On 21 July seven Tunisian weather stations ranked among the twenty hottest in the world: Kairouan recorded 49.6°C, second globally behind Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, while Tozeur, Gabès airport, Béja, Tunis-Carthage, Zaghouan and Jendouba all cleared 48°C. The paper attributes the strain to a surge in air-conditioning demand that pushed consumption beyond what the utility Steg can generate. Inkyfada's audit of the company, published two days earlier, shows the rolling cuts are structural rather than meteorological: the grid's reserve margin has fallen from 28 percent in 2022 to 20 percent this year, Steg carries 7.36 billion dinars of debt and 6.06 billion in unpaid customer bills, and electricity sells at 291 millimes per kilowatt-hour against a production cost of 456.
At a Carthage Palace meeting on 22 July with the ministers of interior, equipment and energy, and agriculture, the heads of Steg and Sonede and the director general of civil protection, President Kaïs Saïed called the outages and fires "abnormal phenomena" and declared interruptions of more than 24 hours unacceptable. He ordered immediate measures and demanded that citizens be told in advance whenever a cut is unavoidable, said the state would not "stand idle" against those seeking to harm citizens and stoke tension, and asserted that Tunisians would resist "any attempt at destabilisation, whatever its source". Framing the outages as sabotage rather than as the product of under-investment sets the terms for who will be held to account.
Central bank indicators put net foreign assets at 22.7 billion dinars on 20 July, roughly 90 days of imports, 487 million dinars lower than a year earlier and eleven days weaker in import cover. The level holds after the state settled a 740-million-euro external maturity, about 2.5 billion dinars, in mid-July. Tourism receipts reached 3.681 billion dinars, up 158 million, and remittances from Tunisians abroad passed 4.7 billion, up 230 million: the two flows are effectively carrying the entire cushion. With no IMF programme in place, hard-currency earnings and domestic borrowing are the whole of Tunisia's financing story.