Tunisia has become increasingly authoritarian since President Kais Saied mounted a constitutional coup in 2021 [Getty]
Tunisia‘s president Kais Saied has sacked his finance minister and appointed a magistrate to the role.
Michket Slama Khaldi will take on the country’s finance portfolio, the presidency announced on Facebook Wednesday, in a post that showed her being sworn into office by Saied.
The presidency initially gave no details for the decision, nor did it mention outgoing minister Sihem Boughdiri Nemsia.
A video posted on Thursday on the presidency’s Facebook page showed Saied, visibly unhappy, going to several government buildings, including the finance ministry.
Khaldi, the new finance minister, has headed a national commission tasked with recovering embezzled public funds during the period prior to the 2011 revolt that ousted longtime president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
In video showing Saied’s inspection visit to the commission’s headquarters on Wednesday, the president said: “What is happening is not normal.”
“The Tunisian people need their money,” he said, adding that the commission’s work has not moved forward since 2011. “We are almost back to square one.”
At the finance ministry, he said that “every person in charge must feel invested with a mission, with a mentality… of a fighter on the front line”.
Saied became president in 2019, and Tunisia was the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring.
He staged a sweeping power grab in 2021, which critics say kicked off a backsliding of democratic freedoms and rights.
Defenders of Saeid say he has honoured his pledge to fight the corruption and inefficiency that plagued Tunisia for decades.
Still, the North African country of more than 12 million people suffers sporadic shortages of basic items such as milk, sugar and flour, and unemployment is high.
Tunisia’s annual economic growth is projected at just 1.6 percent for 2025, according to the IMF.
Debt hovers at around 80 percent of GDP, compared to 67 percent before Saied took office in 2019.
Recently, there has also been a scarcity of domestic gas cylinders, which are widely used for cooking and heating.
