Professor Emma Murphy writes:

Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali came to power in 1987 through a constitutional coup and he appears to have been removed from power through a constitutional coup.

The key here on both occasions was not the constitution but the army.

In 1987 the army moved to secure stability as an increasingly senile and paranoid President Bourguiba threatened to bring the country to a political and economic crisis.

Today it has moved to restore that same stability by removing a president whose person and family have become synonymous with corruption, growing wealth disparities, and political repression.

The question now is whether the interim leadership council will be used to move the country towards a democratic future through meaningful political reforms, free and fair elections, a liberalised media and a new inclusive approach to rule, or whether this is a stalling tactic by the army and the regime elite to quell protests and then restore their grip on power.

Patrick Cockburn notes:

Conditions vary across the Arab world but there is plenty in common between the situation in Tunisia and that in Algeria, Jordan and Egypt. Economic and political stagnation is decades old. In some states this is made more tolerable by access to oil revenues, but even this is not enough to provide jobs for educated youths who see their path blocked by a corrupt elite.

There are echoes of the Tunisian crisis in other countries. In Jordan the security forces have been battling rioters in Maan, a traditional site of unrest in the past where the government has difficulty coping. In Kuwait there was an attack by security forces in December on academic and members of parliament. Food prices have been going up.

Yet all these regimes that are now in trouble had a carefully cultivated image in the west of being “moderate” and anti-fundamentalist. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, President George Bush and Tony Blair made much of their democratic agenda for the Middle East, but when one of the few democratic elections to take place in the region produced victory for Hamas among the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, the US did everything to thwart the outcome of the poll.

The Middle East still has a reputation for coups but a striking feature of the region since the early 1970s is how few of the regimes have changed. The forces behind the Tunisian events are not radically new but they are all the more potent for being so long suppressed.

Western governments have been caught on the hop because explosions of social and economic frustration have been long predicted but have never happened. The extent of the uprising is yet to be defined and the Tunisian army evidently hopes that the departure of Mr Ben Ali may be enough for the government to restore its authority. The generals could be right, but the shootings over the last month failed to work. There is no particular reason why the same tactics should start to work now.

Juan Cole writes:

Tunisian President Zine al-Abidin Bin Ali has fled the country before the advancing crowds pouring in to the capital’s center. A French eye-witness said of the masses thronging Bourguiba Avenue that “it was black with people.” The Speaker of Parliament is caretaker leader of the country. The dramatic events in Tunisia yesterday and today may shake the Middle East, as my colleague Marc Lynch suggested. As usual, the important news from the region is being ignored by US television news.

In some ways, the Tunisian Revolution is potentially more consequential for the Middle East than had been the Iranian one. In Iran, Shiite ayatollahs came to power on the back of a similar set of popular protests, establishing a theocracy. That model appealed to almost nobody in the Middle East, with the exception of Shiites in Iraqi and Lebanese slums; and theocratic Shiite Arabs were a minority even in their own ethnic group. Proud Sunni Arab nationalists, in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, saw nothing to like there, even though they were saddled with a motley assortment of authoritarian presidents for life, military dictators, kings and emirs. Iranian leaders were shocked and dismayed to find that they had made a ‘revolution in one country.’ Their influence would come from championing the (Sunni) Palestinians and supporting Lebanon when it was attacked by Israel, not from their form of government. Iran was not like the French revolutionary republic, which really did become a model over time for much of Europe. It was an odd man out.

The Enlightenment principle of popular sovereignty has been mostly absent in the Arab world, and elections have been an odd Soviet-style shadow play, merely for show lest the dictators and kings be seen to be medieval in lacking anything called a parliament. Lebanon has been an exception, but with a population of 4 million it is a tiny country. The Kuwait parliament has shown signs of life, but in a constitutional monarchy where it was considered gauche to sharply question a cabinet minister related to the king, those are baby steps. It is too soon to tell if American-sponsored elections in Occupied Iraq are sustainable, and you can’t talk about popular sovereignty in a country occupied by foreign troops.

