The curse of the Arab Spring haunting us in Egypt and Tunisia

My relationship with Tunisia only began after its revolution. In early 2012, I went there for the first time to teach. It was a two-week workshop with a group of young men and women producing feminist short films. We stayed at a coastal hotel; one of those resorts that had closed their doors to ordinary Tunisians before the revolution.

That year, following the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime and his flight to Saudi Arabia, a completely new, unleashed energy dominated the air. It was the spirit of a people whose revolution had won its opening victories, a society with a broad middle class marching forward alongside the poor to claim further victories under the banner of what Tunisia had inaugurated, what was then called the “Arab Spring.”

That new revolutionary spirit—optimistic, defiant, eager to confront everything we rejected about the old world, and fully aware that the struggle would be long—took hold of me too. I felt exactly as they did, arriving fresh from the first taste of victory in the Egyptian revolution. Perhaps this spirit was most visible in the behavior of the Tunisians I knew back then. They were younger than me, and for most of them, engagement with politics and public affairs was brand new, born entirely of the revolution.

The cold years

I returned to Tunisia after five years, for several times between 2017 and 2022. By then, any visitor could see that the revolutionary adrenaline had bottomed out. The grand ambitions of young Tunisians during the first two years of the revolution had faded, blunted by deep frustrations on every level. By coincidence, the group I was working with belonged to the same age group as before—now in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties.

One of these visits, while we were outside the capital, coincided with the presidential elections. The constitutional scholar Kais Saied won against his rival, the businessman Nabil Karoui. None of the Tunisian women filmmakers in my workshop, all of whom were from outside the city where we were based, bothered to return to their hometowns to vote; except for one.

Older than the rest, she returned to Tunis for a few hours to vote for the man she called the “mafioso” against the one she labeled “the conservative despot’s project.” She voted for the loser.

Political indifference was clear; the revolution and its anecdotes had vanished from the conversations of young people. We find a equivalent to this in Egypt. Crucially, Egypt had its pivotal moment in July 2013 and its aftermath; specifically the Rabaa massacre. The Tunisian experience, by contrast, was characterized after Ben Ali’s flight by a relative respect, remarkable compared to Egypt, for the sanctity of blood.

The lives of Egyptians after the January revolution have become incomparably harsher at all levels than what preceded it

I remember the trending of a hashtag in Egypt: “I participated in the January Revolution.” It was an act of defiance against criminalizing the uprising, which was at its most violent peak. It was a proud declaration of belonging to January, a re-telling of shared stories, an attempt to breathe that air once more.

The total absence of this sentiment in Tunisia struck me.

When I mentioned it, an Egyptian friend told me that those who still carry this pride and openly declare our allegiance to January are living in a bubble. It has nothing to do with the people in the street, he said, who can no longer stand the very mention of January—not out of fear, but sheer aversion.

I do not know if his assessment was entirely accurate, but it certainly did not lack a basis in reality. The brutal truth is that after the January revolution, the lives of ordinary Egyptians became incomparably harsher on every single level. This is the entry point for understanding the phrase now shared by many, including veterans of the revolution, sometimes in irony and sometimes in seriousness, but always in a whisper so that no one can gloat over our defeat: “Mubarak…those were the good old days, ya Abu Gamal.”

Everyone realizes the brutal spike in prices and daily hardships compared to life before the revolution. Even those who threw themselves into political action before the revolution, know that under the old regime, the risk was a few weeks or moths of jail time, only for them to walk out as heroes.

But after 2013, whoever is arrested has no idea when, or if, they will ever be free again.

Months of Palestinian heat

Recently, I returned to Tunisia twice: once in September 2025, and again in April - May 2026. I was stunned to find that some Tunisian friends had borrowed our exact phrase. They repeat it as a joke that fails to hide the taste of gall: “Those were the good old days.” Yet in serious discussions they do not blame the revolution; they blame the defeat and the regime.

My first trip back was unplanned. I found myself there forced by the emergency situations surrounding the Global Sumud Flotilla sailing from Barcelona toward Gaza. We had to stop for four days in Tunis and another four in Bizerte before we could sail again. The second trip was a “cultural” one, for the Tunis International Book Fair.

It was easy to feel the stark difference between those two visits. Politics was intensely present during the first, but it was detached from Tunisia's internal crises; focusing entirely on the Palestinian cause. The Tunisian authorities at the time allowed people to vent their fury at the genocide, show solidarity with the Palestinian people, and welcome and bid farewell to international activists coming and leaving. As if the overwhelming weight of Palestine had gathered everyone under its umbrella, breaking the usual stagnation.

But by the second visit, a few weeks ago, Palestine had receded from the public sphere. Members of the coordination committee for the Sumud Flotilla, which included representatives from across the political spectrum including factions close to Kais Saied's regime, had been arrested. The air was thick with apprehension fueled by the rising count of detainees, threats targeted at specific figures, the shutdown of civil associations, and the tightening vise on the press.

Here, Tunisia meets Egypt once more, offering a delayed, ironic retort to the line Mubarak’s state media chanted in the days between Ben Ali’s flight and the ignition of the January revolution: “Egypt is not Tunisia.”

Today, they meet on the shared ground of an unprecedented closure of the public sphere, where repression strikes every shade of the political spectrum the moment they step out of line. This is to say nothing of how both regimes use the refugee crisis as a convenient peg on which to hang their economic failures, fueling a rise in virulent racism in both countries.

To see, if only once

I wondered what of Tunisia to write about. Should I write about what remains of the flotilla? The traditional warmth Tunisians show to Egyptians? How the barricades returned once more to the Habib Bourguiba Avenue, where the Ministry of Interior stands? The skyrocketing prices everyone complains about? Or about the crowds collectively staring at books at the fair without buying them, an exact mirror image of Cairo Book Fair?

Ultimately, nothing felt more worthy of writing about than the one crucial difference that still separates Tunisia from Egypt. Despite the arrests, trials, and state surveillance, sectors of young Tunisian men and women remain actively, vibrantly engaged in direct political work. They have escaped the geriatric grip that dominates Egypt, where politics is confined to the isolated, ghost-town headquarters of dying political parties whose addresses most of us do not even know.

One can say that muqawaha/مقاوحة, defiant persistence, is still alive in Tunisia. The flip side of this is how the locals, consumed by the struggle to change their reality, looked to me as an outsider, hoping I might notice details hidden from them by the myopia of daily life. Thus, most of our conversations with journalists and friends turned back to what remained of the Sumud Flotilla experience, how Tunisia was the only Arab state capable of welcoming it, and what remains for all of us from the wreckage of the Arab revolutions. It was wrapped in a profound longing for those days when we felt truly free, unburdened by fear.

To ask what remains of the Arab revolutions inside us, or what the future holds, yields answers that are nothing more than generalities, guesswork, and raw impressions. But what is certain is that we have been marked by the curse: the curse of revolutions. Or, to borrow the words of the late Arwa Salih, though spoken in a different context: “We were touched by the dream once.”

The curse is that we saw and we knew, if only for a fleeting moment, the contours of another more free, liberated, and just world. A world where the air is fresh rather than stagnant. That sudden glimpse, that brief vision before the crushing defeat, cannot be unlearned. It leaves an indelible mark on the soul, an eternal hunger to see it again, whether in Egypt or Tunisia.