---
title: "The Question Is No Longer How to Live, but Where"
description: "Seven years into Kais Saied’s rule, Tunisia’s young weigh salary slips against suitcases, and many choose the suitcase"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-20T01:47:42Z
modified: 2026-10-20T13:20:38Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-question-is-no-longer-how-to-live-but-where-f59a29
language: en
tags: ["migration", "unemployment", "tunisia", "saied", "economy", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# The Question Is No Longer How to Live, but Where

*Seven years into Kais Saied’s rule, Tunisia’s young weigh salary slips against suitcases, and many choose the suitcase*

By Jan Sokol · October 20, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-question-is-no-longer-how-to-live-but-where-f59a29

## In brief

- Seven years into President Kais Saied’s rule, young Tunisians are split between those who see no change and those who still back reform
- Unemployment hit 14.9% in Q2 2026, with 622,000 jobless; youth unemployment reached 35.4%, per the National Institute of Statistics
- Afrobarometer found about two-thirds of young Tunisians have considered emigrating; those thinking about it “a lot” rose to 51% in 2024
- Some 6,500 engineers left in 2022, up from about 3,000 a year in 2013–14; health-sector recruitment abroad continued through 2025
- Researcher Ramadan Ben Omar says motives now go beyond economics to freedom, public participation and emigration as a life project

In Tunis, a journalist named Maher Qassem has begun to use a phrase that explains his country better than any statistic: *beyond money*. After years of working in the media, after years of trying to build a stable life for his family, he has packed his bags for France. The dreams he once kept — a home of his own, a future planned the way one plans a building, floor by floor — have been replaced by smaller, more urgent arithmetic: the monthly expenses, the mounting financial commitments, the salary that disappears almost entirely into loan repayments, rent and his son’s education. There have been times, he says, when he could not help his sick mother pay for her medication and treatment. A man does not leave his country over a row of numbers. He leaves when the numbers begin to humiliate him.

Qassem’s story is told, with others like it, in a [report published by Al Jazeera](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/20/beyond-money-why-young-tunisians-are-considering-emigration) on the mood of young Tunisians, seven years into the rule of President Kais Saied. What emerges is a portrait of a generation standing at the dock, watching the horizon with more attention than it gives to its own streets — and of a country divided between those who have stopped waiting and those who still believe the waiting will be repaid.

![A man holding a suitcase and a seated woman gaze across a sunlit turquoise sea beside a whitewashed coastal village in a watercolor illustration.](https://rews.cc/img/06ec014db9a4ef244bf1c7885623218f37cd9d08.webp)

## Seven years of waiting

Ghaith was nineteen in 2019, when Saied’s victory in the presidential election set off a tremor of expectation across the country. He had little interest in politics and did not vote, but he remembers the hope that travelled with the new president into office the way a crowd carries a banner. Seven years later, he says, little in his own life has changed. The cost-of-living pressures that existed then persist now. Ordinary citizens still run into recurring difficulties obtaining some essential goods and services. And the authorities, in his telling, address the public in a dialect of vagueness: Tunisians want clearer answers about government policies and the results those policies are meant to deliver. They want accountability. They want a vision of the future drawn in lines firm enough to see.

This is the oldest drama of power: the ruled do not ask for paradise, they ask for an address — a place where responsibility lives. When no one answers the door, people begin to look for other doors, in other countries.

Not everyone has stopped believing. Mohamed Amine, a taxi driver in his thirties, voted for Saied in the most recent presidential election and remains convinced the president can improve the country’s situation. The president is “sincere in his intentions” and wants change, Amine says — but various obstacles have hindered the reform programme. It is too early to judge. Give the man more time. Between Ghaith’s disappointment and Amine’s patience lies the true map of Tunisia today: two citizens in the same traffic, reading the same red light as different omens.

![A watercolor street scene shows yellow and blue cars stopped at a red traffic light among white buildings, trees, and a distant mosque.](https://rews.cc/img/c759d14726ca04d97183f11458b262fc859c58d2.webp)

## The arithmetic of departure

The state’s own numbers describe what the conversations in cafés already know. According to the National Institute of Statistics, unemployment stood at 14.9 percent in the second quarter of 2026, with approximately 622,000 people out of work. Among the young the wound is deeper: 35.4 percent of Tunisians aged 15 to 24 are unemployed. Among university graduates the rate reaches 26.6 percent, and among female graduates a striking 35.6 percent — against 14.2 percent for their male counterparts. The diploma, that old passport to respectability, increasingly functions as a passport only in the literal sense.

The longing to leave has been measured too. Afrobarometer, an independent African research network conducting public-opinion surveys across the continent, found that around two-thirds of young Tunisians have considered emigrating. The share who said they thought about leaving “a lot” climbed from 38 percent in 2018 to 51 percent in 2024. Of those contemplating departure, 59 percent named better job opportunities as their main motivation.

And it is not only the young and the first-time job seekers who go. The country trains its own skilled professionals and then watches them board planes. Kamel Sahnoun, head of the Tunisian Order of Engineers, told a press conference organised by his professional body that approximately 6,500 engineers left Tunisia in 2022 alone — against an annual average of about 3,000 in 2013 and 2014. The hospitals bleed too: figures from the Tunisian Agency for Technical Cooperation show 1,839 healthcare and paramedical professionals recruited to work abroad in 2023, another 1,022 in the first nine months of 2024, and 1,244 more in 2025. A nation pays to educate its healers, and other nations enjoy their hands.

## Beyond money

Here the story turns, and becomes more dangerous for any government that hears only half of it. Hamza, a 26-year-old software engineer working for a foreign company, earns what he himself calls a good income. He is seriously considering leaving anyway.

![A watercolor shows an open birdcage containing a desk, laptop, coins, chair, plant, and books, while a blue bird flies freely outside.](https://rews.cc/img/5cf96a5650b193e49e600d063d0312380b09c684.webp)

> It’s no longer just about money

His reasons run through his lifestyle, his dealings with the administration, uncertainty about the future, the broader economic situation of the country. Qassem, the journalist France-bound, says the same from another angle: working as a journalist has become harder. The discontent is not merely about empty pockets; it is about the air.

Ramadan Ben Omar, a researcher specialising in migration, has watched the motives of the departing grow more complex. They are no longer purely economic, he says. They include the search for greater freedom, for opportunities to participate in public life, for the chance to build a better future. Increasingly, young people treat emigration as a life project in its own right — not a remedy for a thin salary but a chosen architecture of existence. He points to border towns like Ben Guerdane, where accumulated economic and social pressures push more of the young toward leaving, by regular routes or by irregular ones. When departure becomes a project rather than an escape, a country is no longer losing workers. It is losing its argument.

## The question that remains

So the cast assembles, each on his own stage: Maher with his packed bags and his sick mother’s unpaid prescriptions; Hamza with his good salary and his open browser of flights; Ghaith, nineteen in the year of hope and now merely tired; Mohamed Amine, still patient behind the wheel of his taxi, still granting the president time. Their experiences diverge, but they describe one country — grappling with economic difficulty and political uncertainty, asking itself whether it can give its young people reason enough to stay.

Every regime believes it owns tomorrow. But tomorrow belongs, in the end, to those who plan to spend it somewhere.