Meet Omezzine
We’re figuring out how to fix democracy. Not by talking about it from a distance, but by meeting the people doing the work. In this episode, you have the chance to get to know co-host, Omezzine Khelifa — someone who’s lived every facet of this fight: reformer, revolutionary, politician, and practitioner. Omezzine proudly calls herself French-Tunisian, and her story begins in the heart of the 2010 Tunisian Revolution — what would become known to the world as the Arab Spring. From the frontlines of protest to the halls of parliament, from activism to tech, and even acting, Omezzine brings a rare mix of insight, experience, and conviction.
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Transcript
Welcome to How to Save Democracy. I'm John. I'm Omezine. This is the podcast for people who love democracy deeply, passionately, who know we need it, but also know that the democracy we have today is broken, if it can be called democracy at all. We're figuring out how to fix it together by meeting the people doing the work from reformers to revolutionaries, politicians to practitioners, and my cohost, Omezine, is all four of those things. In this episode, I have the pure joy of interviewing her and introducing her to you largely to find out why she was mad enough to say yes to doing this with me. We're going to get into the stories behind the headlines in this podcast, but you should know right from the top with Omezine that she is proudly French Tunisian and was an activist during the Tunisian revolution of freedom and dignity in 2010, what became known as the Arab spring. And then became a politician, working to build the new democracy I'm a Zine Khalifa. I want to start fairly obviously actually in 2010 and where you were and how it felt to see what was starting to happen. And what were you were doing at that point
in time? I was working in fintech in France, Paris, and I was someone who was so far remote from politics rapper singing against the dictator, Ben Ali, that time, I was so scared of just watching it in on my Facebook feed. Because my aunt, the sister of my mother, shared a video that was about something happening in the country, and she got interrogated by the police for a day and then got sentenced of eight months of jail two years before that in 2008, accused of fomenting a revolution and preparing a coup against the regime. Wow. So we knew that we were not when we were watching videos that we must must have been under surveillance. Otherwise, how? You know? Even in Paris, I was I knew that I was doing something prohibited. And then some of my friends and colleagues from my engineering school in France, who was also Tunisian, reached out when we started to see blood and police killing protest peaceful protesters in back home. And he said, we should be doing something. We are IT engineers, and we can help spread these videos that then were just being shared among, few people in our intimate social network. And so this is how we started to connect and talk and mobilize online digitally to resist what we understood was the cyber police commenting on every small article in international news outlet to say that the people on the streets were not real Tunisian, that they were terrorists, that they were paid by foreign countries that wanted to destabilize the beautiful economic miracle of Tunisia.
So you're starting to share these videos, bring your skills to bear from Paris. And we started to mobilize also
in peaceful marches in front of for example, because we wanted the French television to talk about what was going on. We didn't want it to just be information that we saw and, didn't and wanted the the world to empathize and to understand that truly that was the first time that Tunisians had the courage to massively go out in the streets calling for jobs and freedom and dignity and calling for an end to the dictatorship. That was a genuine movement, spontaneous and not fomented by any kind of for intervention.
So you went from being scared to even watch a video online to being actively involved. And then and then you went back to Tunisia? Or you Yes. I went back to Tunisia after that. But I think
that was like a personal act that many people took. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a revolution. So my case is not exceptional in per se. And I was so inspired by Tunisians who were still in Tunisia and and being really at risk of having their life completely impacted by them taking this act of courage of showing who they were truly. And so the moment I I decided that, okay, that's enough. I I I wanna be part of this. I wanna support this, and I will face the consequences like anyone else who who who who's been part of the movement. When I took that that that leap of faith, I think I was ready really to change my whole life. But, the moment I realized I can use my skills to to help build the democracy, to help this transition succeed, I decided to leave that job in finance in Paris and go back to Tunisia and help in the transition efforts. I didn't know what to do. So I started just by going to all the conferences, all the events, listen to long like, activists whom I only heard about, brave people who stood up for all of us and had their life completely, I I guess, I don't know, destroyed, but they they couldn't lead a normal life. They were in exile or in jail or lost their jobs. And and so I started to listen to these people to understand what needed to be done. And this is how I shaped my mind, and I understood that the momentum was political and that people like me who wanna help, if they wanna have influence on the path, if they wanna build society and trace, really be proud of the country ten years, twenty years ahead, they need to involve in politics because the country chose this path of rewriting a constitution, organizing free and fair elections. And I thought it was also the a good time to show that different politics were possible because the only politics we knew was dictatorship. Right? A top down, very oppressive, very violent approach. People who were also used their power to to steal the money, to share among group of oligarchs, and that was it. And I I wanted to to believe and I wanted to show it by example that we can enter as citizens and and and in political parties. And by practicing democracy within the parties in the national elections, we can show that democracy is possible and that new different kind of politicians exist.
