1.1 Introduction
When millions of people took to the streets in late 2010 and early 2011, first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, they shouted slogans such as khubz wa ma’, Ben ‘Ali la (bread and water, no to Ben Ali), shughl, hurriyya, karama wataniyya (employment, freedom, national dignity), and ‘aysh, hurriyya, ‘adala ijtima‘iyya (bread, freedom, social justice). In the very moment when the two uprisings successfully brought down the respective dictators, it became undeniable that socioeconomic grievances had played an important role in motivating people to dare the—until then—unthinkable: to directly and openly challenge the rule of two repressive authoritarian regimes. Yet, shortly after the toppling of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, this seemed to have been forgotten: rapidly, the reform of political institutions and conflicts over (religious) identity and civil-military relations began to dominate the political agenda—and academic debates too (Al-Anani 2012; Albrecht and Bishara 2011; Albrecht and Ohl 2016; Brumberg 2013; Zeghal 2013).1
In terms of political developments, Egypt and Tunisia have taken different paths since polarization between Islamists and secular forces reached its height in the summer of 2013 in both countries. In Egypt, the military used the mass demonstrations to oust the then president Muhammad Morsi, to reassume power, and to openly oppose first the Muslim Brotherhood and soon afterwards all kinds of oppositional groups (Pioppi 2013; Roll 2016). Tunisia took another direction: a compromise was brokered between the Islamist al-Nahda Party and the anti-Islamist groups with the help of four civil society organizations referred to as the National Dialogue Quartet. Additional external pressure from international financial institutions contributed to the emergence of an elite consensus, which was long portrayed as a success story, but was also criticized for not moving in any direction apart from re-establishing old power structures and suppressing dissent (Boubekeur 2016; Marzouki and Meddeb 2016). Since 2018, cracks in this consensus have become visible, yet the democratic order seems to be firmly established (Dihstelhoff 2018).
In spite of the different political trajectories, both countries saw the introduction of a new constitution as well as presidential and parliamentary elections in 2014. Frequent government reshuffles, including changes of prime minister, notwithstanding, it seems that in the course of 2015 the political transition phase—to democracy in one case and to a reconfigured authoritarian regime in the other—gave way to a period of relative politico-institutional stability. Also, when it comes to questions of socioeconomic development and economic policies, the post-revolutionary trajectories in the two countries have been remarkably similar. The predominant state response during the first years after the revolutions was marked by pragmatic muddling through that refrained from pursuing structural and/or redistributive reforms. Post-revolutionary governments in Egypt and Tunisia were unable and/or unwilling to improve the socioeconomic situation of the general population, and as a result, the socioeconomic grievances that were key drivers of the 2010–2011 uprisings remained unaddressed. This state of affairs was reflected in the surveys of the Arab Barometer, which showed a clear continuity in this regard: no matter whether people were asked in 2007, 2011, 2013, or 2015 (Tunisia) and 2016 (Egypt), “the economic situation” was cited as the most important challenge of the respective country by more than 60%.2 This is remarkable, given that scholars generally acknowledged that socioeconomic concerns were important drivers of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond, and they speculated that addressing “citizen demands for material improvement and social justice” would be crucial for the future of the political transformations (Burnell 2013, p. 846; see also Bayat 2013; Costello et al. 2015, p. 97; Dupont and Passy 2012, p. 101; Schlumberger and Matzke 2012, pp. 107–108).
Against this background, the present book addresses a set of key questions: What has happened to the socioeconomic discontent voiced in the mass mobilizations of 2010 and 2011 in Egypt and Tunisia? How did socioeconomic protests, understood here as contentious collective actions in which socioeconomic demands are raised, develop after the fall of Ben Ali and Mubarak, including the issues being contested and the actors involved? How did the political actors of the transition period react to socioeconomic contention, including the ways in which they dealt with contentious actors and eventually modified their economic policies? What were the resulting dynamics of contentious politics, that is, the patterns of interaction between state and contentious actors? This is all the more important as socioeconomic grievances not only fueled the general frustration voiced in the uprisings of 2011 but also found expression prior to 2011 in socioeconomic protests. More specifically, in both countries the 2000s were marked by a general (re-)emergence of socioeconomic protests and by particular protest events and cycles of contention that gained nationwide attention.
