In Tunisia, leaders struggle to kick the problems that toppled Ben Ali

One balmy evening in Tunis three weeks ago, a young man named Redouan and several friends piled into a car and headed for a nearby art exhibit, intent on burning paintings.

“We’d heard the paintings insulted Islam,” he says. “When we arrived there was already a crowd outside – and lots of police.”

By then the exhibit had already been ransacked by deeply conservative Salafi Muslims like Redouan. The vandalism triggered days of rioting in Tunis and other cities. Although some of the rioters were Salafis, most appear to have been simply young, poor, and angry.

It was the latest in a series of protests, riots, and labor strikes since Tunisians ousted dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali last year. The disturbances highlight the new stakes of an old problem: chronic economic malaise that leaders now fear could endanger Tunisia’s emerging democracy.

Similar problems face Tunisia’s Arab Spring peers, Egypt and Libya. In all three, youth unemployment, corruption, wealth gaps, and under-development helped fuel uprisings that toppled dictators. Those leaders are gone, but the economic problems that led to their downfalls persist. 

“We’re not forecasting a second revolution in any of the three countries,” says William Lawrence, lead North Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based NGO. “But a combination of bad economic trends and poor political process could create a crisis of legitimacy in any one of them.”

Votes, but where's the bread?

Tunisia’s President Moncef Marzouki said in an interview this month with National Public Radio that he feared economic grievances could lead to “a revolution within a revolution.” Leaders have appealed for patience while the government tries to keep order and start reforms.

Egypt, meanwhile, has plunged into political limbo that many fear could see the gains of its uprising reversed. The ruling military council has dissolved a parliament led by the Muslim Brotherhood and curbed the powers of the new president, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. Whoever prevails must tackle high unemployment and anger over the army’s business interests.

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In Libya, militias that joined forces to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi last year have taken to squabbling, sometimes violently. An interim government appointed by the National Transitional Council (NTC) is struggling to keep the peace as economic problems, from shoddy infrastructure to youth unemployment, breed trouble. 

“What is the future for all these young Libyans? At the moment, for many it seems to be in belonging to a militia,” says John Hamilton, a contributing editor to African Energy magazine and director with Cross-Border Information, a British risk assessment firm.

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