Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ruled Tunisia for twenty-three years and was the first leader driven out by the Arab Spring. He was a career security officer trained in France and the United States who ran the interior ministry, and in November 1987 he had doctors declare the ageing Habib Bourguiba medically unfit and took the presidency in a bloodless coup. The early years promised liberalisation and delivered some of it: Tunisia's economy grew, women's rights were maintained and extended, and Islamist movements were suppressed with a thoroughness that western governments found convenient. The rest was a police state. He won elections with margins above ninety per cent, jailed journalists and opponents, and his wife Leila Trabelsi's family became notorious for seizing businesses. In December 2010 a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid after officials confiscated his cart. Protests spread through the interior and reached the capital. Ben Ali went on television promising not to seek re-election, then left for Saudi Arabia on 14 January 2011. He was convicted in absentia many times over and never returned, dying in Jeddah in 2019. The revolution he set off toppled governments in Egypt, Libya and Yemen within months. Tunisia was the one country to come out of that wave with a working democracy, and the one where it has since been dismantled from within. He had granted himself a constitutional amendment in 2002 removing the term limit and raising the age ceiling, which had been the only thing due to end his rule. His family's assets were frozen across Europe after he fled.

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