2023-06-25 11:00:00
Reserved for subscribers
LETTER FROM MAGHREB. European leaders are courting the Tunisian president hard to get him to accept an IMF and migration deal. Without success.
By Benoît Delmas French President Emmanuel Macron (left) greets Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed and his wife Ichraf Chebil Saïed as they arrive for an official dinner at the Élysée, on the sidelines of the new global financial pact summit, in Paris, on June 22, 2023. © LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP Published on 06/25/2023 at 11:00 a.m.
Subscriber-only audio playback
The showdown of debt is being played out to the southwest of Tunis. At 340 kilometers, to be exact. “As far as I know, the IMF is not written in the Koran,” asserts Saïed in front of a compact assembly of a hundred young men looking for jobs. The Tunisian president has his shoes stuck in the dust of the phosphate triangle, this area in the south-west where this natural resource is extracted. Its export was one of the tripods of the national economy with tourism. Since the revolution, this economic lung has suffered from endemic corruption and union one-upmanship. To obtain jobs, production was blocked, which meant that Tunisia, which was prancing in the top three of exporting countries, tumbled in the rankings. The mining basin has the blues…
I subscribe
#IMF #Koran