For Tunisian taxi driver Houssam Oueslati, the presidency of Kais Saied can be measured in engine oil: 35 dinars in 2018, nearly 100 dinars today — a 186% increase. His response has been to work longer hours just to stand still. That personal arithmetic mirrors a national condition where headline economic indicators and lived experience have diverged sharply. Tunisia's annual inflation hit 5.6% in September 2026, up from 4.8% in January, with food and beverage prices rising 8.4% year on year. Poultry climbed 16.5%, fruit 16.3%, lamb 14.6%. Economist Ridha Chkoundali estimates average annual inflation ran at 8.1% between 2021 and 2026, compared with 6.8% in the 2015-2021 period. The Central Bank has cut its key rate twice to 7%, but lower borrowing costs cannot restore purchasing power already lost. Tighter credit conditions and reformed cheque regulations have simultaneously narrowed households' ability to smooth expenses over time. GDP grew 2.3% year on year in Q2 2026, against a Finance Law projection of 3.3% for the full year. Overall unemployment eased to 14.9% from a pandemic peak of 17%, but youth unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds reached 35.4%, and the graduate unemployment rate stood at 26.6%. Growth that does not create productive jobs for the young is growth that stores political risk. Chkoundali identifies weak investment and declining production as the binding constraints, warning that government domestic borrowing — roughly 7 billion dinars in each of 2024 and 2025, rising to 11 billion dinars at the start of 2026 — may be crowding out private-sector access to credit. Public debt rose from 67.8% of GDP in 2019 to 84.9% in 2024 before easing to 82.1% in 2025, with a projected 83.4% for 2026. Debt servicing now competes directly with wages, subsidies, social spending, and investment. The 2026 Finance Law assumed Brent crude at $63.30 per barrel; by late June, the average was approximately $92.60. Fuel subsidies consumed 2.427 billion dinars ($826 million) in the first half of 2026 alone — 48.6% of the full-year allocation — while public investment totalled only 1.665 billion dinars ($567 million). The subsidy bill is eating the capital budget. Saied's signature economic initiative — a campaign against monopolies and speculation — targets a real source of public anger but carries operational risk. Critics argue the authorities have not consistently distinguished between speculative hoarding and the warehousing and inventory management essential to functioning supply chains. When enforcement disrupts distribution networks without providing alternatives, it can produce the very shortages it was meant to prevent. The Democratic Current party has criticized what it calls a refusal to confront economic realities, arguing that attributing failures to conspiracies deepens problems rather than resolving them. The structural picture after seven years is one of managed stagnation. The economy has not collapsed, but it has not generated the investment, employment, or productivity gains that would translate growth into improved living standards. Fiscal space is being consumed by subsidy obligations and debt service rather than channelled into the capital formation that could break the cycle. For workers like Oueslati, longer hours are the only adjustment mechanism available — and that is a political fact as much as an economic one.
