Lessons From the Only Remaining Arab Spring Democracy

Lina Ben Mhenni is struggling to keep faith with the revolution. When we first met, in the early, heady months of the 2011 Arab Spring, the charismatic blogger-activist, then 27, was widely hailed as one of the movement’s heroes. Her blog posts had helped galvanize protests that brought down Tunisia’s dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the first of several Arab tyrants toppled by their people. Back then, like millions of young people across the Arab world, she was still marveling at what had been achieved and was cautiously optimistic about what would come next: dignity, democracy, and jobs. If the leaders who came next failed to deliver those things, Ben Mhenni and other torchbearers of the Arab Spring were confident they could return to the streets in their youthful millions and force change once more.

When we meet again, in Zahra, a suburb of Tunis, almost eight years to the day Ben Ali fled into exile in Saudi Arabia, she allows that many of the vectors that led to the revolution now point to another upheaval. “It feels like 2010,” she says. “The government doesn’t respond to the problems of the people, and people feel completely helpless.”