The Guardian reports:

For the first time – in a state where there is estimated to be one police officer for every 40 adults, two thirds of them in plain clothes, and people are afraid of even discussing politics in private for the informers on every corner – people took to the streets today chanting: “Ben Ali out!” and carrying banners saying “Ben Ali murderer!” They railed against his family and that of his loathed wife, Leila Trabelsi, seen as a cross between Imelda Marcos and Catherine de Medici. “Trabelsi thieves!” read one banner, against the woman whose family is reviled for taking tasty slices of state business and contracts, and plundering Tunisia’s wealth. Tonight there were reports that some of her family’s coastal villas and businesses had been attacked and ransacked.

“Today in Tunis people have said their last word. The people want Ben Ali out, along with his corrupt government which has no credibility,” said Mokhtar Aidoudi, a lawyer who was among the protesters. “We want to be able to express ourselves, a free press,” said a 20-year-old medical student from Sousse. She railed against the suppression of websites in a nation which lawyers say is the world leader in surveillance and internet censorship, rivalling North Korea and China.

“This is it,” said Hussein Bouchabar, a maths teacher who was taken from his classroom in the late 80s and imprisoned for four years for holding views contrary to the regime. Since his release, he has never found work and sells vegetables in a souk. Like others with him at the protest, militia regularly came to his house, to search and ransack it. His phones were tapped, his children could not get university scholarships. “This country is 10 million people living in an open prison, we hope that can change,” said a bus driver protesting with him, who showed his ankle swollen from a beating by police.

The BBC reports:

A state of emergency has been declared in Tunisia amid protests over corruption, unemployment and inflation.

The decree bans more than three people from gathering together in the open, and imposes a night-time curfew.

Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has dismissed his government and dissolved parliament, and called new elections within six months.

Thousands have gathered in the capital Tunis, urging the president to quit.

Hashem Ahelbarra writes:

Those who watched President Ben Ali delivering his most recent speech noticed a man with a trembling voice saying the opposite of what he stood for.

He said that he was sorry, that he’s been duped by his entourage, that now he got the message and that he will leave power in 2014.

Was he genuine or just buying time.? He is definitely in damage control mode, and while we don’t know for sure what his next move will be, it’s pretty much obvious that the glass ceiling of fear has been for ever shattered in Tunisia and that the police state that Ben Ali created in 1987 when he came to power in a coup seems to be disintegrating.

Simon Tisdall writes:

The trouble started last month when Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, an unemployed graduate, set himself on fire outside a government building in protest at police harassment. Bouazizi’s despairing act – he died of his injuries last week – quickly became a rallying cause for Tunisia’s disaffected legions of unemployed students, impoverished workers, trade unionists, lawyers and human rights activists.

The ensuing demonstrations produced a torrent of bloodshed at the weekend when security forces, claiming self-defence, said they killed 14 people. Independent sources say at least 50 died and many more were wounded in clashes in the provincial cities of Thala, Kasserine and Regueb. The latest reports spoke of continuing clashes in El-Kef and Gafsa.

Despite Ben Ali’s assertions, there is no evidence so far of outside meddling or Islamist pot-stirring. What is abundantly plain is that many Tunisians are fed up to the back teeth with chronic unemployment, especially affecting young people; endemic poverty in rural areas that receive no benefits from tourism; rising food prices; insufficient public investment; official corruption; and a pseudo-democratic, authoritarian political system that gave Ben Ali, 74, a fifth consecutive term in 2009 with an absurd 89.6% of the vote.

In this daunting context, Ben Ali’s emergency job creation plan, announced this week, looks to be too little, too late.

If this long tally of woes sounds familiar, that’s because it’s more or less ubiquitous. Across the Arab world, with limited exceptions in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, similar problems obtain to a greater or lesser degree.

Gideon Rachman, currently in Dubai, writes:

In the wake of 9/11, the Americans decided that the Saudi autocracy was thoroughly corrupt and was stoking up radicalism in the Middle East. In 2005 Condi Rice, then Secretary of State, made a famous speech in Cairo calling for democratic reforms in the region. But the election of Hamas in Gaza demonstrated to the Americans that Islamists were quite likely to win free elections. The House of Saud and Hosni Mubarak suddenly looked like quite good bets, again.

Now the Americans seem to be tentatively re-embracing the cause of reform in the Middle East. Perhaps, they have been spooked by events in Tunisia. In any case, Hillary Clinton has just made a big speech down the coast in Qatar, calling for social and political reforms. The Americans seem to be trying to get ahead of events. But I suspect events will get ahead of them.

As the principal backer of autocratic rulers across the region, the only useful thing the US government can do is stand out of the way.