Maher Qassem earns a salary. Nearly all of it goes to loan repayments, rent, and his son's schooling. He sometimes cannot help his sick mother pay for medication. He is a working professional in Tunisia's media sector, and he is planning to leave. His reasons, he says, go "beyond money." That phrase now functions as a generational motto. The numbers are blunt. Unemployment stands at 14.9 percent nationally, 35.4 percent for Tunisians aged 15-24, and 26.6 percent among university graduates. Female graduates face 35.6 percent unemployment — two and a half times the male rate. An Afrobarometer survey found two-thirds of young Tunisians have considered emigrating, with the share who think about it "a lot" climbing from 38 percent in 2018 to 51 percent in 2024. The pipeline is not theoretical. The departures are already measurable at the skilled end. Approximately 6,500 engineers left Tunisia in 2022 alone, more than double the 3,000 annual average from 2013-2014. Healthcare is hemorrhaging too: 1,839 medical professionals were recruited abroad in 2023, another 1,022 in the first nine months of 2024, and 1,244 in 2025. Tunisia trains these workers at public expense and loses the returns to countries that didn't pay for the education. Seven years into President Kais Saied's tenure, the political picture is fractured. Mohamed Amine, a taxi driver in his 30s, voted for Saied and still believes the president is "sincere in his intentions" and deserves more time. Ghaith, who was 19 when Saied won in 2019 and didn't vote, says nothing has changed — cost-of-living pressures persist, essential goods remain scarce, and government communication is opaque. The gap between these two positions is the gap between faith in reform and lived economic reality. What distinguishes the current wave is its composition. Hamza, a 26-year-old software engineer earning good money at a foreign company, is seriously considering leaving — not because of income, but because of bureaucratic friction, lifestyle constraints, uncertainty about the future, and the broader economic climate. Migration researcher Ramadan Ben Omar confirms the shift: emigration has become a "life project," driven by the search for freedom, public participation, and viable futures, not merely higher wages. When your best-paid young professionals want out for non-financial reasons, the problem is systemic. The extraction mechanism is circular. Tunisia invests in education and training, produces qualified engineers and healthcare workers, then watches them leave for economies that offer functional institutions and professional dignity. The fiscal cost of training stays; the productive returns emigrate. Border areas like Ben Guerdane face compounded pressures, with irregular migration routes absorbing those who cannot access formal channels. Protests in August 2026 carried banners reading "Enough injustice, enough failure." The question the article poses — whether Tunisia can offer its young people enough reason to stay — is already being answered by the departure statistics. The country is not collapsing dramatically; it is slowly draining. The difference between a country that retains its human capital and one that exports it at a loss is the difference between generative and extractive governance, and the trajectory is clear.
