President Kais Saied said he was saving the state. But on the night of 25 July 2021, the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring dramatically returned to one-man rule For more than a decade, Tunisia had been held up as the Arab Spring's lone democratic success.
While revolutions elsewhere descended into civil war, military rule or renewed authoritarianism, Tunisia managed something few thought possible.
It wrote a new constitution and held competitive elections.
Governments rose and fell at the ballot box.
Political Islamists and secularists - despite profound ideological differences - shared power in an uneasy but functioning compromise.