Democracy and dictatorship, I don't have that experience and that awareness of the the contrast of those things. It feels like many more people around the world increasingly do. But what is precious about democracy? Why does democracy matter if the contrast is dictatorship?
I think when we live in long and established democracies, we forget that people died for us to be in that space, that lots of sacrifices, generational suffering brought us to be free. We need to acknowledge that it's we are privileged to live in free spaces and where we can move freely and I mean, democracy is not perfect. It's flawed. It's every all what we're talking about in this podcast, but we still can lead a life that we choose or try to build it without someone preventing us from doing that. And I think the space as well to be able to criticize when public life is not working for all of us, it's privileging some, it's suppressing others. It's something that, you know, being able to criticize is also what help us to evolve. Yeah. Being able to debate, being able to collectively speak and act together is how we build a society and how we can have spaces where everyone can thrive and feel fulfilled. And dictatorship is there is one choice, and if you're unhappy, you die. I mean,
if you speak your mind, you you die. I think I mean, the idea that you were scared to watch a film is we can look around as as we are doing, as you say on this podcast and say we we have to make this thing democracy work better. We have to open up. We have to evolve it. But actually just to draw that baseline that what we know we don't want is dictatorship. This is not about sack off democracy. It's useless. It's about let's make it work. Yeah. In dictatorship and in democracy, ideas
matter and ideas are powerful. The difference is in dictatorship, your idea can get you killed. In democracy, your idea can help change the world and can help create better conditions for everyone if that's what you want. Ideas are powerful, and I think that's why we need to be able to express them and to exchange them and and to not be afraid of them, but actually see them as how humanity progressed.
It must have been such an exciting and, like, powerful time to be doing that work. And you had some great experiences and great moments, right, during that time? The time of transition, your first few years as as a politician.
Yeah. One day felt like ten years. It's it's crazy because I think all of the people who got involved, we were trying to catch up with all the years we've been left out of this. And so lots of events were happening at the political level, at local level. I mean, there were lots of forces that were some were seen in public, some others were not. So we were afraid, for example, of the ex regime doing some horrible acts, like terrorist acts, to show that dictatorship is the only way, that we need security but no freedoms, for example. And so there were a lot of conversation about counterrevolution, like maybe other countries that don't want the first Arab and Muslim country to go there. There were lots of discourses and debates because it was the first time that we were able to speak our minds. So lots of also violence came with good ideas, but we had to learn from not for being quiet and obliged to not say anything to chaotic just life, you know, chaotic public life. And I think the balance that needed to be found is how to move from chaos to an organized freedom where it's possible to to debate, it's possible to create, it's possible to act together, but moving forward and not going back. That that was the most important movement, I think.
Do you have a do you have a proudest achievement from that time? Difficult to choose.
I think it's important to acknowledge the collective efforts. There are a lot of examples as a country, as my political party then
as Which political party?
What? I it's It's social democrats and almost doesn't exist anymore as a structured big political party that it was then because we've made a lot of mistakes. But I think one of the biggest incredible things that we were able to do is in six months' time, we moved from 200 members on the dictatorship in January 2011 to a 25,000 members party in October 2011, and we won the national elections. And we were part of the governing coalition, the first coalition of the history of the country, leading the first years post dictatorship and post revolution. We made a lot of mistakes. And not only my political party, but most of like, all the political party's collective failure that led us after now more than a decade to be in a dictatorship again and have political dissidents now again and journalists and civil society activists and human rights activists back in jail because they're speaking their mind and because they disagree with what's going on and the injustices in the absence of rule of law. So it's not that I can talk about big achievements without talking about what we didn't succeed. And we need to be able to look back, I I mean, as Tunisian collectively, individually, what worked and what didn't. We need to evaluate that process to learn about what needs to be done as well now and the future. I believe that we had about a decade of democratic experience, and that is part of a transition to to democracy, to have setbacks. Now we don't know how long this will take, and we don't know when we will be able to be free again. But people now, unlike in the time of Ben Ali before 2010, they are protesting. They are taking the risks. Thank god there are no more police bullets to to shoot at people, but people are not afraid of being put in jail. They they're expressing themselves, and I'm so proud to see that happening. I just hope that the change will happen in a peaceful manner and that no more lives will be lost in that process.
It's quite profound to talk to you about these things and think about my own perspective on democracy as as having really taken it for granted to a large extent and now it it does feel under threat here in The UK and and I can I can, for the first time, imagine actually imagine Britain as a dictatorship? Like, I can see that possibility but I just can't I can't imagine relating to that reality in the way that you must. And I think that's one of the things that that drew me to wanting to understand this question of how to save democracy from your perspective. It's so so important to be able to understand really understand that that democracy isn't something to be taken for granted even if we might we believe that it needs to be improved and deepened and opened. Let's just set out the the timeline in, like, the key part. So so 2010, the revolution of freedom and dignity. And we had three fair
elections, free and fair election. 2011, 2014, and 2019.
