Debt and financing

Saied broke off the IMF negotiations and frames external financing as a sovereignty question. Receiving the prime minister, the economy minister and the central bank governor at Carthage on 20 July 2026, at a meeting on the 2026 to 2030 development plan, he said the accumulated debt had brought the Tunisian people no benefit, said Tunisia had met every obligation without delay, and called for the debt to be turned into investment rebuilding public services. His finance minister told parliament that he had not refused external borrowing and had approved the Afreximbank decree himself.

”les dettes se sont accumulées sans que le peuple tunisien n'en bénéficie”the debts have accumulated without the Tunisian people benefiting from them

Defending the Afreximbank loan before parliament in late July 2026, she rejected the description of it as a consumption loan, saying it was part of the resources already programmed in the 2026 finance law. She said the Treasury's 2026 borrowing and financing needs come to nearly 27 billion dinars against a budget deficit of about 4 billion, that the rate had been cut from around 9 percent to a fixed 5.86 percent by negotiation, and that Tunisia now prefers domestic borrowing for technical reasons and to help contain inflation, while still mobilising the external financing that was planned.

”la dette en elle-même n'est ni bonne ni mauvaise”debt in itself is neither good nor bad

At the 22nd Tunisia Investment Forum on 26 June 2026 he said Tunisia had been in a phase of net external deleveraging since 2023, with long-term external debt down from 82 billion dinars in 2022 to 68 billion in 2025, about 18 percent. He noted that the default many international analysts expected in 2023 did not happen, and that yields on Tunisian bonds fell from over 30 percent in 2023 to around 7 percent in the first five months of 2026. He treats this as proof the approach works, while calling for growth driven by productive investment. The board he chairs nonetheless asked, in its 29 July communiqué, for external resources to be mobilised on appropriate terms.

Speaking on Diwan FM after the payment, he gave the sharpest account of what it cost: reserves down from 25.629 billion dinars and 101 days of import cover to 92 days at 2 August 2026, ten days below the same point of 2025, with the operation costing close to 2.5 billion dinars and the eurobond being the largest single piece of the 8.5 billion dinars of external debt falling due in 2026. He nonetheless reads the outcome as favourable: meeting the deadline in full strengthened the confidence of lenders and international investors, Tunisian sovereign bonds have recovered their face value after losing more than 51 percent of their market value in April 2023, and that could let Tunisia borrow on international markets again on better terms.

In his own signed column on the day of the repayment he priced the 2019 bond over its whole life: 700 million euros of principal plus seven annual coupons of 44.625 million, a little over 1.012 billion euros in all, so roughly 45 percent of the borrowed capital paid in interest. He argues the money financed current spending in a year of severe fiscal strain rather than any identifiable asset, that leaving the international market was less a sovereign choice than the consequence of losing access after the IMF talks collapsed, and that the arithmetic of the official closing narrative does not hold.

”La dette n'a donc pas disparu ; elle a simplement changé d'adresse. On ne rembourse pas une dette : on la fait déménager.”The debt has not disappeared; it has simply changed address. You do not repay a debt: you move it house.

He accepts that the turn away from the IMF after 2023 was a deliberate sovereignty choice, taken against American and European pressure, and that remittances and tourism are what keep reserves resilient. But he describes the domestic refinancing that replaced external money as a short-term strategy: between 2021 and 2026 the state multiplied treasury bill issues and direct central bank advances, and domestic debt has now passed 88 billion dinars. Continuing on that path, he argues, risks crowding out, or collapsing, private investment.

”Sans nouvel équilibre, le modèle de financement atteindra ses limites dès 2027”Without a new balance, the financing model will hit its limits as early as 2027