Tunisia
A Presidency communique on July 23 said Kais Saied had granted an exceptional pardon to 2,439 detainees to mark the 69th anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, and had instructed that 490 more be released on parole. Kapitalis and Webdo, citing Mosaique FM and Ayachi Zammel's own Facebook page, reported that the former MP who stood against Saied in the 2024 presidential election was among those freed, alongside Wadie Jary, the former head of the Tunisian Football Federation. Neither communique states what the pardoned were convicted of or on what criteria the list was drawn up; national-day clemency is a recurring instrument in Tunisia rather than a signal of a change of course.
According to a Presidency communique, Kais Saied chaired a meeting at Carthage on July 22 with the interior minister, the equipment minister who also holds the industry and energy portfolio, the agriculture minister and the chief executives of the power utility STEG and the water utility SONEDE. He called interruptions of more than 24 hours in several regions "unacceptable", demanded they stop immediately, and set two conditions where cuts remain unavoidable: advance notice to citizens and suitable timing. A day later, Webdo reported that the National Organisation of Entrepreneurs (ONE) is setting up a legal unit to help firms sue STEG over unscheduled load-shedding, which it says is breaking production chains and deterring investment; the restaurant owners' chamber says around 70 percent of establishments were hit during the heatwave. The grid shortfall has moved from a technical problem to a political one about the state's capacity to deliver basic services.
The finance and budget committee of the Assembly of the Representatives of the People approved three bills at its July 21 sitting: a state guarantee on a 110-million-euro EBRD loan for the Gafsa Phosphate Company's CAPSA project (new mining equipment and high-pressure filtration of process water, which management says should raise extraction capacity by about 30 percent and water recovery from roughly 60 to over 90 percent), and two murabaha agreements worth 120 million dollars with the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation, ring-fenced for imports of sulphur and ammonia for the Tunisian Chemical Group. MPs pressed both chief executives on falling output, accumulated losses and ageing plant; the CPG chief said a recovery plan would take five to seven years. The state is borrowing abroad to keep a strategic exporter running rather than to expand it.
The Central Bank of Tunisia's latest monetary and financial indicators show remittances from Tunisians abroad and tourism receipts together passing 9 billion dinars as of July 20: remittances up 5.2 percent to more than 5 billion, tourism receipts up 4.6 percent to nearly 4 billion. Net foreign assets stood at 23 billion dinars on July 22, the equivalent of 91 days of imports, against 22.8 billion a year earlier, while external debt service fell to 7.5 billion dinars from 9 billion. The same bulletin shows notes and coins in circulation up 16.6 percent year on year to 29.4 billion dinars. With no IMF programme in place, the diaspora and the summer season are what hold the external accounts together; and the rising cash stock points to how much of the economy sits outside the banking system.