Tunisia's jobless graduates and Law 18, unapplied in November 2026
Law 18 of 2025 promised public-sector jobs to Tunisian graduates whose unemployment had already run for years. Ten months after it was published, the graduates' union in Sidi Bouzid said on 28 October that no implementing decree had appeared, that the registration platform was not working and that nobody had been recruited.
Law 18 of 2025 is dated 22 December 2025 and reached the official gazette the next day. It opens an exceptional route into the civil service and the public sector for graduates who have been out of work for years. Candidates are chosen on the application files they send in, not by competitive examination, and are ranked by age, by how old their diploma is and by their social circumstances. The hiring is meant to run in waves over no more than three years, supervised by the employment ministry.
The decree is to fix who qualifies. Yosra Néji, the graduates' national coordinator, cites those aged forty and over with ten years or more out of work. She told Express FM on 2 September that she had been assured of a platform in March and the first assignment letters by June, dates she says were not kept. By her account the president told her on 15 June that the government's draft decree did not answer the graduates' expectations well enough, and that he would revise it.
How many people Law 18 covers has never been counted, and the graduates' own estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 is not an official figure. The statistics institute does count graduate unemployment as a whole. It rose to 26.6 percent in the second quarter of 2026, from 24.2 percent in the first, while overall unemployment fell to 14.9 percent from 15 percent. Among women graduates the rate was 35.6 percent, against 14.2 percent among men.
La Presse wrote on 8 October that public-sector examinations had resumed in several ministries, among them health, education, transport and security, and treated that as the state speeding recruitment up. Those examinations are the ordinary route into the civil service, not the route on files that Law 18 creates. Zouhour Friji of the graduates' union in Sidi Bouzid says Law 18 itself was given no budget credit, neither in the 2026 budget nor in the draft 2027 budget.
Marchers left Menzel Bouzaïane in Sidi Bouzid on 27 September. After nine days on foot they stopped at Borj Cedria, on the edge of Tunis, on the evening of 5 October. That was the day Saïed went over the law with his head of government and the employment minister, and the day before the march ended there. The marchers said they had been kept out of the capital. On 2 November the protest was back at Menzel Bouzaïane, with tyres burning on the road.
”Nine months is not a little thing in the life of someone who has been unemployed a long time”
The numbers
What the comparison shows
Where they agree
None of the three accounts points to a single person hired under Law 18. Saïed reviewed the steps taken under it on 5 October, La Presse wrote three days later that the state was speeding recruitment up, and the graduates' union in Sidi Bouzid said on 28 October that no decree, no platform and no recruitment had followed.
Where they split
The disagreement is about whether the state is moving, and the two sides are counting different things. La Presse pointed on 8 October to public-sector examinations resuming in health, education, transport and security. Those examinations are the ordinary route into the civil service. Law 18 recruits on files instead, through a platform that still had not opened in early November. So La Presse's evidence of movement and the union's evidence of blockage can both hold, because they describe two different routes into the same civil service.
What nobody is saying
No source read for this page says whether a revised decree exists, after the president sent the government's draft back in June. None carries an account from the employment ministry of why the decree has not appeared. Business News notes that the scheme has never been officially costed, and none of these sources says what happens if the window closes with nobody hired.
Who says what
She says she was given dates that then passed. On Express FM on 2 September she said she had been assured the registration platform would open in March and that the first assignment letters would be handed out by the end of June, and that neither deadline was met. The nine months she spoke of ran from the law's promulgation, the same count Business News was using that month. By her account the president told her at a meeting on 15 June that the draft decree sent up by the government did not answer the graduates' expectations well enough, and undertook to revise it.
”Neuf mois, ce n'est pas peu dans la vie d'un chômeur de longue durée”Nine months is not a little thing in the life of someone who has been unemployed a long time
She puts the blockage down to money. Speaking to Radio Karama FM on 28 October, she said no implementing decree had been published, the platform was not operating and no recruitment had begun, and she set that against budget increases given to certain councils and ministries. The protesters want the credits written into the 2027 budget, the regulatory texts published and registration opened, and they want the ministries to say how many people could benefit and how many posts are vacant.
”Nous n'avons constaté que des augmentations budgétaires au profit de certains conseils et ministères, tandis que la loi 18 s'est vu attribuer zéro crédit budgétaire”All we have seen is budget increases for certain councils and ministries, while Law 18 was allotted zero budget credit
For him the long wait is the product of past abuses. Receiving the head of government and the employment minister on 5 October, he went over the steps taken under Law 18 and traced the build-up of unemployment to recruitment on forged diplomas or on no diploma at all, and to a system in which belonging to a party was the only qualification that counted. Réalités reports the rest in indirect speech: today's unemployed person did not choose to be out of work but was deprived of a job by practices and privileges that helped waste public money. He said the commitments made would be kept.
Our coverage
- Tunisia's engineers' order puts members' unemployment near 23%, blames a weak economy, not oversupplySunday, 25 October 2026
- Saied discusses jobless graduates' law with ministers as their march nears the capitalWednesday, 7 October 2026
- Jobless graduates' march reaches edge of Tunis after nine days from Sidi BouzidMonday, 5 October 2026
- Bizerte activist's Decree-54 arrest brings a Kasbah sit-in, briefly heldThursday, 24 September 2026
- Activist Karim Teraa arrested in Bizerte, prosecuted under Decree-Law 54Tuesday, 22 September 2026
- Unemployed graduates say police met their sit-in with violence as pledged jobs law remains unimplementedThursday, 17 September 2026
- Unemployment edges down to 14.9 percent, and so does the number of people in workSaturday, 15 August 2026