South Asia Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Barbara Slavin writes for Al-Monitor on Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid’s call for Turkey to implement economic and security reforms, quoting Rafik Hariri Center Resident Senior Fellow Karim Mezran:
A new report on Tunisia to be issued soon by the Atlantic Council and shared with Al-Monitor in advance warns, “Unless the Tunisian government moves rapidly to turn the economy around, Tunisia could well turn out to be the country where the Arab Spring both was born and died.”
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“In a nutshell, what we are saying is that Tunisian elites have focused only on political developments to stress consensus and pluralism, and this is fine, but they have completely overlooked the importance of the economy and of economic reforms,” Karim Mezran, one of the authors of the report, told Al-Monitor. “This can undermine the whole process.”