The statement issued on 21 May 2026 by the Tunisian Ministry of Defence triggered a wave of reactions that says much about the current era. Some saw it as a discreet warning addressed to Kaïs Saïed. Others interpreted it as a demonstration of loyalty towards the regime. Speculation spiralled, as though a few lines alone contained the secret of the balance of power at the top of the state.

This collective nervousness reveals less about the statement itself than about the state of the country: a Tunisia that has entered a phase of deep crisis, where every official word becomes a political symptom and where the slightest military signal immediately fuels fantasies of rupture, dissension, or repositioning.

Yet this agitation obscures what truly matters.

The real issue is not merely what the statement says, but why it was published now, in this form and with this precise language. In authoritarian systems, military institutions never communicate innocently. Their words are rare, carefully calibrated, and often coded. Silence is part of their doctrine; when they speak, it is always to produce a political effect.

The first element lies in the channel through which the statement was released. The text was published on the Ministry of Defence’s page and not on those of the armed forces themselves. This distinction may appear political. The ministry is headed by a minister appointed by Kaïs Saïed, whose loyalty to him is hardly in doubt.

The army, however, operates according to a more complex logic: that of an institution concerned with its cohesion, its historical reputation, and its long-term survival. Confusing the ministry with the army is precisely the kind of ambiguity authoritarian regimes need in order gradually to merge the state with personal power.

For several years now, a convenient narrative has taken hold: that of a Tunisian army naturally neutral, intrinsically republican, and external to struggles for power. This narrative has become a kind of national psychological refuge intended to reassure a society traumatised by the collapse of civilian institutions.

Yet the real history is far less comforting.

The Tunisian army has never been entirely external to the authoritarian system. Even before 2011, it already constituted the regime’s last line of defence whenever the police apparatus faltered. In 1978 during the “Black Thursday” events, and again in 1984 during the bread riots, it was mobilised to save a threatened political order. Certainly, unlike the Algerian or Egyptian armies, it was neither the economic heart of the regime nor its ideological centre. Under Bourguiba and later Ben Ali, the true pillar of power remained the Ministry of the Interior and its hypertrophied police apparatus. But this relative marginalisation did not mean neutrality.

The army was already participating in preserving the system whenever its survival was at stake.

After the 2011 revolution, however, the military institution played a decisive role in accompanying the democratic transition. It protected the institutions at a time when the security apparatus was collapsing, without seeking to seize power. This behaviour earned it immense symbolic capital. In the Tunisian collective imagination, it became the embodiment of a state still capable of restraint and professionalism.

It is precisely this capital that is now eroding.

25 July 2021 marked a major turning point. By accompanying Kaïs Saïed’s power grab and all the subsequent stages — a tightly controlled constitutional referendum, elections emptied of substance, growing repression of opponents, and the normalisation of the state of exception — the military leadership ceased to appear as mere institutional guarantors. They became supporters of a system of authoritarian concentration of power.

One must be rigorous here: when speaking of “the army”, one is referring above all to the high command and senior officers involved in strategic decisions. One is not speaking of ordinary soldiers, nor necessarily of the entire military body. Like any institution, the Tunisian army contains nuances, silences, and internal tensions. But institutions are judged by their public actions and their actual political function, not by the intentions attributed to them.

And the actions are there to see.

The army has accompanied every stage of the current drift. It has provided the security, symbolic, and psychological framework that allowed the authorities to transform the state of exception into a permanent mode of government. While some continued to celebrate its supposed neutrality, the country was sliding towards a discreet militarisation of political life: multiplication of military trials, extension of security rhetoric to all forms of dissent, and the omnipresence of the language of national threat.

Yet perhaps the most striking element remains the language of the statement itself.

Military institutions choose their words with extreme precision. And several formulations in the text seem to refer more to the spirit of the 2014 Constitution than to that of the Constitution imposed by Kaïs Saïed in 2022.

This nuance matters.

The 2014 Constitution rested — at least in its philosophy — upon a pluralist conception of the state: separation of powers, popular sovereignty, institutional balance, and limitation of presidential authority. Within it, the army was conceived as a national institution subject to a constitutional order, not as the direct appendage of a leader.

The 2022 Constitution proceeds according to the opposite logic: hyper-presidentialisation, vertical concentration of power, progressive disappearance of counterweights, and increasing personalisation of the state around the president.

Yet the statement insists far more on “the state”, “institutions”, “the homeland”, and republican continuity than on personal obedience to the head of state. This vocabulary is not insignificant. It creates the kind of double discourse typical of periods of political tension: outwardly affirming continuity of hierarchical loyalty while implicitly reminding that such loyalty exists within a higher framework.

This is precisely where the logic of camouflage comes into play.

Camouflage is not merely military in the technical sense. It is an institutional culture. All armies practise the art of indirect signalling, ambiguous messaging, and formulations vague enough to preserve several options simultaneously. They rarely move openly, especially when the political system enters a zone of uncertainty.

The statement therefore seems to convey two messages at once: yes, the institution remains within the state chain of command; but no, it does not wish publicly to be reduced to the praetorian guard of one man or of a personal political project.

This ambiguity probably reveals a growing concern within the military leadership: how to continue supporting the regime without being dragged into its potential historical discredit.

For the Tunisian army is neither isolated nor naïve. Its officers maintain constant relations with foreign partners, NATO, neighbouring armies, and Western security apparatuses. They are fully aware of the country’s economic and financial deterioration, its diplomatic isolation, the exhaustion of its institutions, and the gradual loss of legitimacy of the political system.

They also know that no authoritarian regime survives for long without a solid coercive apparatus. And above all, they know that an army can lose within a short time the prestige accumulated over decades once it ceases to embody the nation and instead becomes the ultimate life insurance policy of a regime.

For the history of authoritarian systems often follows the same logic: when civilian power loses popular legitimacy, it gradually seeks to transfer that legitimacy to the military institution. It attempts to make people believe that its own survival is inseparable from that of the state itself. Any challenge to the regime is then portrayed as a threat against the nation.

It is precisely this mechanism of institutional confiscation that Tunisia seemed to have avoided after 2011.

And it is precisely this mechanism that is now reappearing.

The statement of 21 May should therefore not be read as a simple episode of institutional communication. It is the symptom of a deeper tension: that of a military institution seeking to preserve its republican image while remaining engaged in an increasingly authoritarian political system.

But history also shows the limits of camouflage.

For there always comes a moment when institutions can no longer hide behind ambiguous language, implicit signals, or subtle communication. Authoritarian regimes inevitably end up posing a brutal question to their coercive apparatuses: serve the state or serve the regime.

And it is often at that precise moment that camouflage ceases to work.