With hindsight, these pre-revolutionary dynamics of socioeconomic contention have been interpreted as having sowed the seeds for the uprisings. In Egypt, these were mainly labor protests. As Nadine Abdalla’s contribution elaborates in detail, starting in 2004, a wave of strikes both among blue- and white-collar workers led to the mobilization of around two million people by 2010. As Joel Beinin has argued, these strikes played a major role in delegitimizing the regime and popularizing a culture of protest (Beinin 2012). While very few and small political movements and organizations such as Kifaya reconquered the public space by raising domestic political claims, it was the workers’ movement that expanded the scope and the repertoire of contention (Duboc 2015; El-Mahdi 2011; Weipert-Fenner 2013). Through this, the movement “began to weaken the barrier of fear” (Allinson 2015, p. 305). But important incidents such as the bread shortage in 2008, which led to spontaneous protests in front of bakeries, were also crucial, as they evoked the powerful collective memory of the so-called bread riots of 1977. Not least important for this sensitive parallel, the army intervened and distributed bread (produced in army-owned companies) in the streets in order to resolve the crisis (Kamal 2015, 43). Socioeconomic protests made it clearly visible that welfare, one pillar of regime legitimation, had ceased to exist for many social groups. At the same time, they opened the public space for contentious actions.
In Tunisia, protests started to spread from 2008 on in the marginalized interior regions of the country (Allal 2013). The most important one was the six-month-long uprising in the Gafsa mining basin. Starting as a small-scale protest by unemployed people, who had expected to be on new hiring lists of the public sector mining company, mobilization spread and turned into a general outcry against the socioeconomic marginalization of the region, including a lack of jobs, miserable infrastructure, and unfair distribution of wealth within the country (Allal 2010; Gobe 2010). Only massive state repression brought the regional uprising to an end. Another example of a symbolically important socioeconomic protest was the contentious actions in August 2010 in Ben Guerdane, a town on the border with Libya that lives off informal transnational trade. Attempts to divert the gains of this lucrative business into the pockets of the clan of Ben Ali’s wife Layla Trabelsi were met with heavy resistance by the local population (Allal 2013). Similar to workers’ protests in Egypt, the importance of socioeconomic contention did not lie in directly calling for the end of autocracy; instead, the protests “revealed cracks in the edifice of party-state influence and control” (Allal 2013, p. 191), and thus undermined the power of the authoritarian regime.
In contrast to Egypt, where labor activism developed outside a completely state-controlled trade union federation, the situation in Tunisia was more complex. Today, the Tunisian General Labor Union (Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail, or UGTT) is hailed for its mediator role within the National Dialogue Quartet that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for ending the deadlock between secular and Islamist politicians and bringing the constitutional process to a successful end. Before the uprising, however, the national level of the UGTT did not play any supportive role in democracy, nor did it support socioeconomic protests. This pro-regime stance of the national leadership dates back to the general strike in 1978 and the bread riots in 1983–1984, when the UGTT had still played a crucial role in mass mobilizations and had made use of its high legitimacy stemming from its active role in the struggle for independence (Beinin 2016). Yet, the state response at that time was brutal, and high levels of repression made the national level of the UGTT more obedient to the authoritarian elites. Only local cadres remained autonomous; the regional level was already (perceived as being) part of the regime. In the Gafsa revolt mentioned earlier, for instance, regional UGTT leaders and their clientelist recruitment practices were a trigger for protests that, unlike their national counterparts, local UGTT cadres supported (Beinin 2016, p. 103; Netterstrøm 2016, pp. 384, 388, 393). This means that, before 2011, local activism was the backbone of socioeconomic protests, inside and outside the UGTT, which did not call for regime change but gradually undermined authoritarian power by reviving contention in the public space. By establishing networks of mobilization, this activism also made it possible for protests to spread and, in this sense, paved the way for the revolution of 2011.
In both cases, Egypt and Tunisia, the dictators were brought down by a cross-class mobilization and no revolutionary power directly acclaimed rule for itself. Although they did not take the steering wheel, not even the center stage, the major socioeconomic protest actors prior to 2011 played an important role during the uprisings. In both countries, their major contribution—though manifested in different forms—was, first, to help the protests to start and spread and, second, in augmenting the pressure on the ruling elites to let their former head fall. Regarding the role of Egyptian labor, Abdalla elaborates in Chap. 6 that, although the entirely co-opted Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) opposed any protest, individual workers as well as independent labor organizations were present from the first days of the uprising on January 25 and 28, both at Cairo’s Tahrir Square and across the country. In early February, a nationwide strike wave brought the country to a standstill, creating massive civil disobedience that spread across 20 out of 29 governorates and even encompassed military-owned companies—one indication “that sustained workers’ mobilization was a cause for concern for the ...