Tunisia’s Growing Unrest: Why Citizens Are Protesting Against Systemic Neglect

Tunisian authorities arrested minors last week after protests over drinking water cuts in Mahdia, according to an interview the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) gave to CIVICUS Lens — a snapshot of how the state's response to bread-and-butter demands has become criminalization. The current unrest is not a flashpoint but a build-up: years of unfulfilled pledges on employment, regional development, and social justice now meeting a political order that has systematically closed civic space. For anyone tracking how material abandonment and authoritarian consolidation reinforce each other, Tunisia is the case in real time.

The material case

The protests now spreading across Tunisian cities trace directly to deteriorating public services, inflation, precarious work, and unemployment — and to the parallel erosion of the freedoms that might otherwise organize resistance to them. FTDES is explicit that this is not the product of a single incident but of accumulated frustration with daily life. In marginalized regions, the neglect is structural rather than incidental. Sub-Saharan migrants face an additional layer of administrative irregularity, exploitation, and violence — vulnerabilities the forum has documented in detail, and that the security apparatus now treats as another lever of control. Civil society's demands concentrate on access to work, water, a healthy environment, and social justice: the basic inputs a functioning state is supposed to guarantee.

The political closing

President Kais Saied's 2021 suspension of parliament and the subsequent concentration of executive power hollowed out the institutional channels through which grievances once moved; activists, journalists, lawyers, and opposition figures have since been detained or pushed into exile. The state's preferred frame is to recast protests as threats to public order or attempts to destabilize the country rather than engage the underlying demands. That framing has produced concrete results. In October 2025, residents of Gabès who mobilized against pollution from gas leaks at the Tunisian Chemical Group's plants were met with mass arrests and, in some cases, terrorism-related charges. On 13 August, protesters — including minors — were taken in after demanding restored water supply in Mahdia. At a 25 July march, some openly called for Saied to step down. The longer authorities respond with summons and terror charges, the clearer the message: there is no legitimate channel for the demands, so the demands themselves become the offense.

What we track

Civil society is calling for an end to the criminalization of human rights defenders, restoration of judicial independence, and public policies drawn up with genuine citizen participation rather than security-led management. Watch whether the Mahdia arrests convert into formal charges, whether Gabès residents face ongoing prosecution, and whether the security apparatus widens its reach against sub-Saharan migrants as it searches for additional leverage over a population it cannot feed, house, or employ. The material demands are not new; what is new is the near-total absence of political space in which to advance them.