In Tunisia, the appointment of two crisis cabinets in January and February 2011 was a direct consequence of the protests that spread across the country starting in December 2010, when a street vendor set himself on fire in the city of Sidi Bouzid. Demonstrations were held in several cities, quickly coalescing into a large protest movement against Tunisia’s long-time ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The response to the sweeping unrest consisted of a mix of repression and accommodation. While security forces were responsible for killing dozens of people between December 20 and January 14, Ben Ali also attempted to mollify the demonstrators by firing ministers and local governors in late December, announcing job creation plans and pledging to hold legislative elections and step down in 2014. The reshuffle announced on December 29 involved changes to minor cabinet portfolios, including the communications, trade, religious affairs and youth ministers, which ultimately failed to placate the protesters who continued to mobilise well beyond the autocrat’s departure on January 14. Furthermore, the protests caused a splinter in the regime. Both the Minister of the Interior and Chief of Presidential Security chose to mutiny against the regime, and some security service units mobilised to arrest members of the Ben Ali family (Holmes and Koehler, 2018). Ben Ali subsequently fled to Jeddah. Three days after Ben Ali left the country, the long-time technocratic Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi announced a crisis cabinet composed of members of the dissolved ruling party, technocrats and opposition figures, many of whom resigned before taking office to express their unhappiness about the continued presence of associates of the former regime. Although only five ministers from the previous regime were reappointed and the most unpopular figures had left the government, demonstrations continued unabated for over a month with protesters denouncing the continuity of the interim government and demanding more radical changes. On February 27, Ghannouchi announced his resignation, leaving the post of Prime Minister to Béji Caid Essebsi, a former ambassador and minister in the 1970s who formed a caretaker government consisting entirely of non-party ministers (Bin Aschour, 2016).
In the months between December 2010 and March 2011, widespread, persistent unrest pressured Tunisian elites to make significant changes to the government and to increase its overall representation. By March 2011, all ministers associated with the Ben Ali regime had been purged from the cabinet, representing an unprecedented level of turnover. Previous reshuffles outside of elections resulted in an average 8.5 percent change in personnel. The first attempt at a crisis cabinet in January 2011 resulted in the dismissal of three quarters of the cabinet, and the subsequent reshuffle in February 2011 resulted in half of the new cabinet being dropped.
Some of Ben Ali’s closest associates, including members of his extended family, the head of presidential security Ali Seriati and the former Interior Minister Rafik Belhaj Kacem, were arrested and faced judicial charges for their role in the crackdown of the uprisings.
The continuation of the protests following Ben Ali’s departure contributed significantly to the ongoing changes in the cabinet (Boubekeur, 2018). Despite Prime Minister Ghannouchi expelling Ben Ali’s loyalists from the executive’s inner circle and his own technocratic profile, he was himself still tainted by his association with the former regime, and demonstrators accused him of retaining some of Ben Ali’s ministers to water down the outcomes of the revolution. As a result, popular pressure mounted between January and February 2011 to also expel ministers that, despite their alleged technocratic profile, had served under Ben Ali, in some cases for more than a decade. The role played by the protests during the interim period therefore explains the high rate of observed ministerial turnover, as well as the relatively long average tenure – five and a half years – of the dismissed ministers.
At the same time, the protests also contributed towards modifying the cabinet’s geographical representation. Under Ben Ali, ministerial positions were disproportionately distributed among elites from Tunisia’s coastal areas, and particularly from his home region of Sousse (Camau and Geisser, 2003). In December 2010, the Prime Minister, as well as the Defence, Foreign Affairs and Agriculture ministers, were all from Ben Ali’s region.
By contrast Tunisia’s inner regions, which had been a hotbed of protest, had often been marginalised, sparking highly contentious popular grievances. Among these regions, Zaghouan and Kebili never enjoyed ministerial representation, while Le Kef, Sidi Bouzid and Tataouine had only one minister each in twenty-three years.