And you were where in those? So you were In Tunisia. And as a politician
throughout? So as a politician, I participated I I was a candidate for the parliament in 2011 and 2014. So we're presenting Tunis to one of the capital districts, my my my district, my when I was born and raised. I didn't win nor at the time, but, like, the first time we were in the governing coalition, so I I advised two ministers and two governments until 2015 because twenty fourteen elections saw us lose completely, like, no seats. And that's what happens, you know, and it's a new democracy. And so we weren't able to explain our role in in Yeah. We were lot lot of issues that we had to deal with as a political party. But, I guess I was disappointed with us not us being the Qatar party, not being able to look at ourselves in the mirror and say what we did wrong. And and I didn't see this reform spirit taking shape and promising. So I had to leave. I felt that otherwise, you know, I would be just I would just die, I think. My I still wanted to involve, and this is how I left party politics. And I started the When did you leave? 2015. '15. And I was already thinking about an idea. I was started to become obsessed with the idea of how are youth some youth getting interested in joining terrorist groups. At the time, if you remember, there there was the DaeshISIS that was on the rise and attacks everywhere, Tunisia as well, like, terrorist attacks. And so I was thinking, how come I got inspired by the revolution and democracy while other youth wanted to join, like, terrorist groups and go fight in Syria and Iraq. And so from this question, I created an organization to to research, advocacy,
and work to offer better alternatives for use in Tunisia. And that was Mob Do You and Creative Youth? Yes, yes. Phenomenal organization. And then the twenty nineteen election saw
power go sort of back in the direction of autocracy. Is that right? Yes. We didn't know it then. It was the last free and fair elections. And, yeah, I personally even voted for this president. We had two candidates, and one was a Tunisian Berlusconi. So we know media mogul, very wealthy, benefited from tax evasion under the dictatorship, very connected to Berlusconi himself and and lots of broader networks. And so and so we knew that we couldn't fight that type of power. But then we had this constitutional law candidate, and we knew already that he was misogynistic, that he was not really pro all freedom and universal human rights. But we thought we put in place institutional checks and balances. And as civil society, political parties, it is there is pluralism that we have rule of law, and we can't fight it in democratic lot of people died in the fourth wave of COVID that was in 2021. And there were some behind the scenes, I guess, maneuvers that prevented vaccines to to to to be released to the population in 2021. And so in the summer, at some point, he froze the parliament and got rid of the government. And magically, we were able to vaccinate 500,000 people in one day using the military facilities, etcetera. So people saw that was a liberation kind of, but the government and the parliament, they were killing people, and so he was the savior. But after that, the savior power and then judges suspended, political leaders imprisoned, and then everyone else started to be afraid of speaking their mind.
I wanna just come back to that twenty nineteen election and the dynamics of it though. And I think that leads us into what we're doing with this podcast quite directly because, I mean, the way you just described it, the people of Tunisia essentially had a binary choice between a Berlusconi type figure who was essentially a definite autocrat.
And But maybe for freedoms. Right? Like, we would have individual freedoms. He would advocate for women's rights and gender equality and things that I think the West likes to see as progressive while having a complete corrupt system behind and economically just helping
the same old ones to get richer and the you know? So you have a choice between that on the one hand Uh-huh. And something that did end up becoming a an autocrat addicted to That nobody imagined. Sometimes,
among Tunisian activists, we say maybe that was a better choice. The first one was a better choice.
I look at countries around the world, Argentina in 2023. They ended up with a binary choice between finance minister who led the country into recession, not really a credible candidate, a man who called himself the madman and took chainsaw to election rallies and was sort of Elon Musk adoptee and he won. And we see this around the world. The idea that democracy can be just a choice between options ends up actually not being any real kind of choice at all, not being really of the people, by the people, for the people. When you look at Tunisia, when you look around the world, how do you you see democracy now? You were so passionate. You were driven to go and fight for a dream. Was it that that dream was always flawed? Was it that the particular circumstances failed? What what how do you see it?
