هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية

On 25 July 2021, Tunisian President Kais Saied announced the suspension of parliament, followed by the dismissal of the government. Since then, power has gradually become concentrated in his hands. He now sets the course of the country’s domestic and foreign policy, particularly since the adoption of Tunisia’s new constitution in 2022, which granted him broad powers.

Today, seven years after Saied assumed the presidency on 23 October 2019, questions are emerging about Tunisia’s regional standing, its political and diplomatic presence, and its ability to influence regional developments, especially as it has prioritised political and historical ties with Algeria.

Tunisia and Algeria: an alliance widening Maghreb divisions

Algeria was Saied’s first foreign destination after his re-election in October 2024. He travelled there that same month to attend celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of Algeria’s war of liberation. Presidents Abdelmadjid Tebboune and Kais Saied walked hand in hand as soon as Saied stepped off the presidential plane.

Algeria is the first regional destination for every newly elected Tunisian president, with the exception of Moncef Marzouki. Tunisia has followed this custom since former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali came to power in 1987. But Saied’s visits after winning the presidential elections in 2019 and 2024 went beyond observing a historical custom. They reflected a complex relationship that has at times seen Tunisia align itself with official Algerian positions, some of which have led to a marked cooling in relations with other countries, including Morocco and Mauritania.

Less than three months after Saied’s decision to freeze parliament and consolidate power in his own hands, Algeria rushed to defend him. In October 2021, Tebboune said Algeria supported Tunisia in its crisis, adding that “their affairs are constitutional, and we can attest that President Kais Saied is an educated, democratic and deeply patriotic man, and we cannot judge him for anything.” He stressed that “what affects Tunisia affects Algeria,” and that anyone daring to threaten Tunisia’s security “will find Algeria lying in wait.”

Tunisia’s economic relationship with Algeria is unequal, with Algeria counting on security cooperation in exchange for its economic support. Security coordination came to the fore a month after the suspension of Tunisia’s parliament, when Tunisia handed over Algerian opposition figure Slimane Bouhafs. He had been abducted from his home in the capital, Tunis, on 25 August 2021 and forcibly deported to Algeria despite having refugee status from the UN refugee agency.

About a year later, in July 2022, Algeria reopened its border with Tunisia. It had been closed for nearly two years, halting overland trade between the countries and increasing economic pressure on Tunisia. That same month, Algeria handed over Lazhar Loungou, the former head of Tunisian intelligence, to Tunisia after questioning him.

A month later, Tunisia made a historic shift in its position on Western Sahara. In August 2022, Saied received the secretary-general of the Polisario Front during the Tokyo International Conference on African Development, which Tunisia hosted. Morocco responded by cancelling its participation in the conference and recalling its ambassador from Tunisia. Tunisia responded in kind.

Since then, it has become clear that Tunisia has aligned itself with Algeria on Western Sahara, while its relations with Morocco have cooled. This deterioration is also evident in economic ties: the latest official Tunisian statistics show that Tunisia’s exports to Morocco fell by nearly 23 per cent in the first nine months of 2026.

The French embassy in Tunis evacuated Algerian-French activist Amira Bouraoui on 6 February 2023, causing a cooling in relations between Tunisia and Algeria. Bouraoui had secretly fled Algeria for Tunisia, where the authorities arrested her and began extradition proceedings before France intervened to evacuate her.

Although Saied dismissed Foreign Minister Othman Jerandi the following day, Algeria responded swiftly by tightening restrictions on Tunisians crossing the border.

Algeria uses trade to pressure Tunisia. Figures from Tunisia’s National Institute of Statistics show that Tunisian exports to Algeria fell by 11 per cent in the first nine months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, while Algeria’s share of Tunisia’s imports remained steady at about 7 per cent.

For its part, Tunisia follows Algeria’s lead on proposed solutions, as Algeria seeks new economic outlets following tensions with Western partners such as France and, to a lesser extent, Spain. Against this backdrop, Algeria proposed a trilateral summit with Tunisia and Libya. Tunisia hosted the summit in April 2024, bringing together Saied, Tebboune and Libyan Presidential Council head Mohamed al-Menfi.

