"The People Are Hungry and the Prisons Are Full" — Tunisians Return to the Streets

Hundreds of Tunisians marched in central Tunis this Saturday in the most pointed street demonstration since the November 2025 protests. The slogan that defined the day — "الشعب جيعان والحبس مليان" / "The people are hungry and the prisons are full" — was carried on banners, chanted at police lines, and printed on hand-made signs held by demonstrators ranging from former Ennahda supporters to secular left activists to families of detainees.

The protest's framing collapses three years of separate grievances into a single line. "Hungry" speaks to the cost of bread, fuel, and basic medicine — to a 15.4% drop in Central Bank net profit, to a Eurobond paid out of reserves, to a dinar under steady pressure. "Full" speaks to over 80 people detained on political grounds, to journalists sentenced under telecommunications laws, to opposition leaders with combined sentences north of 70 years, to civil society organizations shuttered by court order. Either grievance, in another country, would be enough to bring people into the street. Both at once, in Tunisia, is what produced this Saturday.

Demonstrators specifically denounced the arrests of politicians, journalists, and civil society figures, and called for an end to Saied's "one-man rule." Police presence was heavy along the march route; there were no reports of mass arrests at the demonstration itself. That restraint, however, is unlikely to be the security service's posture if the slogan finds a second weekend, a third, and the geometry of November 2025 begins to repeat.

What gives this protest its weight is not its size — a few hundred is not a revolution — but its coincidence. It came in the same week that the institutions which would normally organize, document, and amplify it have been suspended. The Tunisian League for Human Rights cannot field monitors. Avocats Sans Frontières cannot offer legal observers. Independent journalists like Zied El Heni are in prison. The protest happened anyway. That is the part to watch.

Five Refugee Aid Workers Stand Trial — HRW Calls It an "Abusive Prosecution"

On May 13, five employees of the Tunisian Council for Refugees (TCR) went on trial in Tunis on charges connected to their work assisting asylum seekers. They are appealing criminal convictions handed down last November. Two days earlier, Human Rights Watch had issued a dispatch — "Tunisia: End Abusive Prosecution of Refugee Aid Workers" — calling for the charges to be dropped and the staff compensated for what HRW describes as unlawful detention.

The case dates to May 2024, when Tunisian authorities shut down TCR — the country's principal partner of UNHCR — and arrested its founder, Mustapha Djemali, and program manager, Abderrazek Krimi. In November 2025, a Tunis Court of First Instance sentenced both men to two years in prison, suspending six months and releasing them for time served. The five staff appearing this week were prosecuted alongside them. Since January 2026, HRW notes, at least nine civil society workers have been sentenced to prison in connection with "their legitimate work."

The legal theory the state is advancing is novel and dangerous: that humanitarian assistance to asylum seekers constitutes a form of facilitating irregular migration. Tunisia is a state party to both the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Refugee Convention, both of which prohibit penalizing people who present themselves to authorities for irregular entry — and both of which implicitly protect the work of the organizations that help them do so.

A Crackdown Now Documented in Full

Article 86: How the State Bypassed Its Own Press Code to Jail Zied El Heni

The El Heni case is, on its face, a story about a journalist sentenced for a social media post. Beneath the surface it is something more revealing: a demonstration of how the Tunisian state now selects the legal instrument that will produce the result it wants, rather than the one the legislature designed.

The same maneuver underlies Decree-Law 54, used elsewhere to detain critics for posts the press code would have treated as protected expression. Two parallel legal codes for the same conduct, and the state picks the one with the heavier sentence. The Tunisian Bar Association, itself under pressure, has called this practice "an abuse of legislative concurrence." It is also, more bluntly, how rule of law becomes rule by law.

Central Bank Profit Down 15.4% — and a $3.7 Billion "Exceptional" Loan on the Way

The Central Bank of Tunisia (BCT) reported on May 11 that its 2025 net profit fell to 1.15 billion dinars (~US$370 million), down from 1.36 billion dinars a year earlier — a 15.4% decline. The fall is driven by a contraction in revenue from money-market interventions, investments, and foreign exchange operations, all of which had been propping up the BCT's books while it simultaneously lent foreign currency to the Treasury to service external debt.

Two numbers, read together, tell the story. The BCT is earning less on the operations that keep it solvent. And it is preparing to extend an exceptional $3.7 billion loan to the Treasury in 2026 to bridge persistent budget gaps. This is not a one-off — it is a recurring instrument, used in 2024 and 2025, scaling up. The technique is legal under Tunisian law. It is also, in plain economic terms, the central bank financing the government's deficit, with all the inflation and exchange-rate risk that label implies.

S&P Global's 2026 banking outlook had already warned that this practice was eroding the buffer that kept Tunisia's banking sector functional. The May 11 numbers are the first public confirmation that the erosion is now measurable on the BCT's own balance sheet. A successful July Eurobond repayment will be paid for, in part, by the country's own central bank. There is no other arithmetic available. The protesters chanting "the people are hungry" on Saturday were reading the same balance sheet.

Tunis Prosecutes the Aid Workers — Brussels Still Hasn't Answered the Revision Demand

The TCR trial on May 13 is, in operational terms, a migration story as much as a civil society story. The Council was UNHCR's primary implementing partner inside Tunisia; its dissolution and the prosecution of its staff have left tens of thousands of registered asylum seekers without coordinated legal access. The vacuum is being filled — to the extent it is being filled at all — by ad-hoc volunteer networks operating without legal cover.

This continues to sit awkwardly alongside Tunisia's public demand, made earlier this month, that the EU revise the 2023 Memorandum of Understanding on migration to be "more balanced, fair, and equitable." Brussels has not publicly responded. The European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee has not scheduled debate. The European Commission has not signaled whether the roughly €1 billion in macro-financial assistance contingent on reforms will be released, withheld, or restructured. The silence is itself a position.

The Mediterranean death toll for 2026 — roughly 990 confirmed dead and missing as of last week — has continued to climb. The IOM has not yet published a May 11–17 update, but the seasonal pattern is unambiguous: warmer weather, more crossings, more shipwrecks. Whatever the EU concludes about the MoU, its outcome will be measured at sea.

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