Managing Transition

On 13 January 2011, Tunisian President Zine al Abidine Ben Ali appeared on national television in an attempt to quiet a powerful anti-government uprising that had begun four weeks earlier. He announced a series of sweeping democratic reforms and price cuts and promised that he would not seek reelection. At the end of the speech, delivered in the local dialect, Ben Ali alluded to Charles de Gaulle's famous 1958 remarks in Algiers in which he told the French settlers of the colony that was fighting bitterly for its independence I have understood you" ("fahimtikum.") The Tunisian people's response to Ben Ali was "get out" ("dâegage.") The next day, the government declared a state of emergency. Ben Ali fired nearly his entire cabinet and announced that legislative elections would take place within six months. Yet thousands of Tunisians took to the streets demanding Ben Ali's immediate resignation. They gathered first in front of the headquarters of the national trade union, l'Union Gâenâerale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT), at Mohammed Ali square, then moved to the front of the Ministry of Interior. Around five o'clock that evening, President Ben Ali and his wife, Leila Trabelsi, boarded a plane for Saudi Arabia in exile"--