In Tunisia, cradle of the Arab spring, protesters want jobs

IN DECEMBER IT will have been ten years since Muhammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street peddler, set himself on fire. He was protesting against harassment by local police, who often demanded bribes to let him carry on earning his modest living. His death inspired the Arab spring: a series of popular uprisings that toppled autocrats, Tunisia’s included, across the Middle East.

Yet in Bouazizi’s hometown of Sidi Bouzid, deep in the hinterland, few people plan to commemorate him. “He escaped to his maker and left us with this misery,” says Haroun Zawawi, one of several young jobless men sitting near the roundabout where Bouazizi lit the match. On a nearby wall someone has mockingly scrawled “revolution” upside down. “People don’t feel it has improved their lives,” says the city’s MP, Naoufel ElJammali. “There’s nostalgia for dictatorship.”

Tunisia is often praised for being the first Arab country to throw off the yoke of autocracy, and the only one where genuine democracy survives. Elections are still held, the secret police are relatively docile and women participate extensively in public life. But most Tunisians judge the revolution based on the performance of the economy, which has not improved under the new dispensation. Incomes have fallen by a fifth over the past decade; unemployment has been stuck above 15% for years....