I don't think the dream was flawed. I think we have ideals, and we saw the opportunity to to create them, to make them concrete. Like, why do others have democracy and we don't have it? It's not because people didn't ask for it. It's just it's actually because many have been crushed while trying to have it, and this was the time where we could really build it. I think there weren't enough of us to to sacrifice, to say, okay. Let's leave what we're we're doing. It's not doing business as usual anymore. Let's all try to involve and do something. I think the job of politicians as well, like, in the story of consumers where we are the ones bringing the solution, didn't work as well. I think it was too much asking maybe. Sometimes, I think all of us who were in politics thought of becoming crazy because of the challenges. It was not only the challenges of running a government as it is known in established democracy or having all the processes of laws and legislation in the parliament, but it was also building we had to do both of these things because that's how a country functions and dictatorship or not. Like, even if they're masquerade institution, they are institution that need to be run. But how do you run them in democratic way while you have no experience of democratic? So just a theory, learning how to do it, bringing in experts that you don't have in the country or you have only just scholars. And so you can imagine all the NGOs, all the stakeholders, internationals. You have to sort also who is genuine, who is trying to push a hidden agenda, and you have the vested interest of keeping the system as it is or bringing it back to, as we were used to say in my political parties, a few years before the revolution under the Banari dictatorship or in the Middle Ages, like our far right, the Islamist political party who wanted us to go back to not a republic, civic republic, but ruled by Sharia, which is the Islamic law. And so as progressive, we also had to have these ideological debates while organizing the first the the first free and fair elections and while, you know, writing a new constitution and organizing the free municipal elections and and thinking about a new political order that would prevent a dictator from coming back while reforming the justice, the judiciary, allowing the media to have an independent profession
while Campaigning for elections.
Yeah. It was almost an impossible task that we succeeded to do. Frankly, Imagine, it's a decade that we succeed because all the political actors with all the flaws accepted this game that we were all in a democracy until someone came and saw all the flaws and used them to just close the system. But I think in this story where politicians are the ones who bring the solutions or are the ones who work day and night to, do all these things is not sustainable. It was definitely not sustainable in the case of a transition, but I guess with all the complex issues in any place of the world is not sustainable. A lot of us citizens need to be part of the conversation, need to ask the question, need to do our bit. And it's happening in different places, but we we don't know. It's not the mainstream story, right? So we don't know even who to learn from, if you had to learn from some experiences. And I guess as political parties, we learn from other experiences in the past, not like we learn from the Spanish transition. We learn from Latin America. We learn from countries from the Eastern Bloc, on what they did after when the communist war fell. And so we build our own experience, but democratic innovation
or at least having meaningful roles of citizen was not part of the equation, I think. I hadn't really thought of it like this, but are you coming on coming to do this podcast with me to figure out how next time
next time we get it right? Yeah. I think so. Because, actually, we learn from established democracies. And we're saying that established democracy does flood. So we learn in these few years like a toddler, like a baby. You know? First baby steps, who do they learn? They learn from the the the grown ups. Right? So a nation democracy learn from established democracies. And we took that as the the They must be doing it right. Yeah. The golden troves. The system that worked with our own issue, of course, like, with our context and, like, we built our own version but that was not sustainable. Now we need to think about what's next.
And maybe Tunisia and maybe other countries can lead by embracing some of these different ways of doing it. Is that a hope?
Of course. I mean, we need to find our own way to to have new methods of having everyone involved. I think that's the only way. Right? It's not working anymore in established democracies. And the answer is not going back to the subject story where we are told what to do. Otherwise, we get hit hard. I think we need to create new ways under them and be inspired by other places where they succeeded to to do it.
To whether we're looking at the world from so called established democracies that seem to be crumbling or looking at the world from somewhere that wants to reclaim democracy again and has only had a brief taste. We've gotta look for these new ways. We've gotta do something different. Yes. And we also need to have all the conversation about economic models Yeah. Because revolutions
are not only about individual and collective freedoms. They are also about standards of livings and having dignity in our lives. And so this means having jobs and being able to earn a decent living. And so I think What was the there wasn't a slogan of the revolution in 2010. Jobs, freedom, and dignity. If you think of them as an order or as the three of them are a prerequisite on one leading to the other, they're inseparable.
Jobs, freedom, and dignity. And so as we go out on this quest together, how to save democracy? Sorry Sorry for roping
you in. Thank you for allowing me in.
What do you hope people will take from listening to you and meeting you in this way and from our podcast?
I hope they find what we are sharing here, exchanging, interesting enough to wanna interact with us and reach out and think with us. Like, I don't think we have a truth. We're not trying here to say this is how it is, and it's like this or otherwise you're wrong. We're trying to figure this out, and we are trying to collect stories and understand how others have been doing this, whether in indigenous cultures, whether in remote places in the past and the present to try to shape a future together and not only give hope, I guess. It's it's like faith that we are going to succeed in doing that. I would love to be able to to have people see us as part of their community or find a community, like, in the people who like this podcast and identify with the values that for sure show when we share our thoughts. And so I would love to see that there is a community globally that share these values and that we are not alone in trying to create this path that we don't know exactly how it's gonna be. What but we know we want jobs and freedom and dignity for all, not only for generations, but everywhere.
Jobs, freedom, and dignity.
This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omi Zinklifa, and produced by Joe Barrett.
How to Save Democracy is produced in partnership with The Conduit and wouldn't be possible without the kind support of Open Society Foundations and you, our listeners. We've got big plans. So if you can chip in to help us make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.