mystery. What is the real influence of such interventions?
Who is really in charge? To present Tunisia today, nine years after the fall of Ben Ali on 14 th January , as a model of political democracy is as laughable as to have presented the country as an economic model in the Arab world prior to Last summer the European Union ambassador, Patrice Bergamini, put his finger on the problem by publicly criticizing "certain family groups that have no interest in young Tunisian operators breaking through".
Rarely able to speak Tunisian Arabic, Western experts often struggle to understand what the average Tunisian thinks of his rulers or to make sense of confused and often misleading statistics, especially those related to the budget.
