The president of Tunisia declared on Thursday that he would not accept “diktats” and that subsidy cuts might cause unrest, which was his most blatant rejection of the terms of a blocked $1.9 billion IMF bailout package to yet.
In September, Tunisia and the IMF agreed on a staff-level agreement for the loan, but the country has already broken important deadlines, and donors worry that the state’s finances are moving further away from the numbers used to compute the deal.
Tunisia would be in a severe balance of payments problem without a loan. The majority of debt is internal, but Tunisia may fail on payments on its foreign loans that are due later this year, according to credit rating agencies.
Said claimed that in 1983, after the government increased the price of bread, terrible riots shook the nation of North Africa. He declared, “Public peace is not a game.”
To put an end to years of chaos and what he perceived as widespread corruption among the political class, Saied took control of most of the government’s operations in 2021 by shutting down parliament, appointing a new administration, and establishing a system of rule by decree.