Turmoil in Tunisia: What the Egypt Crisis Means for the Epicenter of the Arab Spring

The World

What we’ve come to call the Arab Spring started in Tunisia.

It was the uprising there, in 2010, that set off a chain of upheaval across the Middle East. It eventually pushed out Tunisian dictators, rulers in Egypt and Libya, and sparked revolts from Yemen to Syria.

Now there seems to be a ricochet effect. Tunisia is feeling the reverberations from Egypt’s ouster last month of its first democratically elected leader, President Morsi.

And there may be another distinctly Tunisian upheaval underway.

Hussein Ibish has been following this story. He’s a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine and a columnist for NOW Lebanon.

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