The summit’s closing statement listed security coordination, border protection, control of irregular migration flows from sub-Saharan Africa and stronger economic cooperation among the main points agreed.

How Tunisia will pursue that last commitment remains unclear, especially as it lacks high-level diplomatic representation in Tripoli. The Tunisian ambassador’s term ended last year, and the post has remained vacant.

Tunisia also faces difficulties controlling movement through its main border crossing with Libya, given the volatile security situation in Tripoli and repeated incidents in which Tunisian traders or travellers have been detained by the Libyan side.

At the same time, Tunisia has confined itself to a neutral position on Libya’s crises, stressing its commitment to “Libya’s unity and that the solution can only be Libyan-Libyan, and that the Libyans have the capacities that enable them to find the solutions they accept.”

Africa: a shrinking diplomatic presence and overlapping crises

The preamble to Tunisia’s 2022 constitution affirms the country’s African identity and states that its name has roots in Africa. In practice, however, Tunisia has indirectly reduced its diplomatic presence in sub-Saharan Africa under Saied by leaving ambassadorial posts vacant and relying instead on chargés d’affaires. It has also pursued a hostile policy towards irregular migrants from sub-Saharan countries.

According to a Tunisian diplomatic source who declined to be named, Tunisia has only four ambassadors in sub-Saharan Africa: in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Nigeria, out of 46 other countries in the region. In the remaining countries where Tunisia has diplomatic representation, it relies on acting chargés d’affaires. Ambassadorial vacancies in Cameroon, Mali, Ethiopia and elsewhere remain unfilled, even as Saied repeatedly stresses Tunisia’s African identity and African countries’ shared destiny in achieving sovereignty.

Tunisia’s exports to sub-Saharan African countries exceed $546 million. Yet it has missed 2,999 investment opportunities in 36 sub-Saharan countries, with a total untapped value of $2.28 billion, according to a study titled “Boosting intra-African trade: Can the African Continental Free Trade Area change the equation?” Tunisian World Bank expert Leila Baghdadi contributed to the study.

It would be unfair to hold Saied solely responsible for Tunisia’s weak presence on the continent. But his repeated statements about seeking non-traditional markets and his insistence on Tunisia’s connection to Africa conflict with his hardline security policy towards irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. This makes him primarily responsible for squandering real opportunities that could help Tunisia emerge from its economic crises, especially as he alone shapes domestic and foreign policy, without advisers.

In February 2023, Saied sharply attacked the presence of irregular migrants in Tunisia in a speech to the National Security Council. He argued that the migration waves were intended to “settle irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia, and that the undeclared aim of these successive waves of irregular migration is to regard Tunisia as only an African state with no belonging to the Arab and Islamic nations.”

The speech was followed by escalating attacks on irregular migrants and their expulsion from their homes, amid the spread of rhetoric embracing the “great replacement” theory. Another wave of abuses followed in the summer of 2023, when police transported migrants to desert areas and left them without water. This prompted widespread condemnation from rights groups, UN experts and African organisations.

Tunisia’s migration policy led African countries to repeatedly evacuate their citizens from the country. Anger also spread across African countries over the violence inflicted on migrants, while the World Bank temporarily suspended its new strategic partnership framework with Tunisia.

Palestine: between presidential rhetoric and political practice

During the 2019 presidential race, Saied said in a television interview as a candidate that normalisation with Israel was high treason and that anyone who dealt with it was “a traitor and must be tried on charges of high treason.”

Since then, Tunisians have sought to see that slogan put into practice through legislation criminalising normalisation with Israel. In July 2023, MPs submitted a bill criminalising normalisation, which was referred to a plenary session for a vote in November that year. But the session was halted and remains suspended, in a legal first for the country.