It is therefore not surprising that one of the main goals of the protest movement was to ensure more equitable political representation. The cabinet appointed by Essebsi in March 2011 was more geographically diverse, in spite of the number of available ministerial posts being reduced by one third and the technocratic profile of many of its ministers, who typically came from the capital and the largest urban centres. The government’s inner circle, comprising ministers appointed to the most influential portfolios, also became more representative as a consequence of the expulsion of Ben Ali’s Sousse clan which had traditionally monopolised these positions.
Figure 7.4 - Regional Changes in Representation - Tunisia
In sum, the appointment of two consecutive crisis cabinets in Tunisia was a consequence of the protest movement that led to Ben Ali’s ousting in January 2011. The pressure exerted by popular protests pressured transitional elites into appointing more inclusive governments and breaking with the authoritarian past by dismissing ministers that had been part of Ben Ali’s cabinets. At the same time, hostility to Ben Ali’s former prime minister heading the transitional government led several opposition figures to resign from Mohammed Ghannouchi’s government in January 2011, and to cease any collaboration with former regime members, who were eventually banned from running in the subsequent elections.
In Tunisia, as in the other two cases, the protests caused a split in the ruling elite when members of the regime recognised that peace was unattainable while Ben Ali remained in power and that the old regime was unsustainable. In Ethiopia, the protests and the violence of the government crackdown forced internal elites to confront the regime on the behalf of their constituents while providing disgruntled factions in the regime with the opportunity to become dominant. In Guinea, the protests enabled a previously pliant legislature to start imposing its authority on the leader and demanding that the regime negotiate with external elites to end the violence.
7.5 Conclusion
This study illustrates how regimes react to existential challenges through the appointment of crisis cabinets, using the example of mass protest. The cabinet constitutes one of the main arenas where democratic and non-democratic leaders renegotiate the bargains that sustain their regimes, and are therefore vitally important during times of political stress. It investigated how non-routine mass cabinet reshuffles enable regimes to increase their chances of survival during periods of acute crisis. This study adds to the literature on political survival strategies through focussing on how actions external to the regime elite can drive change. Much of the current literature on leadership transitions and elite volatility emphasises the role of elite decisions and internal rivalries (Albertus, 2012; Albertus and Menaldo, 2012; Roessler, 2011; Lindemann, 2011a). Yet how external events, such episodes of popular unrest, inform elite decisions is rarely studied.
Protests have the potential to exacerbate internal splits within the government, weakening the perceived strength of the leader and the regime. External elites can then pressure a fractured regime for concessions, as shown in Guinea. Factions within the regime can capitalise on public discontent to improve their position in the political hierarchy, as shown in Ethiopia. Mass protest can convince regime elites that the existing order is destined to fall and can encourage insiders to steward a managed transition, as shown in Tunisia. This study demonstrates that, although crisis cabinets in Africa are rarely made in response to protests, the occasions where protests do result in substantial cabinet turnover is when the unrest changes the political calculations and strategies of elites both inside and outside of the regime.
Existing literature on protests and government response has typically focussed on the timing and the geography of repression80, but has often failed to account for strategies of regime accommodation or
co-option. When accommodation has been examined, the lack of data on political appointments means that researchers have had to use regime/opposition rhetoric to approximate for concessions (Bhasin and Gandhi, 2013; Carey, 2006). Protest-motivated crisis cabinets, albeit rare, are influential and display high rates of ministerial turnover, the removal of long-tenure ministers and increased representation of regional centres of unrest. These substantial changes represent a dramatic shift in the distribution of political power. This in turn signals to the protesters that the regime is changing the status quo and is willing to engage in significant reform.
Because of the limited sample used for this study, this analysis cannot infer causal claims about the origin of cabinet volatility in Africa, but should be best viewed as a theory-building exercise to generate hypotheses. More stringent statistical studies covering a wider sample of country/year cases
could test the theories outlined in this paper to better assess the impact of protests on cabinet composition in the medium and long term.