Tunisians came to realise that criminalising normalisation was merely a slogan Saied had used during his first presidential campaign, through which he won broad popular support. During the plenary session on 2 November 2023, Parliament Speaker Ibrahim Bouderbala said he had spoken to Saied, who told him that passing the law “would harm Tunisia’s foreign interests, that this law falls under the category of undermining the state’s external security, and that this issue had taken on an electoral character, nothing more and nothing less.”

Bouderbala added that what mattered to him was “the interest of the homland, the interest of the process and the interest of the House of Representatives, and we must avoid leading the country into the unknown.”

Bouderbala’s remarks were entirely at odds with the sight of lawmakers’ seats draped in Palestinian flags, less than a month after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023.

During the series of assassinations targeting Palestinian leaders in Hamas, Tunisia issued only one statement of condemnation, following the killing of the movement’s political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in July 2024. It also did not condemn the killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, limiting itself to condemning the Israeli aggression against Lebanon.

Saied was absent from key events concerning the genocidal war in Gaza, including the extraordinary Arab summit in Cairo on 4 March 2025, which a number of Arab leaders attended.

At the height of the Israeli assault on Gaza, Iran gained broad support among a segment of Tunisians, particularly as tensions with Israel escalated before Israeli attacks targeted Iranian territory. Tunisia’s official position was not far removed from this popular mood. Signs of an exceptional rapprochement between Saied and Tehran emerged amid talk of his brother Naufel Saied’s influence on the rapprochement and claims that Naufel had converted to Shiism.

Iran: a calculated rapprochement

May 2024 marked a historic turning point in Tunisia’s relations with Iran. Saied visited Tehran to offer condolences following the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and met Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It was the first visit by a Tunisian president to Iran since 1979, and Tunisia subsequently lifted visa requirements for Iranians entering the country.

During the US and Israeli attacks on Iran in 2025, Tunisia twice condemned the targeting of Tehran. A Foreign Ministry statement issued on 13 June 2025 said that “Tunisia expresses its solidarity with the brotherly Iranian people in this delicate moment and renews its call on the international community, especially the Security Council, to intervene immediately and decisively to put an end to the recklessness of the Zionist entity, its aggressive behavior and impunity.”

By mid-2026, Tunisia’s position towards Iran had shifted from support to muted condemnation of attacks targeting Arab states such as the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. In a Foreign Ministry statement, Tunisia expressed its “absolute rejection of any targeting of the territory of brotherly Arab states,” without explicitly naming Iran.

Iran has found two ways to strengthen relations with Tunisia. The first is through Saied, who believes Western hegemony can only be broken by aligning with the opposing camp. The second is Iran’s direct stance against Israel since the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which has eased the reservations of Tunisians wary of closer ties between Tunis and Tehran.

Iran has used the Palestinian cause in its “popular” diplomacy with Arab states, and Saied does the same. The cause appears to serve as a trump card whenever the crises around him intensify. Amid a severe economic crisis, a year after his re-election, Saied’s supporters believed the time had come for him to fulfil his campaign promises to improve economic and social conditions.

At that point, Saied again turned to the Palestinian cause by allowing the maritime flotilla seeking to break the siege of Gaza to sail from Tunisian shores. His supporters boasted of the large crowd that gathered at the port of Sidi Bou Said, just a few kilometres from the presidential palace.

But the euphoria did not last. In March 2026, Tunisian police launched a campaign of arrests targeting a number of Tunisian leaders of the Steadfastness Flotilla. In September that year, they also detained 15 people during a march in support of those leaders.

These positions reveal contradictions in Saied’s foreign policy. Apart from Tunisia’s relations with Algeria and, to some extent, Iran, his statements diverge from his actions. He repeatedly expresses pride in Tunisia’s African identity while police transport African migrants into the desert or drive them into olive groves. He declares support for the Palestinian cause while activists supporting it are arrested.

These contradictions have contributed to Tunisia’s declining regional presence. Its foreign relations have become centred on Algeria and the European Union, with security cooperation exchanged for economic support in both cases.